[62] in Athena User Interface
Re: sawfish configuration
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brad Thompson)
Thu May 18 22:58:20 2000
Message-Id: <200005190258.WAA00785@manatee.mit.edu>
To: aui@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <ot97FyQGgE6e0rwZE0@mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 18 May 2000 22:58:03 -0400
From: Brad Thompson <yak@MIT.EDU>
wdc says:
> How much work is it to add Athena to the default sawfish theme?
> Or is the default sawfish theme too gawdy and slow to function on
> a 175MHz SPARC 5?
What do you mean by "adding Athena"? The default sawfish theme as of
the currently installed version (which is horribly out of date) is not
too slow to run on my SS5 at 85MHz, but it takes up too many colormap
cells for my cg3 (which is 8-bit).
> Regrettably, I think we should make our first priority to do what
> the Mac and Windows do with the edges. Right now usability is
> NOT about what we think is correct. It is about what brain-damage
> has been programmed into most of our user base.
Our users are smart---if we give them an intuitive interface, they will
figure it out, whether or not it is what they have used before, and in
the long run, everyone will be better off. We can never justify
anything of importance by "Windows does it.". We should be aspiring to
be _better_ than Windows, not playing catch up. For the record, I want
to do the same thing as MacOS, which is different than Windows.
> I myself like how I see a little arrow and vertical line cursor when
> I move into the edge of the window to remind me I'm resizing width or
> height, and a little arrow into angle cursor when I go to the corners.
> (I use fvwm). But this is my own personal experience, and as others
> have said, it's wrong to generalize from personal preferences.
I like them too. On Windows, that is the *only* way to tell when
you're going to resize a window, because the interface is so
inconsistent.
wdc says:
> yak says:
> > I don't think that hitting close when you mean maximize is a
> > serious problem.
>
> I strongly disagree. It happens to me all the time when I have to
> suffer the unpleasantness of using Windows.
If this is a problem, then it is not a big deal to move the close
button to the left side.
> DONT eliminate the window menu.
If people feel that it is important to have a WM menu, then I would
advocate making it a context-menu (perhaps activated by right-clicking
anywhere in the WM decorations). This would make it consistent with
the rest of gnome and would not offend my sense of aesthetics. I
_would_ like to make sure that all essential functions are availible
somewhere else: I have noticed that a lot of window managers do not
provide an obvious way to delete a window without going to the WM
menu. ("It's obvious, just meta-right-click on the lower-left
corner.")
> The overarching principle is to maximize the stuff that is where users
> reach for it, and to minimize the stuff that gets in the way of the
> users when they reach for something else.
Your point on title bar buttons makes sense: users who have been using
the system for a long time could still make that mistake. On the other
hand, if a user can figure out how to move and resize windows after a
couple minutes of playing, then we should not be concerned with what
they come in expecting. Tibbetts's point about usability testing is
appropriate here: if users testing the system contradict what I just
said, then I will accept having the frame resize the window in the
default.
yak
