[728] in Athena User Interface
Re: Suggested Athena User Interface promo
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Phillip Long)
Tue Mar 13 09:10:33 2001
Message-ID: <004b01c0abc7$74a5fa10$2e33fea9@mit.edu>
From: "Phillip Long" <longpd@MIT.EDU>
To: "Bill Cattey" <wdc@mit.edu>, <aui@mit.edu>, <owls@mit.edu>
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 09:11:10 -0500
Dear Bill:
It seems to me that an update on where we are with Athena User Interface
development might be a good staging article for what we hope will be
improvements to the desktop for Athena clients over the summer. It isn't
wise to suggest that we're moving forward to implement something of unknown
robustness. It's IS's job to test and evaluate software we put up so that
by the time we implement, while we may not know with 100% certainty how
things will work, we've got a good idea, and more importantly, we have a
sense of where the failures or problems might arise, with some idea in
advance of how, if they do, we might best respond.
I suspect that our user community is less familiar with the GNOME
software suite than the developers. Which leads me to suggest that an
article about the current AUI, it's assets as well as where it might be
improved, followed by a description of the process underway move things
forward is timely. The conclusion might be, after considering various
alternatives, something called GNOME has the potential to lead us to an
improved user experience that we can support and build on.
Christopher's comments were well stated, I thought. Taking risks with
the primary computing environment of the majority of our users isn't viewed
as an exciting and progressive action. That's a lead to this story for a
different audience.
Phil
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bill Cattey" <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: <aui@MIT.EDU>; <owls@MIT.EDU>
Sent: Monday, March 12, 2001 4:17 PM
Subject: Suggested Athena User Interface promo
> A little while ago, the similarity between the AUI project and the
> Athena port to Solaris struck me. The following promotional prose sort
> of wrote itself. I was thinking it might be appropriate to say
> something like it in
> the Athena Insider, or some other place where we announce big user
> visible changes. (Perhaps the IS newsletter?)
>
> What do you think?
>
> -wdc
>
> ----
>
> New Athena User Interface Coming
>
> In 1993, Athena took a risk: We replaced aging DECStations with Suns
> running Solaris 2.1. We knew that Solaris 2.1 was a young operating
> system with an unknown level of robustness. We made our best efforts at
> testing and fixing what seemed most relevant to users.
>
> The risk was that we were removing slow but reliable DECStations
> and replacing them with fast but possibly buggy Suns. It turned out
> that customers were delighted with the speed improvement, and were not
> too inconvenienced by the bugs.
>
> This year, Athena takes another risk: We plan to replace the basic look
> and feel of Athena, set in the late 80's with a new one based on the young
> GNOME toolkit with an unknown level of robustness. Again we have made
> our best efforts at testing and fixing what seems most relevant to users.
>
> The risk is that we are replacing a hard to use interface with one that is
> easier to use but is slow or buggy. We hope that we succeed in 2001 as
> well as we succeeded in 1993. We hope you find the new Athena User
> Interface easy to use, fast, and bug free, but we stand ready to work
> hard to remedy slowness or bugginess you report to bugs@mit.edu.
>
>
