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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: Interesting interview with UI designer Jef Raskin
From:       Emerald Arcana <emerald-arcana () rogers ! com>
Date:       2002-03-02 14:19:18
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- From the article:
~~
Jef: I remember one client of mine who boasted about his customizable desktop 
and how he never had to reboot his software. I set the system font to red and 
the background to red. You couldn't see a thing. He spent a few minutes 
trying to find and open the now-invisible menus that would let him change one 
of the colors. 

He had to reboot. His system was good in that it automatically saved the user 
preferences, so it came up red on red. He had not only to reboot, but to 
reload the software, losing all his demo data. 
~~

What a bastard!  This has to be one of the meanest thing I've read in a long 
time.  Is he saying that if no one was allowed to customize options, then 
stuff like this wouldn't happen?

Back to Usability.  The guy has a point... yes.  Obviously skins that change 
stuff beyond recognition are not good.  Inconsistency is not good (which is 
why we're sticking for toolbar menus in the right order, etc).  Skins aren't 
the best thing in the world: I usually don't skin my applications, and I 
generally don't think that most KDE apps should implement skinning code.  
NoAtun for a while had this odd UI that no one could understand due to skins 
(I don't know if it still does because it doesn't run on my sytem).  But if 
they already have skinning code... well.

As far as the red-on-red stuff goes, maybe there can be a command-line script 
(maybe NCurses-based) or a "bare-bones uncustomizable" recovery application 
that rolls back a "validated" version of your KDE config files.  That way, if 
you screw anything up, you can restore it easily.  Alternately, you could 
also (perhaps) use it similar to a "configuration manager" if you're inclined 
to want to use different configuration settings for KDE.... but its primary 
function would be a Config File Recovery Agent.

Okay.  I'm going to send this to myself to make a note....

BTW, If anyone's hopped onto the Talkback board, there's a whole schpeil of 
angry responses about this article.
- -- 
- -- Arcana
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