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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: A very good Article about usability
From:       wvl <yatsu () wanadoo ! nl>
Date:       2002-11-09 22:58:10
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On Friday 08 November 2002 11:03, Jordi Böhme wrote:
> http://mpt.phrasewise.com/stories/storyReader$374

From the article:
> 1) In the 1970s and early ?80s, transferring documents from a computer?s 
> memory to permanent storage (such as a floppy disk) was slow. It took many 
> seconds, and you had to wait for the transfer to finish before you could 
> continue your work. So, to avoid disrupting typists, software designers made 
> this transfer a manual task. Every few minutes, you would ?save? your work 
> to permanent storage by entering a particular command.
> 
> Trouble is, since the earliest days of personal computers, people have been 
> forgetting to do this, because it?s not natural. They don?t have to ?save? 
> when using a pencil, or a pen, or a paintbrush, or a typewriter, so they 
> forget to save when they?re using a computer. So, when something bad 
> happens, they?ve often gone too long without saving, and they lose their 
> work.

Okay, he has a good point. 

How about:

- auto-saving the document (with redo/undo buffers) every X minutes to a 
default directory. 

- provide an applet in kicker that serves as a filing cabinet so that when the 
user is done the user may drag&drop the document (by means of a 'd&d' icon 
somewhere in the GUI. perferable in the document-view area). onto the filing 
applet which could spring open displaying several default filing categories 
('work', 'personal', etc..).

Retrieving the document would be done by clicking on the filing cabinet. This 
way we no longer expose the using to the (whole) filesystem, provide a 
centralised, virtual (vFolder/search features can be added to the file 
cabinet applet) storage point for the users documents and very importantly we 
provide a backup of the users progress on a document ('Find unfiled document' 
in the file cabinet) without having to require interaction (filename = 
'title'/first x characters + timestamp).

> 2) Trouble is, the ?Quit? command has always been annoying and confusing 
> people, because it?s exposing an implementation detail ? the lack of 
> multitasking in the operating system. It annoys people, because occasionally 
> they choose ?Quit? by accident, losing their careful arrangement of windows, 
> documents, toolboxes, and the like with an instantaneity which is totally 
> disproportionate to how difficult it was to open and arrange them all in the 
> first place. And it confuses people, because a program can be running 
> without any windows being open, so ? while all open windows may belong to 
> the file manager, which is now always running in the background ? menus and 
> keyboard shortcuts get sent to the invisible program instead, producing 
> unexpected behavior.

Yup, no application really requires a 'Quit' command. I can't think of any 
reason why it shouldn't be removed in favor of just using the 'X'.

- wvl


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