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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    inconsistencies
From:       Thomas Zander <TZander () factotummedia ! nl>
Date:       2004-09-29 14:09:07
Message-ID: 20040929140907.GA21911 () factotummedia ! nl
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The other day I was making fun of mozilla and firefox for having a really
silly inconsistency; ctrl-w makes you close your document sometimes and
sometimes it does not.

I'm always really annoyed when software tries to be smart and work in
'states', especially when I can't figure out what these states are. It means
I really have to think about what I am doing constantly.
I found out that when I have my cursor in the location field ctrl-w is
'remove last word' and otherwise its 'close document' (or close window
if there is only one tab).  Both in firefox and mozilla.

Why post this to the kde usability list?  Well; I think many will agree that
its silly to do that.  Its also a very good example of where things go wrong
if the user missed the change in context. In konqueror we do something
similar, and even harder to understand 'states'. Parts where the application
tries to be smarter then the user.
I had a directory full of music files and I tried to select a couple of them
only to get the nasty surprise that the file I selected was opened in my
already running instance of xmms.  (which made me loose a playlist I worked
on for a quite some time).

For some reason konqueror only _selects_ when clicking on some files outside
of the actual filename, but it actually executes the file when clicking on
other files.

it took me about 10 minutes to find out that:
a) some views allow clicking outside the first column to be an 'activate'
b) but only for some file-types. (images/wars/music)

I can guarantee many users will never find out and only get scared for
clicking with this inconsistent behavior.

Does anyone know why this has been added?

See: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=90471
-- 
Thomas Zander

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