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List: koffice-devel
Subject: (forw) Fwd: Re: Question about your KPresenter's review (my reply)
From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr () thyrsus ! com>
Date: 2002-02-10 4:14:40
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Cathy is having DNS problems, so she asked me to forward this.
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<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>
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From: Catherine Olanich Raymond <cathy@thyrsus.com>
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To: esr@thyrsus.com
Subject: Fwd: Re: Question about your KPresenter's review (my reply)
Date: Sat, 9 Feb 2002 22:57:10 -0500
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---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Subject: Re: Question about your KPresenter's review
Date: Sat, 9 Feb 2002 22:44:27 -0500
From: Catherine Olanich Raymond <cathy@thyrsus.com>
To: neundorf@kde.org, aleXXX <alexander.neundorf@gmx.net>,
koffice-devel@mail.kde.org, "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com>
On Saturday 09 February 2002 07:36 pm, aleXXX wrote:
> On Saturday 09 February 2002 20:34, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > 3. Need to double click inside box to add text, then click away to see
> > the box again and end text type-in mode.
>
> Yes, the double clicking is annoying, I think this is almost the only place
> in KDE where it is required.
Hi, this is Cathy Raymond, the end-user who spawned these comments.
As a person formerly stuck with Windows, I didn't mind the double clicking.
What I did find confusing was having to keep changing the mode of the box in
order to do different things to the text.
> > 5. Cannot selectively change format of text. For instance, Word-like
> > buttons for boldface, italic, or underscore only operate on all text
> > in a box. If you need to treat different portions of text on a slide
> > differently, you need multiple text boxes. Help doesn't explain this.
>
> ???
> Select the part of the text which you want to format, change the
> formatting, done. As in any other app.
I tried doing this again after reading your response, and succeeded.
However, the mechanism for doing it is still kind of awkward. First you need
to put the box in "text type-in" mode. Then you need to select the pull down
menu for "Text", choose "Font" and select a particular font (e.g., times,
bold italic, etc.) Unlike KWord, etc., there is no quick way to put text in
bold face, or to put it in italics, without going to "Font" and picking
something suitable from a long font menu.
If you need to make up all-text slides (something business types and lawyers
generally want to do) you will want a simple way to put headings in either
bold face or italics without changing the font.
> > 7. Limited special effects. Why no blinking text?
> > 8. Cannot associate MP3's or sound effects with a slide. Why not?
>
> Because nobody implemented it ;-)
Okay. :-) One reason Eric and I felt it was important to send you these
comments was to give you some insight on types of features that should be
implemented to make KPresenter more attractive to a typical end user.
When we did our Drag.net presentation, we wanted to have one blinking text
slide, and we needed to associate several different slides with a sound clip.
We think these are features that would enhance the usefulness of KPresenter
generally.
I know that MS PowerPoint allows specific sound effects to be associated with
slides (e.g., breaking glass). I don't know, however, if PowerPoint can
associate MP3s or do blinking text (though I will check....)
> > 9. New view command opens a new K Presenter window. That is misleading.
>
> Well, there where lengthy discussions about this topic, and the meanings of
> these things ("mew view", close, quit, etc) were clearly defined.
Uhh... maybe they were, but I just didn't find the place *where* they were
defined.
A slide show building program like KPresenter is most useful to a
non-technical person if they can figure out how to get it to do at least the
basics--formatting text and putting text and pictures together on
slides--without having to wade through a lot of documentation. (In addition,
as you publicly admit, a lot of the KPresenter on-line help has not yet been
written, anyway. :-) )
My frustration with KPresenter came largely from the fact that figuring out
how to format text was very difficult and awkward.
> Well, docs are fine, but another rule says "1. Users don't read
> documentation. 2. Users don't read anything, not even message boxes" (from
> "Joel on UI Design for programmers")
I agree that people in general, and users in particular, usually don't start
by reading the documentation. However, if it is not obvious to the user how
to do something from the interface, the user *will* look for the answer in
the documentation. It is terribly frustrating when neither the interface nor
the documentation helps find the right answer.
I'd like to add that I like KMail a lot, and that the KDE office suite in
general suits my needs. I did not have any experience with presentation
software before I attempted to use KPresenter to put together the slide show
for Drag.net, because I don't use such software in my job. However, many
people do. I think that KDE would be much more attractive to non-technical
users, such as "business types," if KPresenter were as easy to use as KMail
(I have never had to resort to the on-line help for KMail!) and had the
sound-linking feature mentioned above.
--
Cathy Raymond <cathy@thyrsus.com>
"The meeting of personalities is like the contact of chemical substances;
if there is any reaction, both are transformed." Carl Jung
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