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List: koffice-devel
Subject: (forw) Re: Question about your KPresenter's review
From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr () thyrsus ! com>
Date: 2002-02-14 4:27:14
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Cathy is having reverse-DNS-lookup troubles.
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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: Rob Landley <landley@trommello.org>, David Faure <david@mandrakesoft.com>,
<koffice-devel@mail.kde.org>
Subject: Re: Question about your KPresenter's review
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 23:24:58 -0500
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Rob has described a lot of the other problems we had with KPresenter much
better than I have. I just wanted to add a few additional comments.
On Tuesday 12 February 2002 02:01 am, Rob Landley wrote:
> Another opinion from one of the other members of the presentation group...
> Documentation also helps people think through a user interface.
Helps the developers think through the UI, that is. I'm not a developer, but
this sounds rational to me. I know that in order to teach somebody how to do
something, you need to understand it thoroughly, step by step--and writing
documentation is a form of teaching--teaching the rest of the world about the
program.
> The
> interfaces we've seen that that are well documented tend to be better
> interfaces, simply because somebody went through it from the point of view
> of a new user, and if anything was particularly egregious they noticed it.
> (It's not quite real end-user feedback, but it's probably the next best
> thing. And it makes collecting real end-user feedback easier, since it
> makes collecting real end users easier.)
As I've already said, I believe you will get more end users faster by
improving the documentation, even if the code were to stay the same, than by
changing the code without improving the documentation.
[text cut here]
> It all boils down to cultivating your end user base as the number one
> priority, and LISTENING to them as your biggest asset. Adding new features
> and polishing old ones in hope the shiny bait will attract new users isn't
> very effective. It's probably a better use of time to talk a relative into
> using it for a week and asking them WHY they inevitably throw up their
> hands in frustration and go back to Windows, and then following those
> leads. 10,000 lines of code to make the menus animated and transparent with
> pop-up tool tips isn't worth 100 lines to make the address book print, if
> that's what's really bothering the end user. If a project only has 10
> users, pumping them for information and making them happy enough to recruit
> an 11th for you is probably the best way to grow your user base.
>
> Tim O'Reilley wrote a good piece on this that Eric could probably dig up...
>
> (I feel all of this really should be preaching to the choir and restating
> the blindingly obvious...)
It's clear to me that the points Rob is making here are not obvious, because
at least two different members of the KDE team have told us that they need to
fix all the bugs *before* getting to the documentation.
[text cut here]
> I'm not too worried about KPresenter. Eric and I found MagicPoint, and I
> personally think the easiest way to get good presentation software for unix
> is to write a good front end for that. It's small and simple and does what
> we want already. Bolting a good user interface onto a good code base that
> already does what you want is fairly easy. If putting good code behind a
> snappy polished interface after the fact was easy, we'd all be using
> Windows...
Part of the reason *I* wanted to give the KDE team feedback about KPresenter
is that, although it would be easy to get a good presentation software
package for Linux by putting a "front end" on MagicPoint, I like the KDE
suite and I wanted to help make it possible for the KDE team to get their
entry in the presenter software sweepstakes "ready for prime time."
[text cut here]
> > > I can't "send it to you". KOffice CVS requires Qt3 and KDE3, and
> > > KPresenter is under heavy development... better wait a bit. But if you
> > > can compile source code or if you can get Eric to do it ;), you can
> > > always grab the latest stuff using anoncvs
> > > (http://www.kde.org/anoncvs.html)
> >
> > Okay, that's fine. Thank you. See, I simply don't always know what is
> > easy to do, and what is hard, or inconvenient, with regard to obtaining
> > new versions of a program that's under "heavy development." Part of the
> > burden of being a user, I guess. :-)
>
> End users never mess with CVS. :)
And having gone to look, I understand why. :-) David already explained in a
prior posting, though, that he did not mean to imply that end users should
have to mess with CVS, or that they would.
> > On the other hand, you knew enough to be able to "fix things". I do not
> > have that kind of knowledge. As an end user, I don't know enough to know
> > why a program does things in a particular way, or even how to find out
> > why a program does things in a particular way. I can only describe the
> > fruits of my experience of attempting to use it.
>
> Teaching Cathy more about how to understand the plumbing so she can jiggle
> the handle properly when it doesn't work is nice, but not the objective.
Correct. (If only because many potential end users won't have even as much
interest and patience in learning to "understand the plumbing" as I have.
> -) )
[text cut here]
> >
> > The law office where I work runs Windows NT and uses all Windows/DOS
> > applications. However, because I don't usually need presentation
> > software, I did not attempt to experiment with PowerPoint until after I
> > had attempted to use KPresenter. KPresenter was the first presentation
> > software package I ever used.
>
> I hadn't used powerpoint either when I tried kpresenter. I played around
> with it a bit to see if Cathy was missing something obvious.
>
> The two main things I wanted to do with it were place pictures and text in
> slides. Pictures largely worked ok (modulo bugs: making a window
> significantly larger than the slide you're editing shows several bugs and
> paint problems. Cathy's desktop is something like 1700x1200.
I have a 21" monitor (courtesy of my husband, who likes being able to see an
entire page of code or text at one time when he's editing it).
> Positioning
> a picture off the edge of the slide displays off the edge when you drop it
> (and on some but not all redraws), but you can't grab it again outside the
> slide (although it looks like you can). Clipping the display to the slide
> would be nice. But on the whole it worked.)
>
> Text was another story. It took me a while to figure out how to make text
> work. Right clicking on the slide didn't let me insert text, the pulldown
> menus didn't have an insert text, the toolbar up top didn't have any way to
> insert text. (I'm used to toolbars along the top, not down the side. I
> even find web browser sidebars annoying and turn them off. Maybe it's just
> me...)
I don't care for sidebars myself, but I didn't mind the small one on
KPresenter.
> Eventually I found the tiny little unlabled icon on the left that let me
> drop text boxes. I didn't have too much trouble resizing it, but figuring
> out how to edit took some doing. (I'd never needed to double-click a
> picture. What would that do?)
>
> The resize rectangle went away when the cursor showed up: despite the thing
> still being selected, I couldn't see its edges. Annoying. The text window
> didn't start in edit mode, and didn't expand itself to fit the text I typed
> and expect me to hit enter when I wanted a second line. That was the
> behavior I expected. The behavior I GOT was that first I resize it and
> guess how big it should be with no text in it yet, because if I immediately
> double-clicked and started typing text I got one character per line going
> almost straight down, and if it went off the bottom I couldn't grab the
> bottom right resize dot like I normally do, because it was off the bottom
> fo the slide. Then I had to resize it AGAIN when I was done, because I
> never guessed right and sometimes I wanted two lines of text anyway.
>
> The border vanishing in edit mode contributed to this problem, of course.
> I didn't know how much space I had before it wrapped me. Once or twice I
> accidentally double clicked when dropping the box and it did go straight
> into edit mode, but went off the bottom of the screen before I'd typed ten
> characters (I touch-type...)
Rob's description of the user's initial experience with KPresenter's handling
of text is very good and explains even better than my comments what made the
process so frustrating.
As I told David Faure in another posting tonight (which may not have gone out
yet; my mail connection is temporarily down as I write this), MS PowerPoint
works a bit differently. When you first put a text box on a slide in
PowerPoint, that box is instantly ready to accept text. Also, the lines
indicating the side of the text box do not vanish when the box is accepting
new text. Both of these attributes would have eliminated most of the
problems Rob and I experienced in first using PowerPoint.
> My assumption about changing the options of an object was to pop up a menu.
> So I right clicked on the text I'd entered, but that didn't let me change
> the text color, the font, underline. I still haven't figured out how,
> actually, I gave up first.
I finally figured out how to to change the font. I once succeeded in
changing the text color, but doing so was sufficiently counterintuitive that
I have not been able to repeat the feat consistently. I still don't know how
to underline text.
> (We gave it another try later and found several
> interesting behaviors. It once swapped so much it triggered the OOM killer
> and exited, with around 20 slides on a machine with 1/4 gig of ram and
> twice as much swap space. Inserting slides in the middle confused it on a
> couple of occasions. Stuff in full screen mode didn't always look like the
> preview (in some cases text objects that showed up in a window were
> completely missing full screen). It sometimes took around 10 seconds to
> change slides on a dual pentium 400 system. One strange bug with resizing
> text objects was that sometimes it decided to double the size when you
> released it. (This one might have been that the size was calculated as
> distance you'd let go from the top left edge of the slide, not the top left
> edge of the text object.) And the "resize box to fit text" option (which
> SHOULD be what it does in edit mode anyway: when you've got one line don't
> start a second until they hit enter, when they've got two lines you know
> how wide it is already) left any extra space on the right edge alone, which
> was generally the main thing that needed resizing...
>
> On the whole, I was not impressed. Pictures and text are 90% of what you
> do with slides. I got the impression nobody had ever really used the text
> part.
Unfortunately, so did I.
> And since the project had 8 zillion other features you had to wade
> through to find text and pictures (which then didn't work very well), it
> didn't seem like the time being spent on the thing was particularly
> focused...
>
> That's why we were so hard on KPresenter.
But we wouldn't have bothered if the problems didn't seem to be fixable.
> > > Doesn't powerpoint work the same way? Click on object to move it,
> > > double-click on it to edit it ?
> >
> > I don't have PowerPoint on the machine I am answering you e-mail from,
> > and I don't remember enough of my experiment with PP to answer your
> > question fairly. I'll take another swing at PowerPoint at the office
> > tomorrow and let you know what I think.
>
> While I realise that emulating powerpoint is a great way to attract an
> established userbase that somebody else has already terraformed and
> housebroken, using it as an excuse for bad behavior is not necessarily a
> good thing.
Actually, Rob, that's not the thrust of David's comments here. He wasn't
trying to compare PowerPoint to KPresenter or vice versa at all--if anything,
I introduced that implicit comparison into the debate.
David told me in a prior posting that he found KPresenter to be "quite nice"
to use even before he worked on fixing bugs in it. I was curious, so I asked
him what other presentation software he had tried, and he replied
"PowerPoint."
I understood David's comments to mean, rightly or wrongly, that he found
KPresenter to be as easy to use as PowerPoint. That motivated me to check
out PowerPoint again to see whether I agreed. I've copied you on my remarks
to David about what I found.
--
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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