On Thu, 2005-07-14 at 14:32 -0300, Alexandre Oliva wrote: > On Jul 13, 2005, Colin Walters <walters@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > Think of it this way: what if GNOME's historical audience had been > > musicians? Then the right click menu might have had > > "Open Musical Score Composer". Having that makes as much sense to the > > general population as "Open Terminal" does. > > FWIW, when I first introduced Cygwin to a musician friend of mine, he > absolutely *loved* the ability to issue commands without having to > point and click, and the ability to write scripts to automate common > or repetitive tasks. If your friend can write scripts, that means he or she has a level of technical knowledge we can not expect of all users. > Terminals should not be thought of as power-users only; they're useful > for everybody. Completely, totally disagree. Every time a non-developer/non-sysadmin has to use the terminal for something is a bug. > Perhaps our desktop approach should take a stance > similar to AIX SMIT (sp?), a system administration front-end that > would not only enable you to perform various tasks with a point&click > interface, but *also* let you know the commands it was running to > perform those tasks. Let me suggest something to you - what if we took an stance with GCC where when it compiled C code, it popped up a curses application which told you how you could be writing by hand the assembler it was generating and how it was doing. Here's how the register allocator works, here's how it optimized away variable x, etc... Now, I happen to be one of the people who is in the target audience for GCC. The entire reason I use GCC is because I don't *want* to know or care about assembler. Just like our desktop, for the vast majority of people, GCC is a tool they use to get a job done, not something they care to know the internals of. The curses/GCC thing would be extremely annoying at best for people just trying to get a job done, exactly like your suggestion of desktop commands would be. > I'm told Autocad is very much like this as well, > and even architects without any prior programming expertise end up > being able to automate tasks using the lisp-based programming > interface, which is one of the features that makes it so powerful. Autocad is a very specialized tool for a particular audience. You can probably assume that most of its users spend 8 hours a day for years in front of it and that any time they can save helps a lot. The same is not true in general. It is not worth the time for most users to learn how to program just so you can save a few seconds off your OpenOffice usage or whatever. Don't get me wrong: it *would* be nice if we had an equivalent to AppleScript so somewhat technically inclined users could script apps for relatively obscure use cases. But that's no substitute for actually fixing the desktop to just work for the major cases. > This gave you the option to remain clueless I think this reveals a lot about how you think about our target users. If you consider them "clueless" and think that they have some need to know how computers work and how to program or else they're stupid, that strikes me as rather negative and arrogant. Personally, I think *we* are the clueless ones, who spend all of our time in front of computers learning how they work. The truly smart people are the ones who became surfing instructors at some beach in Hawaii and rarely see a computer. People in general want to use the computer to do their work, send email occasionally or something, and could care less how they work at all (and definitely don't care to learn how to program). You'd think this would be common sense...I feel pretty silly even explaining it. > Did it change? I didn't notice any changes whatsoever in my panel. > Sure enough, I would, should I wipe out all of my gnome settings and > started from scratch, I guess. (Un?)fortunately there's no easy way > to track the defaults while keeping the settings you've overridden, > AFAIK. Open Terminal, OTOH, has changed regardless of my settings. True; but the change is a benefit by default to most users, so we need to have it enabled by default. You can express your preference for having terminal easy to access by installing nautilus-open-terminal or adding a hotkey for it or whatever. -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
