Re: The HIG and Open a Copy

Am Montag, den 21.02.2005, 15:22 -0800 schrieb Dom Lachowicz:
> Hi guys,
>
> > brother" usage
> > monitoring system on AbiWord, any speculation about
> > more commonly used
> > or less used functions is simply blind speculation.
>
> Nor should we necessarily let that paralyze us from
> any future decision making. Leaders must make
> decisions even in times of incomplete data.
>
> We've had a history of largely mimicking MSWord's UI.
> This has had its advantages and its drawbacks. Its
> largest advantage is that anyone familiar with MSWord
> is immediately comfortable with AbiWord. Its largest
> drawback is that we've been partially constrained by
> Microsoft's design decisions. Granted, they have
> usability teams, usability labs, and more money than
> God Himself to throw at their problems. But I
> digress...
>
> We may be at a point where we must ask ourselves -
> "What do we bring to the table? What do we offer our
> users that our competitors don't?"
>
> Is our goal to clone MSWord, warts and all? OpenOffice
> does that too well and have too many resources to
> throw at their problems. This is a battle we can't
> win, and may not even want to win.
>
> Is our goal to be smaller, faster, and easier than our
> competitors for some set of use cases? Here, I see our
> strengths playing out to our advantage.
>
> Or is it something else entirely? This is something to
> be discussed in another thread.

I fully agree.
One possible problem i see about discussing blue sky plans (especially
in OSS projects) is that people are often getting too enthusiastic and
the plans made are not implemented (speaking of my limited experience
and of course not trying to tell you how an OSS project works).
OTOH every developer probably has some kind of a "long term vision"
about abiword. It might be good to synchronise that to some extent to
avoid misunderstandings.

> What is *crystal clear* to me is that we can't have is
> CVS HEAD being used as a UI playground, and then have
> discussions about it after the fact. Even though CVS
> branches are a pain in the butt, they have their uses.
>
> Rob, if you want to, create a CVS branch to demo UI
> changes. Or create more mock-ups/patches and post them
> to the list and bugzilla. I think that our menus are a
> cluttered, disorganized mess. And I think that a lot
> of our dialogs could be simplified and reorganized to
> better help our users. But we need to have these talks
> before we make sweeping changes rather than
> afterwords. I appreciate your enthusiasm.

There are some problems with that (as with my recent approach)
+ It will be built only by a few people (see jmm-doublegraphics)
+ The developers (i'm most interested in their opinion) busy enough.
+ (This is the same as doing individual patches)

This time maybe my enthusiasm grew a bit too big.
I will continue listening to people and tweak menus until they fit.

Best,
- Rob
Received on Tue Feb 22 09:21:23 2005