Re: GTK file selector

[Aidan Kehoe]

 Ar an séú lá déag de mí na Nollaig, scríobh Juri Linkov: 

 > >  > What an irony that the goal of Gnome developers was to design an
 > >  > easy-to-use file dialog, and now no one can use it without hints
 > >  > acquired from others.
 > >
 > > It’s an irony if you ignore that their goal was to design a dialog that
 > > was easy to use for naive users.
 > 
 > I doubt very much that removing useful features to make a simplistic UI
 > will persuade naive users to use the Gnome environment.  

Making a UI that’s no more complicated than it needs to be may, and that’s
what they’ve done for the naïve user. They’ve made it more awkward for the
expert, but for mass-market software, the expert doesn’t matter. 

However, I believe that the comparative advantage from Gnome’s new-found
simplicity won’t outweigh the endorsement from Linus for KDE; indeed, the
endorsement from Linus for one environment over the other might be the
impetus needed for KDE to pull ahead as the dominant desktop environment,
and finally having a standard desktop environment would be an excellent
thing.

 > So I still don't understand what is the target audience of Gnome
 > developers.
 > 
 > > In 2005, naive users do not use any form of emacs, in general,
 > 
 > By analogy with GTK2 dialog windows, removing features from Emacs
 > to make it similar to Notepad will make naive users happy :-)

Do you not understand what the GTK2 people did? They didn’t remove features,
it’s just as possible to use the new dialog box in the same way as the old.
Less obvious for what experts want to do, but experts are experts, they’ll
figure it out. 

And yes, making GNU Emacs behave more like a Win32 app, like Notepad, _will_
make naïve users happy. Look at the success of CUA-mode. Hang round with
Win32 users looking for an advanced editor, and they’ll go for Notepad++
long before GNU Emacs, because all their habits from Notepad work in
Notepad++, and not in emacs. Emacs is more featureful, but not enough to
overcome the pain of finding out what CUA-mode is and doing all the other
donkey-work to have the editor behave like what they’re used to. 

 > > and even the experts are abandoning it today.
 > 
 > Why do they abandon it?  And what do they prefer instead?

They abandon it because of stagnant development, the design and
implementation clusterfuck that is Mule from the perspective of European
language users (search for ö not working again!) and minimal consideration
for GUI users in this age of 17" screens. Among other reasons. 

Eclipse, VIM or Notepad++ seem to be what most of the power users I know who
chose an advanced editor recently are using.

-- 
I AM IN JAIL AND ALLOWED SEND ONLY ONE CABLE SINCE WAS ARRESTED WHILE
MEASURING FIFTEEN FOOT WALL OUTSIDE PALACE AND HAVE JUST FINISHED COUNTING
THIRTY EIGHT THOUSAND FIVE HUNDERED TWENTY TWO NAMES WHOS WHO IN MIDEAST.