On 2010-01-24 05:02:11 +0000, Caio Chassot said:
My point is: while we can eschew overly dumbing down the UI to make it
perfectly understandable to your mom on first use, we should avoid
justifying bad decisions with "we're power users, we can deal,
configure the hell out of it, until it actually works". Mutt users who
love it but mourn the days lost to configuring it will agree with me
here.
This is a Mac app (damn it) after all.
I agree with this completely. I hate the “power users have the ability
to configure the hell out of everything” mentality, because it assumes
"ability" is matched with equal amounts of "time", which is rarely true.
Curiously, though, the number one piece of advice I give to all Mac
users new to the platform is to look at each app’s preferences the
first time you launch it, because there are invariably hidden gems.
Mind you, most of the people I know are also “power users” (even if new
to the platform).
There are very few apps out there which "just work" to everybody’s
utmost satisfaction, but sensible defaults will get you 95% of the way
and sensible levels of preferences will cover the other 5%. I think
we’ve probably all seen apps on some platform or another where the
defaults get you 5% and the crazy preference dialogs theoretically give
you the other 95%, but nobody ever quite manages it…
M.
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