Hi!
Am 21.03.2007 um 21:12 schrieb Yen-Ju Chen:
We are on OSNew:
http://osnews.com/story.php/17528/Install-Guide-Etoile
Wow, cool. We got lots of good feedback there. :-)
When I tried the Google themes today, a friend told me that he heard
an average of 30% of computer worktime is spent on configuring one's
user environment instead of doing actual work. The numbers may be
exaggerated and I have no idea if this is really from an actual
statistic, but the idea behind it is clear and seems very reasonable
to me; how is a user supposed to do work when the environment invites
him to play around so much?
Maybe we shouldn't allow users to change too much on the user
environment using Etoiles graphical applications. It's wonderful that
AZDock is so modular as you say, but letting the user change the dock
application should not be officially supported. If the Etoile project
maintains multiple different dock implementations, only half of the
time can be spent on each of them, which will result in lower
quality. I'd prefer having a single reliable dock application. (One
may ask why I still consider the dock modularity as important then.
If Etoile is really being deployed on lower-resolution platforms like
personal digital assistants one day, we'll still have the possibility
to write a new dock if the old one doesn't fit into the usage
concepts on that platform.)
These ideas do of course conflict with the demands of power users
like "shapeshifter" in the OSNews comments, who seems to want to
customize everything. Looking at our configuration applications and
the slow progress on the SystemConfig framework, I must conclude we
probably don't have the manpower to satisfy the needs of this type of
user. ;-)
I myself used to reconfigure lots of keyboard shortcuts once. I
believe that as long as they are properly documented somewhere, you
can get used to every environment. Things get even easier when the
environment tries to stick to common keyboard shortcuts, which are
used in other applications as well. Most decent applications do this.
I think that in the long term, time spent on finding very good and
"familiar" default settings for everything is way better spent than
time spent on writing configuration dialogs.
-Günther
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