> Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2009 17:45:56 +0200 > From: Soren Hansen <so...@ubuntu.com> > Subject: Re: Properly identifying applications > To: ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com > > If you put yourself in the place of someone who is not used to > Linux: You have a document you want to open (and for some reason > you don't just click on it in Nautilus, but let's ignore that > for a little bit). How are you supposed to know to look > for something called "Evince"? How is > having that name in the menu going to be helpful?
Sorry, I guess I didn't make my point clearly; I'm not advocating that the menu entry just be "Evince" but rather something like "PDF Document Viewer (Evince)" See the KDE4/Kubuntu menus for an example of how this can elegantly be accomplished. I still object to the specific designation "Document Viewer" as it's simply false: evince foo.doc and evince foo.odt do not work, so this is most definitely NOT a document viewer. You're confusing users by calling it that. (For the technical users who view ps/dvi files, there can be another menu entry called "Postscript/DVI Viewer (Evince)".) > I couldn't disagree more. The no-brainer choice it exactly to NOT show > which application is being invoked. What's important is the task it > performs, not what it's called. If the user needs to know the name of > the application he's using to do something, we're doing something > wrong. To view documents, you use a document viewer. > If we change the default document viewer at some point, > the user's experience shouldn't change. They shouldn't have > to know that we've replaced Evince with FooPDFViewer. > They should just keep using "Document Viewer" and have the > best possible experience. While this philosophy makes sense when dealing with relatively naive home users, it falls a bit short for power users and institutional (large network) installations. Let's take the case of power users first. All programs have bugs, otherwise your point would be better received. Working in an environment where people are frequently pushing certain kinds of applications to the limit, we're aware of dozens of specific issues in different programs. For example, depending on precisely what a user is trying to do, I will recommend that they use acroread, evince, or xpdf (usually after one or the other has failed at fill out forms, or printing, or properly rendering certain kinds of documents -- in extreme cases, we have to invoke pdftk). Changing the underlying program without letting anyone know is an excellent way to completely annoy power users. The situation with institutional users is even worse. With >300 linux machines, we use an automated installation system to install packages on machines and keep them up to date. Every time we upgrade to a new ubuntu system, we have to first install 1 or 2 machines using the Desktop CD in order to try and figure out what Canonical has decided to change, particularly in the user interface, about which ordinary users are most apt to complain. Forcing me to put on my Sherlock Holmes hat in order to deduce that, say, evince is no longer part of the default distro, is not the way to make new friends. So to repeat: The ideal is a system which is sufficiently friendly for naive users while not unnecessarily impeding the work of power users and administrators. Yes, this is a challenging task, but Microsoft Bob should provide some indication of what happens when you only cater to the former group. <:) -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss