Slashdot Mirror
GNOME for Grandma
An anonymous reader writes "PCWorld colmnist Matthew Newton has written an interesting two part article titled "In Search of Linux for Grandma", in which he shares his thoughts on introducing computers to a 75 year old PC neophyte (through Linux).
He discusses the new spatial Nautilus that he is planning to unleash upon grandma, and quote from the article - "Grandma is never going to learn about "opening a file manager" to "navigate her way" to her documents. They are all going to live in plain view in folders on her desktop. And when she opens them, there won't be any surprises."."
Umm, one window per folder = spatial folders. Windows explorer has the panes with the tree on one side and the contents on the other and when you click on things they open in the same window.
Most of what you say, I agree with. Execpt...
It doesn't matter if Open Office has "a squirrely install" - so does Microsoft Office.
I just installed Office 2003 on my laptop here:
1. Put the CD in the drive
2. Enter the registration key
3. Select "Complete Installation"
4. Wait and watch the blinkenlights
That was it. Nothing squirrely there, I'm afraid. Yes, MSFT is an easy target - but there's no reason to blame them or their products inaccurately. It just reflects poorly on the rest of some very good points.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
1. Put the CD in the drive
2. Enter the registration key
3. Select "Complete Installation"
4. Wait and watch the blinkenlights
That was it. Nothing squirrely there, I'm afraid.
Compare that to
#apt-get install openoffice.org
or a couple of clicks in Synaptic. Steps 2 and 3 are pretty squirrely compared to that and if you have a net connection, step 1 should seem a bit weird, as well.
It's not just Debian that's this easy: Gentoo and *BSD folks tell me it's that easy for them too.
I have to admit that MS does have us beaten in the blinkenlights department. Blinkenlights have obviously been a top priority throughout their corporate history.
See what I've been reading.
Sun did studies like the ones you are referring to and contributed the results back into Gnome. Sure enough, I found a reference to this on the Gnome.org HIG website.
Your original comment makes it appear that you have not used a recent version of Gnome (2.4 or 2.6) because it that project a very prominent example of how free software can have a focus on usability and still provide useful applications. You really ought to try it out if you haven't lately.
501 Not Implemented
Anti-virus software will be needed if Linux goes mainstream because a lot of security problems aren't the result of a software vulnerability. Trivial passwords, socially engineered virus emails, trojan horses, etc. Patch your code all you want but an uninformed or careless user can still let all sorts of malicious code in.
Feel free to mod me "-1 - Angry Jerk".
Crossover Office? Seems to work well for most programs. TurboTax would break due to the shitty copy protection but a competing product should work. And as another poster pointed out they have a web edition which works with FOSS browsers.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Huh? That's strange.. here's my additional steps...
Umm, one window per folder = spatial folders. Windows explorer has the panes with the tree on one side and the contents on the other and when you click on things they open in the same window.
I believe the grandparent was referring to the mode available in Win95-98 and WinNT that opened a new window for each folder. This was not a sptial system, merely a scheme that opened new windows all over the place. A spatial scheme implies the existence of other attributes (only 1 view/window for any folder, and that view retains all properties (size, position, view-stle etc.). The Windows semi-spatial system didn't properly implement all of this, and was certainly that much the worse for it. My understanding is that that scheme has been dumped for WindowsXP, which now uses the explorer interface only.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Obviously some people who are sixty have engineering degrees.... they got them when they were young. So what? Today's youth will eventually be old, but nobody expects them to magically become bad at computers.
It is genuinely hard to learn a skill like this when you're older. That doesn't mean it's impossible, or that some people don't do it, but it does mean it takes more work, and that strategies are worth it. It means you go more slowly.
It's just statistics. What is the percentage of women on slashdot? What is the average age? Prejudice is popular because it works.
when she finds out that this revolutionary idea of opening a new window for each folder is one of the first features users turned off in windows 95
Yes, but unfortunately there is more to a proper spatial interface than simply opening another window for each folder. Microsoft's implementation was very simplistic and failed to implement the atttribute preserving properties, and general "window as a folder" paradigm that spatial interfaces are all about.
I'm not a huge fan of spatial navigation - I don't think it's that great without some useful systems to make sure the window managment is easy (and note that the GNOME version has many of those, while the MS Windows version did not - another serious difference in usability right there) - but to compare a well implemented spatial interface with the very broken, half implemented system Windows used is pointless. The Windows95-2k "open folder in new window" scheme never grasped the key points of a spatial interface, it just aped roughly what Macs did.
Just because windows created a very bad, half assed version of the idea doesn't mean the idea is bad, merely that the MS implementation sucked.
Check your logic and try again.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Red Hat and Suse, and I'm pretty Sure Mandrake have all installed an autoupdate tool for the last few major versions, complete with a panel applet that is just as point-and-click friendly as Microsoft's WindowsUpdate systray program. And yes, they even handle kernel upgrades.
Pure debian doesn't have one, but I'd be more inclined to call debian a distribution framework than and actual distribution. I'd have to assume that Xandros, Linspire, Libranet, Lycoris, and all the other debian-based consumer desktop distributions do include such a tool.
Folks, it wouldn't hurt to learn a bit of history. Don't re-invent the wheel.
IBM's OS/2 WorkPlace Shell (WPS) has been using the spatial browser method for many, many years.
Open up a folder anywhere, one window for one folder. It retains it's size and position from the last time you closed it, and yes, even scroll bar position and view (different views are possible).
SHIFT+double-click to close the parent while opening up the child, and just right-click to bring up the menu to open the parent.
Sound familiar?
The features go on and on...and by the way, here's one thing that Nautilus doesn't have yet. The concept of a "Workspace".
Designate a folder as a Workspace in OS/2 WPS, and next time you open it, a complete environment will be restored. All open applications, all documents, any web browser links, etc. Close the folder, and everything closes up shop automatically.
You insensitive clod! You're thinking of a beowulf cluster of grandmas!
Crushing dreams at the speed of sarcasm
The core system gets a lot of Usability testing - although the UI leader (Seth) has written that UI testing is not a be-all-and-end-all, there is an art to it too.
puts ("Python r0cks\n");