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Advice for Developers: Make Common Usage Easy

Posted by timothy on from the thomas-sowell-is-smart-smart-smart dept.

Ken Hendrickson writes "Thomas Sowell has some fantastic common-sense advice for software developers from the viewpoint of an ordinary user: Make it easy to do what almost everybody wants to do. I don't believe he uses Free Software; that means that Microsoft is not satisfying their customers, and Free Software can perform better than Microsoft even in the ease of use area!"

3 of 637 comments (clear)

  1. Joel has a little bit about this idea too by BayBlade · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I found it a good read here

    --

    The key difference between a Programmer and a Senior Programmer is that one of them is Mexican.

  2. FireFox gets it right... by Apathetic1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is something I think FireFox has gotten very right. Don't want to mess around with settings? Great. It works right out of the box.

    I've installed FireFox for about a dozen people now. So far only two have even bothered to open the Options dialog. They don't care how the options are set, as long as they can browse. The two who have opened the Options dialog think the customizability is great but those two are not the majority of users.

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    My username does not make me Apathetic. It's irony, get it?

  3. Free Software can out-ease-of-use Microsoft? by JessLeah · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Yeah... right. I LOVE free software, and I HATE Microsoft (crap, I run Debian and OpenBSD _ONLY_), but let's be freaking realistic here. If free software is so easy to use, then why did I have to send THIS email to the OpenOffice users' mailing list this morning:
    Subject: scalc: How do you select WHICH row or column is the X or Y axis???

    Yes, I have viewed Help. Yes, I have Googled for more information. Yes, I have searched the FAQ.

    But for the life of me, I cannot figure out-- and this sounds really dumb, I know-- how to tell scalc "Use column A, 'Amount', as the Y-axis, and column B, 'Date/Time', as the X-axis'.

    I am trying to have OOo do a very SIMPLE line graph here-- how much money is in my account, graphed against time. Very very basic stuff, the kind of thing they teach to fifth graders. I cannot manage to convince scalc to do it.

    And God help me if I wanted to keep 'Date' and 'Time' in separate columns, and have the software know to parse a single row's 'Date' and 'Time' cells as one date/time object...

    Can someone please, please, please tell me how to do this? In M$ Excel, it's really really easy. You just tell it which column to use as which axis. It's so simple even a 10-year-old could understand it. IN OPENOFFICE.ORG YOU ARE NOT EVEN GIVEN THAT OPTION! You ARE given a billion different choices as to how you want the chart to LOOK, and by diddling with the chart object once it's in the 'sheet, you can give it a spiffly gradient effect, or change the labels on the axes...

    But nowhere can you actually tell it what variables (read: columns) the axes should be bound to????

    Just as an aside, I am really going nuts here, and pondering just going to Microsloth Office (running in CrossOver, as I run Debian). I appreciate the effort thot everyone has put into OOo, but seeing as how I CAN figure out how to insert a 3D rainbow-coloured torus into my spreadsheet, but I CANNOT figure out how to do a simple line graph, I'm kind of miffed at the moment. It would seem that the people who handle 'useability' had their priorities hat on backwards? ;) I mean, are rainbow-coloured tori really more important than line graphing? ;)
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    Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin