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GNOME 2.12 Released
Moderator writes "At long last, Gnome 2.12 has been released! Among the many new features are clipboard management, a menu editor, an improved search tool, and a spatial-tree view in Nautilus. Check out the start page for more info."
Nah, I agree. There are times when "Yes" and "No" are barely acceptable - namely, when you are asked a very short, simple question by the dialog. But really, if the whole point is to use your computer quickly, even a short dialog should avoid them. Why make the person read a sentence like "The action you are about to perform cannot be undone. Are you sure you want to do this?" in order to figure out what every dialog is for when you can give the familiar user a chance to do things so much more quickly by allowing him to read two buttons - "Delete" and "Cancel", "Delete" and "Don't Delete," something like that. If you are forcing the user to read the dialog in order to know the correct answer, you might as well have buttons labeled A, B, and C, and tell the user what each does in the dialog text.
That said, it's not enough. Prime example: In Quicken (2006 for Mac, anyway), if you are in the middle of the account creation wizard, and click the Cancel button, Quicken pops up a sheet with the usual "Are you sure you want to do this?" type question, and gives you the buttons "Cancel" and "Close." There are plenty of people out there (myself included) whose first instinct is to click the "Cancel" button because Cancel is the first button I clicked and Cancel is what I want to do. Of course, it's also the wrong answer.
I don't mind waiting so much, if it's a heavy app, but I'm really, really annoyed that applications steal back the focus when they finally appear. It's so unintiutive and annoying. Then again, all (or at least the ones I know of) OS:es and managers do this, so it's not specific to Gnome.
:) And if there is a way to get this behaviour today, please please tell me!
If you don't understand what I mean, here's the point: I often start up an application that I will use "in a while" and then proceed to navigate further in Nautilus or whatever. When the app starts, it steals back focus even though I already do something else. That is not usability. There's two use cases:
1. User starts application, waits for it to complete. This would cover almost all common use and especially non-power use. Focus remains with started application from the point that I start it.
2. User starts application, proceeds to give other window focus (by click, ALT-tab, whatever). Starting application at this point loses focus and will not regain it.
Ok, so if the app doesn't steal focus, it may not be obvious that it's finished? That's what the new taskbar hints is for, and it's also a matter of how you behave. Any user likely to have problems with this probably wait for each app to start in turn anyways, so it's not likely to be a problem.
Now this I would like to see. It annoys me at least a couple of times a day.
Spine World
Gnome is the OSX killer.
You are killing right? Its been how many years, better part of a decade and they just added freakin' clipboard services.
Call me back when they: