Bored people in China can build a life-size Great Wall made out of AOL disks.
A problem with your arguement--sane defaults
on
KDE Gesture Control
·
· Score: 2
"But you can customize it" people say
"But if you dig deep enough into the configuration, you can change" people say
Such are the ideas that hold linux from the desktop. Many users starting off will do neither, and shouldn't be expected to try to improve things that should have been improved to begin with. If there's something in an interface that is supposed to be done (e.g. labeling toolbar buttons) and makes an interface more usable, it should be the default.
If KDE really wanted to improve their interface, they should make those tiny little toolbar buttons a lot bigger by adding labels. When you increase the size of a target (aka control aka widget), the user can access it faster (something we in the UI industry call Fitts' law). Right now, KDE has billions of tiny buttons that aren't very forthcoming as to what they do (a problem alleviated by a label) and that have crappy access times as a result of their tinyness. Just like all those buttons in M$ office. I guarantee you that few users if any ever use the toolbar buttons in word or excel because they're esoteric and have no speed advantage. Another problem with KDE is lack of progressive disclosure, which is the concept of putting the most simple, basic options at the top-level of an interface, and then giving the user the option of digging down to a more complex level if needed. KDE doesn't do this. They throw 18 billion menu entries, buttons, and other controls straight at the user. When this happens, users will feel completely overwhelmed and won't know where to begin in using program. Just looking at Konqueror makes my head spin.
I'm not bashing KDE for adding a good advanced feature like gesturing, but this seems to be just one more instance in a trend that desktop environments have followed as of late: adding cool, trendy, buzzword-compliant technologies but then completely blowing it the most basic and fundamental UI design principles.
I'm just waiting for the day that Bo and Luke get lost and fire up the General Lee's OnStar system.
This is kind of inaccurate. XIP increases this.
on
Agenda, Not Hidden
·
· Score: 2
Not the post, but the review. Yes, my developers Agenda has 8 megs of DRAM, but it also has 16 megs of flash RAM. "But this is not DRAM" they say--Agenda has something called XIP (Execute in Place) that allows stuff to be loaded and run from the flash RAM.
Cause the people at red hat are idiot geeks
on
Agenda, Not Hidden
·
· Score: 2
>Why couldn't Linux developers either in Redhat >or some other distro make things this simple for >people who're interested in Linux for the home >desktop segments?
I've talked to one of the people who worked on the red hat installer. I mentioned a few of Anaconda's myriad usability problems that would confuse the hell out of grandma if she tried to install linux. Problems that could be easily changed in the code. He couldn't understand what the problem with the installer was. "Wasn't it pretty enough?" he asked?
Alas, poor desktop GNOME
They meant well, I know
But their attempts at creating UI's were of infinite jest though their pixmaps were fancy
They had blindly copied microsoft 1000 times
And now, how abhorrent an imitation it is
My grandmother cringes at it.
Fitts' Law--the menus on their windows breaks. It is at least something they forget at Sun.
Something is rotten in the state of GNOME.
To fork or not to fork
That is the question
Whether tis nobler to suffer the bungling errors Of Gnome's outrageous UI design
Or build up an army of mac programmers
And in doing so, win the desktop
What's in a kernel? That which we know as a good interface with a linux kernel would be just as sweet.
Oh penguincow, penguincow, wherefore art thou my penguincow? Deny Bill his victory and the mac's greatness reclaim.
Sorry. I'm feeling rather poetic and silly today. But I'm already starting to do what you've mentioned. Mac people are best qualified at creating interfaces for grandmothers, which is why I'm creating (albeit slowly) a mac flavored GNOME fork. The current linux user environments were made for geeks by geeks. For them, technology is the ends unto itself and not and a means by which you get work done. On the gnome-gui list, there was an effort to put out UI guidelines. The effort, while not much, could be summed up as "let's go copy microsoft." When I pointed this out, the responses on the list were something to the tune of "Let's go copy Microsoft. We don't care if Apple did it better or it made more sense". Screw forging alliances with linux; it's time to take it over. I also agree with you about StarOffice. It really is big. And all the code comments are in German. Und ich spreche nicht gut Deutsche.
If you want, I can e-mail about the project. I will eventually bring other people in on this.
Ukab T. Great
Unfortunately, shareware is very important to mac
on
Qt for Mac
·
· Score: 2
Much of the mac development community consists of people writing (and often subsisting) off of shareware apps they sell. In fact, one of the bouyancy devices apple has in this sea of windows is all the people who write shareware apps to fill in for all the imporant windows software that isn't ported to the mac; it's too bad their work doesn't get more attention. Mac shareware isn't crappy like windows shareware; much of it is high quality stuff with interfaces that are far more intuitive and less frustrating than anything you're ever going to find in the linux or windows worlds. GraphicConverter and Escape Velocity are prime examples of the great stuff that's been produced over the years. For a mac shareware author who codes for the love of the platform and only pulls in 25K a year, $1500 for a Qt license is going to break the bank.
One thing palm has constantly done wrong is they squandering most of the opportunities for advancing the Palm user experience on stupid things that make the market droids and geeks google eyed. The biggest issue here is handwriting recognition. Palm could have put their efforts and faster chips into improving handwriting recognition. I'm not necessarily talking about getting rid of Grafitti (since that would require a *really* fast chip) but rather use the increased processor speed to implement better HWR algorithms so that the palm doesn't miss every fourth or fifth letter you write. Perhaps giving the user the ability to train grafitti (like with speech recognition). But what does palm do instead? They come out with color screens. It's that "ooh ahh" technology which is appealing to geeks (and market droids)just because they like technology but which doesn't really improve the total user experience. Another way they really blew it is with the Palm V. In that case, they used advancement in handheld technology to make a smaller, slimmer device that was meant to free the user from the worry of carrying around a big, thick PDA. But as any Palm V owner will tell you, they designed it in such a way that the buttons which turn the damn thing on are easy to hit. While the user is liberated from the worry of a thick device, they are now burdened with worrying about whether their palm will accidently turn on at the slightest bump. I think, or at least I would like to think, that some of Palm's troubles are due to their belief that "sexy technology" is more important than the user experience.
If people will pay to do it with their significant other in airplanes and hot-air balloons, there gotta be a market for doing it in space.
The problem isn't files . The problem is Windows.
on
The Humane Interface
·
· Score: 4
M$ Windows is one of the worst things that could have ever happened to GUI design. Microsoft has allowed so much DOS to pollute the Windows UI that what you have is a complete breakdown of the whole "user is in control" file/folder system the mac had. I think many geeks who say "we need to get rid of files and folders. They're too hard for normal people to understand" fail to take this into account.
On the mac, the user could drag a folder with an application to their desktop. We're not talking shortcut, we're talking actual program. If they needed to reinstall the OS, they could drag a folder with an application inside it to a zip disk, re-format the main HD (and give it a name more intelligible than a drive letter), reinstall OS, and then drag the folder with the program from the zip disk to wherever the hell they wanted to. Congratulations, program is now installed. To delete program, drag folder with app to trash and empty. There were no special names that were appended to the regular name of the file (i.e. no filename extensions). The file was simply whatever the user wanted to name it--they could tell what type of file it is by the LATFI method (Look At The Fine Icon). To install a driver (aka extension), drag extension file to extensions folder. To deinstall, drag to trash and empty. And above all, all files, including system files, had "Plain Damn English Names"(tm). Files and folders were easy to understand simply because there wasn't anything complex that one couldn't understand.
The macintosh was the most perfect concrete abstraction anyone has ever designed.
Unfortunately, the redmond morons were extremely unwilling, for technical and well as religious reasons, to make sure that good ole CLI DOS didn't contaminate windows. They didn't design the GUI from the ground up as if the command line never existed (like Apple did). They simply made DOS a little bit easier to understand. And they took a simple, concrete abstraction like the Macintosh and made it abstractly concrete.
On windows, you have a desktop, technically, but often when you drag stuff to it, you're asked if you want to create a "shortcut"--it tries to discourage you from putting the real thing there. So the desktop as a container breaks consistency with the folder as a container-type object. "You can put anything in a folder, but the desktop? No that's different." Then there's the matter of "My Computer". Your partitions do not sit directly on the desktop. You have to go through this strange layer called "My Computer" that isn't quite a folder and isn't quite a file. Once inside the "My Computer" limbo, you have the drives/partitions themselves, which cannot be given any name you want. You can sort of give an alias, but you must always see c: and a:. Then you've got "Special" folders with "Special" abilities that break consistency with the way that normal user-created folders act. There's "My Documents", which has the weird property of being the first place the file dialog warps to. Then there's "Control panels" and "Dial-up networking" and "Printers" folders, which exist outside any known location on your drives. These folders really don't like having stuff moved in and out of them like the regular folders do, and in that way, they too break consistency. To add something to a folder, the user simply drags it to the folder and drops it. But the user can't (with most Windows software) drag a folder with an application inside from a CD-ROM to wherever the hell they want to put it. They have to go to "Add new software", which many times will put the program into the specially designated "Program Files" folder--yet another folder with strange and unusual properties. And finally, there's system files. Ordinary files and folders the user names can be up to 255 letters of Plain Damn English. But files such as the ones in the Windows folder and those distributed with most 3rd party software--those are just plain 8 letter gobbledygook. With all this needless complexity that's in windows, with all these rules to exceptions to exceptions to rules, is it really any wonder that M$ users face such a tough time navigating through the file/folder system?
Now maybe the concept of the file/folder is a little bit outdated. Jef Raskin certainly seems to think so. I kind of agree with him. But the fact of the matter is that any flaws that the mac desktop metaphor had was made 100 times worse by Microsoft's incompetance at designing user interfaces.
Alan cooper proved this when he designed VB
on
The Humane Interface
·
· Score: 2
the most inhumane interface ever designed, complete with MDI 'window within a window' and toolbars that so aggressively attempt to dock with other stuff that it is impossible to get any work done. I wouldn't trust an ex-microsoft employee (save Tog, who criticizes them frequently) as far as I could throw them when it comes to any interface design issue. And yes, this does go for M$ programmers who now work at Ximian.
It's the best graphical linux mail client that exists. Much stabler than Evolution and far less feature bloat. You don't have to pay 100's of dollars for it ('cause it's free). Though if you insist on doing so, I'd gladly accept that amount as a finder's fee;)
if GNOME or KDE were ever to become so easy that they would let someone use linux without 'living and breathing computer', would linux still be considered a UNIX?
Another danger of proprietary models: bad UI's
on
MS VP Speech Online
·
· Score: 2
One danger of proprietary software never mentioned is software with bad user interfaces. Many windows-based companies (including the one I work for--unfortunately) regard the creation of usable, intuitive, GUI's with extreme apathy. One of the worst offenders of all these software companies is the one that Mr. Mundie works for (i.e. Microsoft). What no one seems to understand is that a well designed interface has a direct effect on a person's productivity. Well designed interfaces reduce learning curves and increase efficiency. Poorly designed interfaces waste time and energy in both the learning process and in the every day usage of the program. I'm sure that if someone was able to do a study of the lost productivity that resulted from Microsoft's myriad UI mistakes over the last ten years, I would have no doubt that the figure would run into the hundreds of billions dollars. Think about it--something wastes 10 seconds of your time 50-100 times a day for years on end. That's a whole hell of a lot of work your employer lost. With open source software, even if a software vendor has programmers whose UI design stupidity surpasses Microsoft (if that could actually be possible), the customer can hire their own programmers and UI specialists to redesign the interface so that it doesn't waste ridiculous amounts of their employees time and the company's money.
They should have added option to for the user to select individual packages during the installation. I'm not saying that the screen should be initially cluttered with checkboxes for installing stuff (like mandrake, e.g.), but they should have given the user an option to go to a well laid-out section that allowed for picking of specific packages.
Real ease-of-use, as opposed to Microsoft/Ximian ease of use, is not about wiping the user's ass, it's about not kicking it. It is possible to have a simple interface that gets increasingly detailed as you go down. This is the principle called "Progressive disclosure". Unfortunately, ximian seems to be unfamiliar with this idea. Not that I am singling ximian out, because KDE is equally unfamiliar with this idea, except in the opposite way (the user encounters way too many controls/options initially. Clutters up the user's screen and mental bandwidth). UI design foibles that tend to screw the user over in the name of wiping their ass are the trademark of Microsoft. Since Ximian is heavily influenced by what microsoft does, it is not really surprising that such a mistake like the lack of custom package selection was made.
The manual installer was another badly botched design. Last time I used the graphical installer to try and manually install from stuff I downloaded (I now just build from tarballs), it didn't work. There was no, real apparent way achieve a local install, despite the fact that an option for such a thing was listed in the installer. Being a geek, I got around this. But not everyone's grandmother is a geek.
I'm not really trying to criticize Ximian too harshly. I'm just saying that I'm better at designing UI's than they are. Maybe I should apply for a job there, since obviously no one at Ximian is doing their's. Ximian sure has many talented programmers who are technically competant. I'm sure they know everything about corba, every gtk/gtk/glib/xlib API call by heart. But from what I've seen of their software, they don't have a single person on board who knows a damned thing about usability design. I have seen UI design mistake after design mistake repeated again and again with each new Ximian/Helix download. Miguel might give a good talk about making computers easy to use, but so far he hasn't been able to back up his words with action. Of course, debating this whole thing in a flame war on slashdot is pointless, since time doing that will take me away from my main GNOME activity, which is fixing Ximian's numerous UI idiocies and releasing the modified code in a forked version of GNOME. I'm sorry I wasted this much time already.
It's controlled by anyone who is able to download the source and freely modify it. To paraphrase the great prophet Muad'dib, he who can download code for a thing controls a thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Bored people in China can build a life-size Great Wall made out of AOL disks.
"But you can customize it" people say
"But if you dig deep enough into the configuration, you can change" people say
Such are the ideas that hold linux from the desktop. Many users starting off will do neither, and shouldn't be expected to try to improve things that should have been improved to begin with. If there's something in an interface that is supposed to be done (e.g. labeling toolbar buttons) and makes an interface more usable, it should be the default.
If KDE really wanted to improve their interface, they should make those tiny little toolbar buttons a lot bigger by adding labels. When you increase the size of a target (aka control aka widget), the user can access it faster (something we in the UI industry call Fitts' law). Right now, KDE has billions of tiny buttons that aren't very forthcoming as to what they do (a problem alleviated by a label) and that have crappy access times as a result of their tinyness. Just like all those buttons in M$ office. I guarantee you that few users if any ever use the toolbar buttons in word or excel because they're esoteric and have no speed advantage. Another problem with KDE is lack of progressive disclosure, which is the concept of putting the most simple, basic options at the top-level of an interface, and then giving the user the option of digging down to a more complex level if needed. KDE doesn't do this. They throw 18 billion menu entries, buttons, and other controls straight at the user. When this happens, users will feel completely overwhelmed and won't know where to begin in using program. Just looking at Konqueror makes my head spin.
I'm not bashing KDE for adding a good advanced feature like gesturing, but this seems to be just one more instance in a trend that desktop environments have followed as of late: adding cool, trendy, buzzword-compliant technologies but then completely blowing it the most basic and fundamental UI design principles.
I'm just waiting for the day that Bo and Luke get lost and fire up the General Lee's OnStar system.
Not the post, but the review. Yes, my developers Agenda has 8 megs of DRAM, but it also has 16 megs of flash RAM. "But this is not DRAM" they say--Agenda has something called XIP (Execute in Place) that allows stuff to be loaded and run from the flash RAM.
>Why couldn't Linux developers either in Redhat >or some other distro make things this simple for >people who're interested in Linux for the home >desktop segments?
I've talked to one of the people who worked on the red hat installer. I mentioned a few of Anaconda's myriad usability problems that would confuse the hell out of grandma if she tried to install linux. Problems that could be easily changed in the code. He couldn't understand what the problem with the installer was. "Wasn't it pretty enough?" he asked?
Alas, poor desktop GNOME
They meant well, I know
But their attempts at creating UI's were of infinite jest though their pixmaps were fancy
They had blindly copied microsoft 1000 times
And now, how abhorrent an imitation it is
My grandmother cringes at it.
Fitts' Law--the menus on their windows breaks. It is at least something they forget at Sun.
Something is rotten in the state of GNOME.
To fork or not to fork
That is the question
Whether tis nobler to suffer the bungling errors Of Gnome's outrageous UI design
Or build up an army of mac programmers
And in doing so, win the desktop
What's in a kernel? That which we know as a good interface with a linux kernel would be just as sweet.
Oh penguincow, penguincow, wherefore art thou my penguincow? Deny Bill his victory and the mac's greatness reclaim.
Sorry. I'm feeling rather poetic and silly today. But I'm already starting to do what you've mentioned. Mac people are best qualified at creating interfaces for grandmothers, which is why I'm creating (albeit slowly) a mac flavored GNOME fork. The current linux user environments were made for geeks by geeks. For them, technology is the ends unto itself and not and a means by which you get work done. On the gnome-gui list, there was an effort to put out UI guidelines. The effort, while not much, could be summed up as "let's go copy microsoft." When I pointed this out, the responses on the list were something to the tune of "Let's go copy Microsoft. We don't care if Apple did it better or it made more sense". Screw forging alliances with linux; it's time to take it over. I also agree with you about StarOffice. It really is big. And all the code comments are in German. Und ich spreche nicht gut Deutsche.
If you want, I can e-mail about the project. I will eventually bring other people in on this.
Ukab T. Great
Much of the mac development community consists of people writing (and often subsisting) off of shareware apps they sell. In fact, one of the bouyancy devices apple has in this sea of windows is all the people who write shareware apps to fill in for all the imporant windows software that isn't ported to the mac; it's too bad their work doesn't get more attention. Mac shareware isn't crappy like windows shareware; much of it is high quality stuff with interfaces that are far more intuitive and less frustrating than anything you're ever going to find in the linux or windows worlds. GraphicConverter and Escape Velocity are prime examples of the great stuff that's been produced over the years. For a mac shareware author who codes for the love of the platform and only pulls in 25K a year, $1500 for a Qt license is going to break the bank.
Combine the nice syntax of Swing with the uncruftyness of Qt. We can have an open source visual J++
yes. I am kidding.
What kind of ass could C-3PO possibly kick? What's his special weapon--bitching at people till they die?
http://slashdot.org/articles/01/05/03/1617211.shtm l
Guess where Dell put all those recalled laptops that catch on fire...
One thing palm has constantly done wrong is they squandering most of the opportunities for advancing the Palm user experience on stupid things that make the market droids and geeks google eyed. The biggest issue here is handwriting recognition. Palm could have put their efforts and faster chips into improving handwriting recognition. I'm not necessarily talking about getting rid of Grafitti (since that would require a *really* fast chip) but rather use the increased processor speed to implement better HWR algorithms so that the palm doesn't miss every fourth or fifth letter you write. Perhaps giving the user the ability to train grafitti (like with speech recognition). But what does palm do instead? They come out with color screens. It's that "ooh ahh" technology which is appealing to geeks (and market droids)just because they like technology but which doesn't really improve the total user experience. Another way they really blew it is with the Palm V. In that case, they used advancement in handheld technology to make a smaller, slimmer device that was meant to free the user from the worry of carrying around a big, thick PDA. But as any Palm V owner will tell you, they designed it in such a way that the buttons which turn the damn thing on are easy to hit. While the user is liberated from the worry of a thick device, they are now burdened with worrying about whether their palm will accidently turn on at the slightest bump. I think, or at least I would like to think, that some of Palm's troubles are due to their belief that "sexy technology" is more important than the user experience.
AOL and AAA both have the letter "A" in , after all. People might get confused.
If people will pay to do it with their significant other in airplanes and hot-air balloons, there gotta be a market for doing it in space.
M$ Windows is one of the worst things that could have ever happened to GUI design. Microsoft has allowed so much DOS to pollute the Windows UI that what you have is a complete breakdown of the whole "user is in control" file/folder system the mac had. I think many geeks who say "we need to get rid of files and folders. They're too hard for normal people to understand" fail to take this into account.
On the mac, the user could drag a folder with an application to their desktop. We're not talking shortcut, we're talking actual program. If they needed to reinstall the OS, they could drag a folder with an application inside it to a zip disk, re-format the main HD (and give it a name more intelligible than a drive letter), reinstall OS, and then drag the folder with the program from the zip disk to wherever the hell they wanted to. Congratulations, program is now installed. To delete program, drag folder with app to trash and empty. There were no special names that were appended to the regular name of the file (i.e. no filename extensions). The file was simply whatever the user wanted to name it--they could tell what type of file it is by the LATFI method (Look At The Fine Icon). To install a driver (aka extension), drag extension file to extensions folder. To deinstall, drag to trash and empty. And above all, all files, including system files, had "Plain Damn English Names"(tm). Files and folders were easy to understand simply because there wasn't anything complex that one couldn't understand. The macintosh was the most perfect concrete abstraction anyone has ever designed.
Unfortunately, the redmond morons were extremely unwilling, for technical and well as religious reasons, to make sure that good ole CLI DOS didn't contaminate windows. They didn't design the GUI from the ground up as if the command line never existed (like Apple did). They simply made DOS a little bit easier to understand. And they took a simple, concrete abstraction like the Macintosh and made it abstractly concrete. On windows, you have a desktop, technically, but often when you drag stuff to it, you're asked if you want to create a "shortcut"--it tries to discourage you from putting the real thing there. So the desktop as a container breaks consistency with the folder as a container-type object. "You can put anything in a folder, but the desktop? No that's different." Then there's the matter of "My Computer". Your partitions do not sit directly on the desktop. You have to go through this strange layer called "My Computer" that isn't quite a folder and isn't quite a file. Once inside the "My Computer" limbo, you have the drives/partitions themselves, which cannot be given any name you want. You can sort of give an alias, but you must always see c: and a:. Then you've got "Special" folders with "Special" abilities that break consistency with the way that normal user-created folders act. There's "My Documents", which has the weird property of being the first place the file dialog warps to. Then there's "Control panels" and "Dial-up networking" and "Printers" folders, which exist outside any known location on your drives. These folders really don't like having stuff moved in and out of them like the regular folders do, and in that way, they too break consistency. To add something to a folder, the user simply drags it to the folder and drops it. But the user can't (with most Windows software) drag a folder with an application inside from a CD-ROM to wherever the hell they want to put it. They have to go to "Add new software", which many times will put the program into the specially designated "Program Files" folder--yet another folder with strange and unusual properties. And finally, there's system files. Ordinary files and folders the user names can be up to 255 letters of Plain Damn English. But files such as the ones in the Windows folder and those distributed with most 3rd party software--those are just plain 8 letter gobbledygook. With all this needless complexity that's in windows, with all these rules to exceptions to exceptions to rules, is it really any wonder that M$ users face such a tough time navigating through the file/folder system?
Now maybe the concept of the file/folder is a little bit outdated. Jef Raskin certainly seems to think so. I kind of agree with him. But the fact of the matter is that any flaws that the mac desktop metaphor had was made 100 times worse by Microsoft's incompetance at designing user interfaces.the most inhumane interface ever designed, complete with MDI 'window within a window' and toolbars that so aggressively attempt to dock with other stuff that it is impossible to get any work done. I wouldn't trust an ex-microsoft employee (save Tog, who criticizes them frequently) as far as I could throw them when it comes to any interface design issue. And yes, this does go for M$ programmers who now work at Ximian.
was there ever any doubt they could kick Jeff Bezos'?
It's the best graphical linux mail client that exists. Much stabler than Evolution and far less feature bloat. You don't have to pay 100's of dollars for it ('cause it's free). Though if you insist on doing so, I'd gladly accept that amount as a finder's fee ;)
Pigeon overhead is nasty. Too many "packets" are dropped
If schoolkids had such a fun program as this, they'd never go to the school library to look up naughty words in the dictionary.
if GNOME or KDE were ever to become so easy that they would let someone use linux without 'living and breathing computer', would linux still be considered a UNIX?
One danger of proprietary software never mentioned is software with bad user interfaces. Many windows-based companies (including the one I work for--unfortunately) regard the creation of usable, intuitive, GUI's with extreme apathy. One of the worst offenders of all these software companies is the one that Mr. Mundie works for (i.e. Microsoft). What no one seems to understand is that a well designed interface has a direct effect on a person's productivity. Well designed interfaces reduce learning curves and increase efficiency. Poorly designed interfaces waste time and energy in both the learning process and in the every day usage of the program. I'm sure that if someone was able to do a study of the lost productivity that resulted from Microsoft's myriad UI mistakes over the last ten years, I would have no doubt that the figure would run into the hundreds of billions dollars. Think about it--something wastes 10 seconds of your time 50-100 times a day for years on end. That's a whole hell of a lot of work your employer lost. With open source software, even if a software vendor has programmers whose UI design stupidity surpasses Microsoft (if that could actually be possible), the customer can hire their own programmers and UI specialists to redesign the interface so that it doesn't waste ridiculous amounts of their employees time and the company's money.
They should have added option to for the user to select individual packages during the installation. I'm not saying that the screen should be initially cluttered with checkboxes for installing stuff (like mandrake, e.g.), but they should have given the user an option to go to a well laid-out section that allowed for picking of specific packages.
Real ease-of-use, as opposed to Microsoft/Ximian ease of use, is not about wiping the user's ass, it's about not kicking it. It is possible to have a simple interface that gets increasingly detailed as you go down. This is the principle called "Progressive disclosure". Unfortunately, ximian seems to be unfamiliar with this idea. Not that I am singling ximian out, because KDE is equally unfamiliar with this idea, except in the opposite way (the user encounters way too many controls/options initially. Clutters up the user's screen and mental bandwidth). UI design foibles that tend to screw the user over in the name of wiping their ass are the trademark of Microsoft. Since Ximian is heavily influenced by what microsoft does, it is not really surprising that such a mistake like the lack of custom package selection was made.
The manual installer was another badly botched design. Last time I used the graphical installer to try and manually install from stuff I downloaded (I now just build from tarballs), it didn't work. There was no, real apparent way achieve a local install, despite the fact that an option for such a thing was listed in the installer. Being a geek, I got around this. But not everyone's grandmother is a geek.
I'm not really trying to criticize Ximian too harshly. I'm just saying that I'm better at designing UI's than they are. Maybe I should apply for a job there, since obviously no one at Ximian is doing their's. Ximian sure has many talented programmers who are technically competant. I'm sure they know everything about corba, every gtk/gtk/glib/xlib API call by heart. But from what I've seen of their software, they don't have a single person on board who knows a damned thing about usability design. I have seen UI design mistake after design mistake repeated again and again with each new Ximian/Helix download. Miguel might give a good talk about making computers easy to use, but so far he hasn't been able to back up his words with action. Of course, debating this whole thing in a flame war on slashdot is pointless, since time doing that will take me away from my main GNOME activity, which is fixing Ximian's numerous UI idiocies and releasing the modified code in a forked version of GNOME. I'm sorry I wasted this much time already.
It's controlled by anyone who is able to download the source and freely modify it. To paraphrase the great prophet Muad'dib, he who can download code for a thing controls a thing.
a really cool, funny, song. Download it. http://artists.mp3s.com/artist_song/234/234762.htm l