Gnome Article on UI Design on /.

[Thomas Zander]

On Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 11:47:04AM -0700, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> On Monday 22 April 2002 05:41 am, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > why do you think it is hard to side with a "single idea"? probably because
> > different people work in vastly diferent ways/methods/environments. so you
> > end up with a large chunk of people who need/want it something one way, and
> > a large chunk who want it another. you can either have a niche product,
> > cripple the interface for many users, or be configurable.
> 
> I think the problem is that many features are being added without taking the 
> big picture into account, without thinking of the feature in terms of "task". 
> 
> I am currently looking into kcmfontinst and one the things that puzzles me is 
> that you can choose whether to delete a font or to move it to /tmp. This is a 
> typical example of a bad feature. I don't want to move a font to /tmp. I can 
> hardly imagine anyone else would. Maybe people want to temporary disable a 
> font (why?) and you could implement that by moving the font to /tmp, but the 
> feature to move the font to /tmp is pretty silly. If I want to move files 
> around I use konqueror.

While you are right in the moving part the feature is actually quite nice, but
useless in its current implementation.

The thing the author probably wanted to accieve is what the enable/disable action
on the macOs (8 is the last I used) extention manager does.

You can click on a checkbox in front of the extention and the thing gets moved to
another dir; and the other way around if you click it again.
Naturally that approuch is totally useless for the amount of fonts people tend to
have on their systems and the logical move to join the feature with delete is 
easy.
That just overlooks the re-activate feature that made the thing worth-while in 
the first place.

IMO a better solution would be to add a way to deactivate a font and add a list
of deactivated fonts which can then be activated afterwards.
A good implementation would be to store the original position of the font (the
subdir if you use the advanced GUI) and add a context menu to reenable it.

Just some thoughts...

-- 
Thomas Zander                                            zander at earthling.net
The only thing worse than failure is the fear of trying something new
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