KAssistant announcement

[Tim Beaulen]

On 8/14/06, Thomas Zander <zander at kde.org> wrote:
> On Monday 14 August 2006 11:57, Olivier Goffart wrote:
> > The real question is about English here.
> > In the English language, do you better say "Assistant" or "Wizard" ?
> >
> > I'm not one English speaker, so i don't know the answer at all.
> > But if the answer is "Assistant",  then, the class name should be
> > changed (to KAssistantDialog IMO)
> > Anyway, if "Wizard" is the perfect term to name such assistant, then
> > the class name will stay KWizard
>
> As all such things, there are different reasons to name it different
> things. Most conflicting. The Wizard idea has been around from the early
> Macintosh days and all long time users are familiar with the terminology
> in one way or another.
> Since some years the term 'assistant' started popping up and while I may
> personally think more about clippy[1] when that name is used, I'm sure
> there are others that feel this is a more proper name.
>

If I'm not mistaken, one of those characters was a magician too.
So, a wizard can be linked to clippy too.


> Assistant is some person helping you out doing mundane tasks, while wizard
> is the very smart person giving you directions and just doing its magic
> behind the scenes.

That's your interpretation of a wizard. I've never seen a wizard give
directions, only ask questions in the form of  "what do you want to
see next?"

An assistant helps you choose the things you want.




btw:
Using different names for things that your users see and things that
your developers see is a recepy for disaster. It'll work for one or
two classes, but if you're going to consistently give objects other
names than they appear to your users, you'll eventually get in a lot
of trouble.
(I see this happening on my work.)