Re: Ideas/Regressions

On Sat, Oct 12, 2002 at 01:04:54PM +0000, [email protected] wrote:
> >What about a gconf-editor entry to enable advanced menus, so the stupid
> >(err, not very computer savy) users would never ever see these items,
> >while the rest of us would not be robbed of the functionality ?
> 
> It would be possible to make my configure pref a gconf pref easily.
> I'm pretty sure no one would agree with having simple menubar as default
> though.

What about a simple menu option, placed somewhere obvious, which would
be called enable advanced UI, and which would be made to enable advanced
UI elements when set, and when unset would not only hide the advanced UI
elements, but also revert every change done in the advanced UI elements
to some safe default (or the previous state, or whatever). I guess you
would enable a gconf-editor pref to make this UI option shown or not, or
even a compile time switch, so someone wanting to use gnome/galeon as a
corporation desktop or whatever, can disable it for all the users.

> >I still think the gconf-editor is a ugly way to do prefs, but then gnome
> >copied this on the windows registry, so i guess there we have to adapt
> >to it. In particular, if you enter gconf-editor, which is still somewhat
> >buggy at times, to change some option of galeon, you could as well
> >change a lot of stuff by chance that have nothing at all to do with
> >galeon, and you can screw, not only galeon, but your whole gnome
> >desktop.
> 
> ? How would you break other apps with gconf-editor ?

Because the galeon setting are just a click away from the settings for
other apps ?

Mmm, let's explain this, you speak about real user and about power
users, but there are a whole lot of graduation between them.

Imagine a basic user, who don't know anything about unix or gnome or
whatever, which uses gnome because he got a box from a wide public
distrib (like lindows or so) and he heard about these cool mouse gesture
feature that he can enable by editing /apps/galeon/Advanced/whatever in
gconf-edit in some web page about mouse gestures (or even worse, just
that you can enable mouse gestures in gconf-editor). So there he goes
opens gconf-editor, and navigates it, is much more bewildered by it than
any menu he may have had to visit, and either feels lost and abandons
it, or feels bold and will try to modify the entry. In the second case,
he may even feel bolder and try out some other stuff in gconf-editor,
maybe even some of the other apps, and voila! he may very well have
screwed up his whole setting. 

Also, there are also more tech savy users, which would want to test some
of these option, or simply find one of the disapearing options important
to them and want to reenable them, but are not of the level to be
confident in using gconf-editor.

That is without telling about the possibilities of errors during the
manipulation, or the current brokeness of gconf-editor (due to a problem
with debian's shipping experimental gnome2 packages, i needed to change
the default windows manager in the gconf-editor, and well, choosing edit
only makes gconf-editor disappear, sure it will be fixed someday, but
gconf-editor does not seem to be a very solid app to rely upon) and all
kind of things can go wrong.

And anyway, i am not familiar with the HIG or whatever, but anyone that
decided that it is better to put all the prefs for all apps in a single
place was clearly on crack, a MS worshipper, or whatever. If i want to
change things for galeon, then i go to the galeon preference menu or
whatever it is called, not to some central pref repository. And i would
much like to hear the arguments about it, and preferably from something
who did not use MS windows for the last 10 years.

Friendly,

Sven Luther


> 
> Marco
> 
> 
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------
> This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek
> Welcome to geek heaven.
> http://thinkgeek.com/sf
> _______________________________________________
> Galeon-devel mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/galeon-devel


-------------------------------------------------------
This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek
Welcome to geek heaven.
http://thinkgeek.com/sf