Killer apps/"selling" points of FC and GNU/Linux

Ronny Buchmann ronny-vlug at vlugnet.org
Sat Nov 27 16:39:17 UTC 2004


On Saturday 27 November 2004 11:21, Avi Alkalay wrote:
> softwares really excel in usability confort. And I don't think a
> commercial software used by millions of people around the world, at
> home and at work (Outlook), still has usability bugs. It is pretty
> mature by now.
Oh, it definitly has usability bugs. For example you cannot search in all 
address books at once. Auto-completion of email addresses sometimes works and 
sometimes doesn't. (There are some more, but I don't want to annoy the list 
with outlook bugs.)


> In this case of my father, usability is not "used to", because I
> explained all the virus implications of using Outlook, and he used
Usability has not much to do with viruses.

> Thunderbird for several weeks. It was simply related to how Thunder
> organizes information, speed, etc. He finished saing "Don't worry
> about security, I have an anti-virus". Thunderbird is still beta...
> hopefully they'll improve it.
>
> I want to say that again because this is very important:
> Usability and Confort of use are not realted to software features (of
> course they must have it too), but to the speed things are renderer on
> the screen, super beautiful fonts, integration, no bugs on things
> related to drag'n'drop, and underlying widgets code, and most of all,
> people, psycologists, making tests with regular people on how they
> feel using certain software.
I feel GNOME is much more usable than any variant of Windows.
But continued working on usability is definitly an important part of future 
development.

> Specially about fonts (it is way more relevant than most techies may
> think), those Tahoma and Verdana fonts were designed for confort and
> to look beautifull on the screen. Luxi Sans (Sans on FC), Bitstream
> Vera, and others available on the free world don't have their superior
> quality. I experienced regular desktop users migrating from W to L,
> and the first thing they want to customize is the fonts. Sans is too
> big, Vera is not well hinted, and anti-aliasing  is bad for small
> sizes.
Always when I have to use Windows I get angry about the fonts (especially the 
fixed "system font" size coming from the Win3 era).

I have currently (FC3) nothing to complain about Vera fonts.

> About usability tests, Mozilla team probably studied IE usability a
> lot, and they worried about removing many menu items, and to mimic
> other aspects. So sometimes many options aren't good. For example, on
> KDE we have 3 editors that make the same functionality that Window's
> Notepad: Kedit, Kwrite and Kate. Confusing?
Agreed.

-- 
http://LinuxWiki.org/RonnyBuchmann




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