[Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME

[Christopher Blizzard]

On Mon, 2005-12-12 at 20:42 -0800, Timothy D. Witham wrote:
>    I will give you an example.  I've been using Evolution
> since 2001 and every release has removed something
> from the way I worked.  Made it a little less friendly to
> me and a little more of  a pain in the ass to use.  I used
> to really push Evolution to folks but since 2.0 I say "I
> use it because I have been using it.  And if asked I
> will say that I really feel that it is broken for my usage
> model and that I have zero hope of it getting fixed."

Evolution is a _great_ example for this discussion because it fits
exactly into our design discussion;  That is, it's designed for the
"Enterprise Market."  Put someone who isn't part of a large corporation
and doesn't want to think about scheduling and task lists and calendars
and meetings in front of it and they will say "what in the hell is all
this stuff for" and will likely get fed up and walk away.  It's just not
designed for home users.  (Actually, I think that Evolution was just an
Outlook clone and therefore ended up in the Enterprise by effect instead
of as an explicit design choice.  But anyway...)

Mail.app is closer to home user patterns but it turns out that the
ultimate clients for people like that are the web-based ones.  Yahoo and
gmail basically own that space these days.  We're completely out of that
market.

Different tools for different folks.

> 
>    I don't need it to come out with my settings as the
> default.  I'm all for default settings to make things
> easy to use for a novice but when you remove the 
> functionality so that an expert user can't get the
> full value then that is a failure.

I wouldn't jump from "removing functionality" to "failure."  I think
that it's safe to say that maybe we've not made it right for you, but
that's a design decision, not a failure.

--Chris