Re: Creating a task launcher.....

From: Stephen R Laniel (steve_at_laniels.org)
Date: 07/07/05

  • Next message: Bogdan Sicleru: "Re: LIBSTDC++-LIBC6.1-1.SO.2" 
    Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2005 15:36:29 -0400
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org

    On Thu, Jul 07, 2005 at 09:15:33PM +0200, Brice Méalier wrote:
    > > I'd say that we should just keep new users away from the
    > > command line. I do all my work there, but it ceased to be
    > > the best way for new users to interact with a computer about
    > > 15 years ago. The problem with the command line (just to
    > because win started to get market share at that time and gave users bad
    > habits....

    A GUI is not a 'bad habit.' It's the interface that most
    users are comfortable with. The command line is an intensely
    powerful gaping void: you look at it and ask, "Um ... what
    do I tell it to do?" I want to get a list of the files here;
    what do I type? 'ls' is not the first thing that comes to
    mind, much less 'ls -la'. I want to create a new document;
    'vim' is not the first thing that comes to mind. The list
    goes on. It's nonintuitive. I suppose it could be made
    slightly more intuitive by making the command 'web browser'
    or 'word processor' do something, but that's not going to
    happen ("bash: web: command not found").

    > generally, the name of the program matches the name of the binary! the
    > best example is what you are telling above with firefox...

    Sure. But part of my point is that a new user will not know
    that the web browser is called 'firefox'. I installed
    Mozilla on a Windows client's machine a while ago and
    deleted the IE icon (I do that for all my clients nowadays,
    using Firefox instead). I didn't change the default icon
    title, so it still said "Mozilla." I left that client and
    hopped on the subway home. 30 minutes later I had an irate
    voicemail on my cell phone asking me, "WHAT IS 'MANZILLA'?"
    The name does not suggest what it does.

    Lesson: ever since then, I have changed the icon title to
    read 'web browser' or 'Internet'. Most new users DO NOT know
    what the term 'web browser' means, generically: they don't
    understand that there is a class of objects called 'web
    browsers' of which Internet Explorer and Mozilla and Firefox
    are instances.

    So that's the level of user that we're dealing with. We
    can't even expect most users to know what a 'web browser'
    is, much less to know that 'Firefox' does the same thing as
    IE, MUCH less to know that their web browser will launch
    if they type 'firefox' (not 'Firefox' or 'FIREFOX') at the
    command line. Much less that 'firefox &' is probably the
    command they actually want to run.

    The command line is a hopeless loss for 99.5% of all users.

    > important information! BTW that remembers me the first (and lone) time I
    > tried to convert a pascal program to c using the program "p2c"

    The fact that you were trying to convert a Pascal program to
    C suggests that your level of experience is far past that of
    most new users. This is why the first thing that students at
    Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute learn
    is "You Are Not The User." We need to study how actual users
    behave, not base our UI judgments on what we ourselves find
    intuitive.

    Working as a Windows, OS X and Linux end-user support guy
    has really enlightened me.

    > I agree with you! I just wanted to pointed that in comparison to win the
    > filesystems is organized! and so a comparison of /usr/bin to c:\Program
    > Files seems to be not 100% relevant!

    Windows is mostly organized as well. Nearly all executables
    will appear under C:\Program Files, just as nearly all
    Linux executables appear under /usr/bin. Also, nearly all
    users' documents appear under C:\Documents and Settings.
    C:\Documents and Settings\All Users is not quite like /etc;
    you'll get a lot of /etc-type stuff under C:\winnt.

    Has anyone written a "directory conversion guide" for new
    users?

    > Please don't feel blame by my comments, this is not my goal! I just want
    > to give some tips to a new user and not to tell him that what you say is
    > wrong.

    No blame here. Just some ideas. 

    -- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve@laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key



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