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Debate Help | by LSU_Frodin | 2005-06-17 01:19:21 |
| Zillions of features in MS Word, for instance |
by A_flj_ |
2005-06-17 02:26:51 |
They don't harm, might some say. But they do! If you aren't used to Word, you cannot start using Word without having to take notice of the less often used commands, since the user interface does show them. So IMO the many commands Word shows do some harm - most users use only a few commands in most cases, so any additional commands are just getting in the way, and thus cause harm.
But many users (I suppose most of them) occasionally use one or the other of the more exotic, less common commands. So the presence of those commands is actually good - many users could not do their work completely using word, although a simpler, less bloated programm would probably do for most of the jobs.
IMO it isn't about whether the program itself is bloated or not. It's about its skin - the way the user interface is built. To take this issue into account, MS introduced clever menus which only show the most recent/most common commands - which isn't actually a solution to the problem. IMO a better solution is to allow saving the UI layout including what commands should be shown as different preferences sets, and being able to load whichever preferences set you may need to use at a certain time. Some programs do use this approach, although few (as far as I can recall older, non-KDE or -Gnome X apps in most cases).
(On Linux, there may be a way to achieve this effect with a little hack. Many programs use text files located in the user's home folder for storing their settings. If you write yourself a script or a little X app to manage configuration files, you can create them from within each app, and back up/restore them a you may need from the external app. On Windows, this would be more of a challenge - the program would need to back up and restore parts of the registry, and in the registry things aren't so clearly separated as in plain text files, and some programs use some binary or text files in the user's "home" directory, on one hand, and on the other hand it's not as easy to script the registry as it is to copy text files around. And anyway, in both cases you'd have to restart the app for which you want to change the preferences, and the app would need to support user interface customization.)
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I agree with parts of this | by MatthewDBA | 2005-06-17 03:49:19 |
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