There is a GNOME usability philosophy that I disagree with. When I want to change a setting there is no easy or consistent way to undo my change.
So for example, if I want to experiment with fonts in the Appearance Preferences dialog I like how I can see the changes right away but if I mess something up or want to compare a new setting to the old setting there's no way. Once I make a change, that change is saved and unless I'm careful to remember what the previous setting was I'm stuck. This is a philosophy carried throughout GNOME so there are a ton of good examples: * Keyboard shortcuts - default for "launch web browser" is 0xb2 - if you accidentally change this there's no easy way to get back to the original * Keyboard preferences - you cannot undo changing the sliders. * Mouse preferences - if you change anything here your mouse will *never* work the same again (I know, I've learned the hard way never to touch this) I remember reading somewhere how the developers of the date/time applet (I think in Windows) never expected people to use it as a general calendar for reference. Imagine if when you scrolled through the calendar in GNOME to see what day of the week March 8th was that it actually changed your clock's date? I like that there's no pop-up confirmation - that would be annoying, but it feels like changes should be atomic and that the user can choose to revert at any time. I would report this as a bug but the fact that it's so consistent throughout the interface indicates to me that this was a conscious design decision. I like the fact that the design principle is carried out so consistently though. :-) -- Matthew Nuzum newz2000 on freenode _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list Usability@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
