[scribus-dev] Table/Cell PP sections sketches

a.l.e ale.comp_06 at xox.ch
Mon Jun 20 15:49:50 UTC 2011


hi alexandre,

> You see, we allways end up with "I think is even more intuitive
> than...". This is plain wrong, and it's more or less why I wrote
> before that the whole properties system needs a usability study before
> any UI design starts. I'm not sure whether it's too late to
> participate in OpenUsability this year, but it's something worth
> condiering for the next year, in my opinion.
>

you should know very well that the PP rework has been done under the 
supervision of a professional UI expert.
we're already going in the direction your suggesting!

this does not mean that everything is perfect now or will be perfect at 
some time in the future.
but scribus went a bit further than a simple "i think".


on the other hand: we are a free software project and i'm not sure that 
we should have the goal to filter everything through the eyes of an UI 
expert...
we want the programmers to have fun (at least from time to time) and we 
want our users to contribute their ideas to the project!
it's already very hard to get those contributions: i'm not sure that we 
need a new bottleneck.



also, in the specific case of the table editing, the project is being 
done through a GSOC and i'm not sure that it would have been a good idea 
to make it depend on the results of another project (the UI one).
but elvis is doing a terrific work and is producing "generic" code that 
should not be that hard to rework once we have a UI analysis on the 
table editor!



finally, concerning a participation in open usability (which is a 
project i didn't know about... and to which you could have pointed us a 
few days before the deadline, not after the deadline!):
the problem is that there is not much interest in asking for feedback, 
if there is no chance that somebody picks up the recommendations and 
acts on it. (we already have some recommendations which have been 
sitting around for years...)
we should carefully choose which "part of scribus" we would submit, and 
make sure that there are real chances that a programmer can act upon!



ciao
a.l.e



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