[plug] Oxymoron: Microsoft, innovation

[Mark J Gaynor]

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On 19/06/2006 at 12:31 PM Cameron Patrick wrote:

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>The user interface idealism as espoused by GNOME is "things should just
>work without having to fiddle with settings"; unfortunately [a] they do
>not always practise what they preach, and [b] they underestimated how
>many user interface niggles people would find to argue about, and just
>how much the people cared about being able to tweak this.  Example: One
>thing that persistently annoys me about Metacity is that I can't close a
>window by double-clicking the left hand side of a window.  (Yeah, I used
>Windows 3.1 a lot :-P)  The next release of GNOME will have this as a
>hidden setting you can enable; the default will be off because
>apparently more people have complained about having accidentally closed
>windows this way than have requested this feature.

Is this the actual reason or is it what they  want you to think, because it
is outside the core development model.

It would be an interesting exercise to see just what functions of any
program that users actually did use and which ones the never used in 
a given time scale. I bet that study has not been done. It could change
the way developers approach their development. A good place to come
from is what people want, not what you think they want and that is more
often the problem. 



Mark
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