Re: [Tb] Fundamental usability issues & bugs

> >The Export as Text dialog allows you to change templates, but the
> >change doesn't have any effect (yes I pressed the Update button).
>
>
> The template change affects the SELECTED notes.

I hadn't looked at text export in a long time and several versions ago, as I
never use it. But the original poster is right, at least as of v. 2.5 (I have
little interest in launching a more recent version and having my Preferences
corrupted again). Here are the bugs I saw: I select a single note with just a
short sentence in it, and invoke "Export as text...". After a very long delay
(about a minute!) I get the text export window containing lines informing me
that it couldn't find the text export template. But it's trying to export the
whole file - the error message is repeated for each of my hundreds of notes.
OK, I see the button for exporting the selected note only, and select that; the
effect is that all the error messages vanish except for one. But the selected
note has no text export template set - the attribute is empty for that note, so
why is there an error message? Anyway, I use the dialog to choose a template,
and hit the update button, but as the poster says, nothing happens.

So the poster is right, there are some bugs here and some weird UI issues. And
he's pointed out some organizational problems with the interface: how the
"Export as HTML" is not parallel to the "Export as text", but to get a dialog
similar to the latter you need to invoke the "HTML view".

And this:

> Of course, if the template button in Text Export changed the default
> template, then it would be hard to change the template for a specific
> note

seems to have nothing to do with the specific issues described. If it isn't
clear what problems he's describing, why don't you try following him along in
the program, putting yourself in the user's shoes, and see what he sees on the
screen? That's what I did, instead of assuming that he was confused, and the
problems were obvious.

> Choosing one item from a list of a hundred or so is a UI problem, not
> only for Tinderbox but (to the best of my knowledge) for everyone.

The poster didn't say what he thought was wrong with the Attributes window (if
that was where he thought the problem was). Is that what we're talking about? I
don't see anything wrong with Tinderbox's solution, in the context of
conventional GUI interfaces. But sometimes I think that the authors of GUI
programs should take another look at how some of these problems are solved in
unix programs that use only the commandline or a curses interface.

For example, in the unix shell (any of them) you constantly have the problem of
"Choosing one item from a list of a hundred or so" and you can usually do so in
a few keystrokes. The items in this case are filenames or the names of
available commands. In the mutt email program I can choose from among a list of
a hundred contacts to which to send a letter in about three keystrokes.
Incorporating this kind of (extremely efficient) keyboard-oriented interface
into a GUI program would be a departure from convention, I guess, but has it
been looked into?

(I can think of a few tentative examples of leveraging the keyboard in helping
to navigate the GUI: the "keyboard shortcuts", of course, taken to the next step
by Photoshop; on the Mac, the ability to walk through open and save dialogs by
typing the initial characters of filenames and using navigational keys.)
Received on Mon Dec 19 15:12:13 2005