Apr
11
tales from the offtopic #22: user-friendly breakage
Tagged with community, design, desktop, flamewars, GNOME, ubuntu | Leave a Comment
We all know why GNOME is the most popular desktop in the enterprise. It does so much for users — they don’t have to do a thing while the GNOME daemons get things done. topyli and mc44 were trying to convince aubade of the benefits today.
I think it was a pretty noble effort anyway.
Apr
1
tales from to offtopic #21: design for topylies!
Tagged with cartoon, design, desktop, GNOME, openoffice.org, topyli-friendly, ubuntu, users | Leave a Comment
OpenOffice.org has released version 2.4 with many improvements. Congratulations to both developers and users of OO.o! I personally am in no capacity to evaluate it. I’m pretty sure it has about as many buttons and check boxes and sliders as the previous one. I still like Abiword.
The new OpenOffice.org website looks awesome though, double cheers for the clean and usable design!
Inspired by this, and also probably about my previous post, my friends nickspoon and mc44 on #ubuntu-offtopic defined a topyli-friendly design for OpenOffice.org 3.0. There’s still time to make a difference before they feature freeze!
But as mc44 says, don’t get your hopes too high :(
Dec
7
tales from the offtopic #18: sane errors and pie
Tagged with community, design, HCI, troubleshooting, ubuntu, unix | 2 Comments
Ideally, a Unix program is silent. Only when a program fails for some reason, it must fail spectacularly, providing the user with detailed, helpful error messages. PFA, topyli, riotkittie, and gord all agree.






