GNOME3 and au revoir WAS: systemd: please stop trying to take over the world :)

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Fri Jun 17 13:55:57 UTC 2011


On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 5:21 AM, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
> ... you mean by "holy ghost intuition", feel tempted to press a key to
> access a hidden feature, where once was a simple feature?

The question really isn't whether or not to make use of the newer
keys. The real question is how to make it learnable without being able
to paint the label on the physical key.  If the Esc key on the
keyboards were not painted with a printed hint...would people be able
to find it on all keyboards?  I've seen Esc in various relative
locations on the keyboard interface over the years depending on the
keyboard. Or the numlock or the delete?  The painted hinting on the
keyboard itself matter a lot and we don't have a good alternative to
good key labels.

What I am really saying is that the deeper problem with learnability
of new keyboard driven features  is that the hardware and the software
development for pretty much the entire open ecosystem we work with in
Fedora is disconnected.

If GNOME( or KDE or other project..its not GNOME specific issue) was
like Apple and controlled the design of the hardware as well as the
user interface for the OS and were allowed to paint the physical keys
with the printed hinting appropriate for the OS... a lot of the
learnability frustration for new keyboard driven features would be
mitigated.

Just, look at all the extra keys on modern OEM laptops from the Dell's
and the Lenovo's and others...extra keys which map to OS specific or
BIOS specific functionality that they as OEMs design the hardware for
to interact with the OS they _ship_. None of this stuff is
standardized...and yet the OEMs feel perfectly fine doing it and
selling differentiated keypress devices in the market.  Of all the
systems you can go out and buy at a major consumer retailer in the
US(and I say the US because that's were I am and thus I can't speak to
other places with authority) or from major online OEMs how many
laptops have a standard layout with no extra functionality keys? 1%?
less? The _standard_ keyboard from 10 years ago is not the full story
for retail hardware that is being produced and bought now.  For us to
pretend that it is...is just putting our heads in the sand...and
giving up.

So how do we make the use of these keyboard driven functionality more
discoverable? I don't know. I'm not a UI designer. But I would like to
see a UI designer discuss keyboard functionality discoverability.
Moreover, I would like to see 2 or more UI designers have a public
archived meaty discussion on the topic that I can read and learn from.


-jef"My current fav gnome-shell keyboard incantation is the screencast
recorder....there is no way on earth I'm going to remember that 4
simultaneous keypress combo. And just as unlikely for me to There is a
reason I was never good at Mortal Kombat...the key combos were just
not my strength"spaleta


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