A really good article on software usability
Anne Wilson
cannewilson at tiscali.co.uk
Fri Jan 5 16:19:02 UTC 2007
On Friday 05 January 2007 15:41, Tim wrote:
> Tim:
> >> I was helping someone come to terms with computing a while back, and
> >> every time they closed a document, they'd be asked about saving it, and
> >> they'd always say yes, no matter what.
>
> Anne Wilson:
> > But at least it's the safe option.
>
> But it wasn't. They were losing data and keeping broken copies. They
> were saving unintentional changes to documents, irretrievably losing the
> originals. Likewise, they were saving what were meant to be temporary
> changes to documents (bit they didn't want printed, but still wanted in
> the file).
>
Sorry, but there's no way on earth you can protect data from people who refuse
to use the brain.
> > So you don't consider print settings for the document to be a real
> > change? I do. It's odds on that if I want to print it again I will want
> > to use the identical settings.
>
> I don't. If I'd changed printer settings, perhaps. But just printing
> the document, no. The "document" hasn't changed. Data about it may
> have, if you keep track of how many times it's printed. But in the
> usual sense of whether some document has changed, refers to the actual
> content.
That I had to test, as I had never seen it happen. I opened a document in
OOWriter, one that I knew had been previously printed. I accepted the
printer settings and printed it. I then closed it. No dialogue - it just
closed.
Anne
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/users/attachments/20070105/43381417/attachment-0002.bin
More information about the users
mailing list