On Thu, 2008-08-07 at 21:20 +0200, Casual J. Programmer wrote:
The funny thing about greeters is that people do consider it important/interesting but they'll get back to it later. I do that here on openSUSE, and on my XP Tablet laptops that I've had for several years, I know there's lots of cool info about how to use Tablet features, but I keep telling myself, I'll read it later. As a consequence, I never disable it, it keeps popping up at startup, but never read for several years now.
People have an inherent tendency to try first, read later. As such, I would probably put it in Main Menu rather than as a pop up.
The funny thing about people is, they keep telling themselves as well as others that their shortcomings apply to everybody else in the universe.
If greeter has useful information, it should be moved to a help file and greeting should be dropped. If it has no useful information it should just be dropped. If Bryen didn't read his greeter for several years in succession, it's because he simply doesn't need it, no matter what he is telling himself about missed occasions.
Casual
In general, I agree with your philosophy. However, to point out several things... To use the "greeter" on my Tablet as an example again, in fact, I very rarely utilize the true power of TabletPc's. I always tell myself, yeah I'll learn, but in reality, haven't yet. Does it mean I don't need it? Sure, I'm doing just fine without it. Does it mean I'm fully maximizing my TabletPC? Yes to that too. So, whether a person reads the info in greeter or not, doesn't necessarily mean whether they need/should know that info or not. The other thing, you mentioned that content in there should go into Help files. I see the Greeter as more of a "Did you know...?" function than a help function. People don't go to Help to learn new things about openSUSE. They go there to learn how to fix a problem they currently have. So, the real question is, where should the information go where it can be relevantly accessed? We seem to all agree that the greeter has a psychological effect of being ignored, yet the information within greeter appears to be useful to many people. Or, should we find a radically and philosphically different approach to introducing our users to features and such? I kind of think a "Did you know...?" icon in Main Menu might be more psychologically eye catching. Or maybe, we should do a "Tip of the Day" concept of some sort (which I also tend to ignore and turn off.) I don't know. :-) Bryen
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