[Gllug] Fight! Fight! Fight!

[Alex Hudson]

On Thursday 11 October 2001 16:45, you wrote:
> >True, is Staroffice 6 less prone to crashing though?
>
> Yes, much. Remember it's not officially out yet, but the beta seems
> pretty solid at the moment.

I've had a lot of problems with it. Drawings crash it very easily, as does 
editing a document in Word format - the multiple saves seem to send it off 
track. No problems saving/editing them in native format though, so I've been 
doing that and only converting when needed. It is a beta; I can live with it.

> - The install opens up a full screen window. This is not Windows.
>   Full screen windows don't belong on a multitasking OS. 

I think that's a matter of taste rather than design, surely??

> - It doesn't like you running it unless you do so as the user that
>   installed it in the first place.

Yep, this sucks :)

> - When opening a document for which you don't have write permission,
>   it opens in read-only mode. You can't modify it. You can save it
>   as a different file name, and then it'll switch modes so you can
>   modify it. But that's non-intuitive,

I disagree utterly. The current method is non-intuitive. The SO method _is_ 
intuitive. Just because you've ben conditioned to think X doesn't mean X is 
the correct way.

Think about this: user editing a read-only document on a machine where they 
have used all their quota. The computer knows that this user is never going 
to be able to save their work; yet lets them edit merrily away anyway. That's 
wrong.

Making a document unchangeable is exactly what read-only mode is for - it 
makes it obvious what the permissions on the file are immediately, in a way 
people can understand (although, it could be clearer). See the Sun usability 
study on Nautilus for a similar solution to read-only files in Bonobo 
components.

Cheers,

		Alex.

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