Quirks

[Martin Maney]

On Sun, Sep 26, 2004 at 05:37:15PM -0500, Martin Maney wrote:
> Do the settings for the terminal in "preferred applications" affect
> anything?  Not the "terminal" item.  And how come something as basic a
> a text terminal can't be assigned a shortcut?  Okay, Cally might not

Someone pointed out the "add to panel" in the context menu (aha! yet
another unintuitively hidden control panel!  <rhetorical>where *does*
Gnome get its reputation for usability from?</rhetorical>), which
wasn't what I was looking for, but it's my fault: I didn't specify that
I wanted to add it as a keyboard shortcut.  Still no visible way to do
that.  :-(

That did, however, lead me to another item on that hidden panel, and
apparently that's what controls the only visible "terminal" widget in
the system, rather than the more visible "preferred applications"
panel.  Is it just me or this completely fubar?  Hmmm, and after you've
changed it, despite the implied promise of that picklist control, it
has no memory of the default setting.  Looking more and more like fubar
is the right choice...

So the terminal in the system menu is completely separate from the
desktop context menu terminal.  Just like they warned us about in
programming 101: when you say the same thing in two different places,
by golly you probably have contradicted yourself.

Sorry, I guess this is just me bitching about Gnome's superficial
approach to usability.  You would think I would have learned by now
that testing with novices can only help with the parts novices know
about.  <sigh>

Thanks to whoever it was that nudged me on this - I'm afraid the
message got filed in a spam trap directory (memo to self: review
procmail rules, that shouldn't have gone there?) and I didn't save it,
expecting that it was just the direct-mailed cc on a reply to the list.

-- 
People make secure systems insecure because
insecure systems do what people want and
secure systems don't.  -- James Grimmelmann