[Scribus] insert lorem ipsum: back to context menu?

[Craig Ringer]

On Wed, 2005-07-20 at 04:09 +0200, Christoph Sch?fer wrote:
> Hi Louis,
> 
> > I agree usability is of upmost importance.
> 
> Yes, and chances are good, scribus will beat its "competitors" hands 
> down in the long run.
> 
> > This discussion kind of 
> > demonstrates here just how important it is.
> 
> Agreed! While scribus' usability is excellent in general, I'd like to 
> encourage everyone on this list to discuss usability issues. Commercial 
> software manufacturers spend tons of money for usability testing (with 
> the exception, perhaps, of Quark and Microsoft). In FOSS, voluntary user 
> feedback is needed, not only for features, but also usability.

That reminds me ... we could really use a tracker category for
"usability" to distinguish it from "UI" (ie to make "UI" specific to
functional defects of the UI).

> That's one of the beautiful differences between QXP on one side and 
> ID/scribus on the other (I might add the contrast between MS Office and 
> OpenOffice.org as another example). Unfortunately, it is exactly the bad 
> usability that keeps the de facto monopolies alive, since companies 
> invested large sums to train their employees for working with 
> ugly/clumsy software (QXP, MS Office).

I have to object to several of those points.

First, I think Quark is actually pretty usable at least in some areas.
It does take a little while to get used to the strongly modal nature of
editing with it, but not that long. After that, much of the app is
pretty intuitive and you can actually *find* things.

Unfortunately, that does not extend to configuration (printer styles -
*shudder*) or most of the dialogs.

As for OO.o, I find it less usable than MS office in the vast majority
of areas (the exception being some bits of Writer, such as the style
system). And I mostly use OO.o not MS Office so it's not an issue of
familiarity.

> Moreover, many workflows are 
> built around second or third grade programmes. OTOH, these facts provide 
> the time for FOSS to mature and finally offer viable and reliable 
> alternatives, based on user feedback.

Yep, now that is an interesting area. Making a superior workflow
possible. The first example that springs to my mind is the fact that at
least for Q4 on Mac OS 9, when we were having corruption, performance,
and relibailibty issues with Quark working on files on our file server,
Quark recommended to me that we simply not use a network.

An app that is safe on network file systems is thus very, very
interesting.

--
Craig Ringer