Call for Papers/Talks/Ideas! "Update.2 Mini-Conference"

John R.Hogerhuis jhoger at pobox.com
Fri Mar 21 19:30:36 EDT 2008


I'd agree with Mitch. Performance, or for us, UI responsiveness, the most
visible and painful issue being start up time of applications is paramount. My
4-year old, with no cushy performant computer experience, loses interest in the
10 seconds+ it takes to load activities. Even the calculator takes seconds to
load. Actions taken in the photo/video recorder do not sync up with sounds and
are not proximate enough in time to the UI action.

The second thing is basic UI usability. The pop-around menu border makes the UI
thoroughly unusable with the trackpad since focus is lost when you get too close
to the edge. My daughter's frustration level shoots through the roof whenever
this happens. Maybe that is fixed in a recent release, but the fact that the
border pops up when you get anywhere near the edge frustrates my daughter to the
point that she finds the trackpad is "too hard to use [control]." Pretty much
the laptop is on the shelf right now for that reason.

Also on UI usability, there are far too many words for a non-reader to use
almost all programs. At one point usability for non-readers was a goal, not sure
what happened.

If those two (albeit broad) areas were dealt with the laptop would come back off
the shelf.

-- John.




More information about the Devel mailing list