On Wed, 2005-03-09 at 16:15 -0500, mental@...3... wrote:
We need to rethink this approach to warning about unloaded extensions. It seems to be causing a LOT of confusion amongst our user community, of which the below is representative.
At the very least the dialog needs some text explaining the implications for the users so they don't jump to the conclusion that Inkscape is broken.
Yes, I think the text needs to change -- but I think the dialog needs to stay.
I think that everyone likes the error log, which I think actually documents many of the problems. I think most of the complaints have been that the format is too technical -- which I can agree with. But I think that there are two types of users reading the log, users and those writing extensions. We need to have enough information for the later class of users.
The problem is, that if we have the error log, how do people know to look there? Should this be some hidden feature that only those who look through hidden directories and read the mailing list know about? I don't think that is a user friendly approach. I think it is much better to inform them that there is an log with errors in it, should they be interested in investigating further. (with the dialog text being rewritten appropriately)
While I like the idea of only giving errors when the user tries to use the feature, I don't think that it is practical. I don't want a list of filetypes that I can select, with only 2 of them usable. I don't want to be able to accidentally select one (even though I know it isn't usable) because I'm working quickly. So, then we could have them unselectable (dimmed) -- but then how would you know whether that is a problem in the document (ie, it doesn't work with paths) or there is something else that I need to install. Well, we could put a custom icon along side each entry to show what mode it is in, then we could provide a secret decoder ring to each user...
While that might be going a little far, I think that the point is we want to remove clutter from the list of choices that is given to a user as much as possible.
--Ted