Probably the most heated discussion in Inkscape 0.41 was the addition of a dialog stating that some extensions failed to load. When I first wrote the dialog it was fun, but it later got revised to be more mature. But, ever since then, it has been a constant discussion on the Inkscape mailing lists. Finally, someone put code behind their thoughts and Mental has removed the dialog.
Now, I don't know what the real solution is, but it seems the popular opinion was against the dialog. Many users got confused by it, and thought that Inkscape wouldn't work overall -- and some even reverted to earlier versions of Inkscape. These are not good things. But, the questions we got before that included "Why doesn't this feature work?" and "Would you implement this?". Having those questions constantly isn't good either.
I think that biggest thing I've learned from this is that users don't understand the difference between warnings and errors. We used the GTK+ warning properly, and the icon shows that, but people don't understand that. Any pop-up piece of data is an error.
What we'll do in the future versions of Inkscape is unknown, but I think that we need a solution that does the following:
- Inform the user that something happened that they can fix
- Tell them where to look for more information
posted Jun 8, 2005 | permanent link
