AbiWord Weekly News #137

Just because someone is not accustomed to something doesn't mean it's a bad thing for them to have. I could rattle off any number of things that many people are "unaccustomed to" that would be good for them. Clean air. 3 meals/day. Sanitation. Running water. Regular exercise. Change and differentiation are not intrinsically bad things.

Now, it may or may not be a good idea of these views to be editable (or for such views to even exist). If you disagree about Nautilus embedding Bonobo components, file a bug in bugzilla or talk about it in the Nautilus mailing lists. If you feel that these views shouldn't be editable, then file a bug in bugzilla or talk about it in the Nautilus lists. Please try to understand that gnomedesktop is the *absolute wrong* forum for this. Especially under an "AbiWord" article, when the problem you have is really with Nautilus' policy.

You disagree with me. That is fine - it's nothing to get all fired up about. It would be great if you or I could do some usability testing with a room full of users. They could really give us developers some good, honest, reasonably-unbiased feedback. Unfortunately I only have weekends free and limited funds. I imagine you don't have the resources for this either.

The terminology allows for views to be both read-only and editable. The popular acronym "MVC" = "Model, View, Controller". The "View" is what you see, and is often editable. AbiWord, Gnumeric, MSWord, Dia, Gimp, etc... are all editable MVC applications. EOG is a non-editable MVC application. The terminology sucks, I'll grant you that, but I didn't invent it either. It's entirely reasonable for one to talk about "editable views." One edits/manipulates a view of a document. There is no such thing called an "Edit" that I'm aware of.

My expectations:

1) Word Processor documents and spreadsheets are by nature editable things. Documents are fluid.

2) When you type in a window, you expect text to go into that window.

In my mind, those are two valid expectations. It could well be that your argument is better, or at least more palatable to a larger majority of users. I'm the first to admit that I don't know the correct answer there. I happen to like my idea better - it makes perfect sense to me. And without any hard evidence to back up your suggestion, I'm not changing a thing, nor is it my place to. If you've read this far, you should know that this should be done at the Nautilus level, not the AbiWord one.

Dom