Am 19.06.2011 01:52, schrieb planas:
On Sat, 2011-06-18 at 10:39 +0200, lee wrote:
planas<jslozier@gmail.com> writes:
Lee,
On Fri, 2011-06-17 at 21:42 +0200, lee wrote:
planas<jslozier@gmail.com> writes:
I believe that the 80/20 is somewhat misleading. As noted earlier must
use approximately 20% but not the same 20%.
I would estimate that somewhere around 50% of all the features are used
reasonably often and the rest are rarely used.
There are substantial features 100% of the users use, aren´t there?
What´s the percentage of such substantial features compared to all
features?
If substantial features make for 20%, you would have 80% percent of all
features of which 50% are rarely used. If I´m not mistaken, that makes
already 60% of all features used reasonably often. When you need to make
a package that provides 60% of all available features, you might find
that there´s another 20% or 30% of all available features that need to
be packaged as well because of dependencies.
When you need to package 80--90% of all features anyway, how
important is it to put effort into packaging only 10--20% of all
features seperately?
The current problem is we do not have any good information of what
features are not very important and do not extend the functionality for
all but a few users. The question is what mix of included and extensible
features should be available beyond those that are important.
Which features are important?
Beyond the basic file manipulation, you have the basic data
entry/handling needed for each application. The features, many wlll
probably be included are useful for some but not all users.
One of the problems is you need either a lot different users surveyed
at the same time or smaller number surveyed over a longer period of
time. For example, most of the time I do not use a table of contents
in my documents but when I need the feature I must have it. How many
people need this feature irregularly versus those that often use it? I
do not know.
There you go: When you need a particular feature, you must have it. When
you need it, it is totally irrelevant how often you or other users use
it.
How often a feature is used and/or how many users use it doesn´t say
anything about how important the feature is. When someone needs it, it
has to be there.
I would disagree, it takes time to code and debug a feature that is very
rarely used by a small number users. These features may better added as
extension. The problem is where to draw the line and say this one is
included and this one will be a possible extension.
Partially I agree to your argument, but as you can see in this
mailing-list, a lot of problems appear because the programmers have not
in mind, that their new code is not compatible to some extensions.
If these extensions were included in LO they would find these bugs
before the relic of a new version, and not weeks ore months later like
it is today.
One of the marketing tricks is tout all the features you have in your
package without regard to how useful many are to all but a handful of
users. Look carefully at some the commercial software ads and notice how
often they tout features that look nice but you probably will never use.
What´s worse? Having features you don´t need often or not at all in the
software you use or having to look for other software you don´t use and
that has the particular feature (and maybe not others) you happen to
need (maybe only once ever) and use that instead?
I totally agree to that. There are a lot of functions I did not use at
the beginning when I started to work with spreadsheets, because I did
not know that thy were included.
The more I learned about all the functions, the more I'm going to use
them. But up to now I did only Install two Extension. 1'st the
dictionary, witch I think is a good choice to putt this in an extension.
And second the "X-Ray tool" (A really helpful debugging toll, to learn a
lot about Programming in LO), which I think should be included in the
main packages.
If a function I really need is not included in the main package, I'm not
going to start a long (and often unsuccessful) search for extensions.
I write( if possible) a macro or my own function instead. But not all
users are able to use macros, and it took me a while to learn to handle
them the way I'm doing this now.
This method has two ore three advantages: It is often faster then
looking for the right extension, and the document is compatible to other
LO installations, where no extensions are installed. This is important,
if you want to sheer the document.
Also the function is exactly what I need and not something close to what
I need.
This will always be a problem for any software package. It is impossible
to provide all the possible features that may get used very rarely.
Also, it is very difficult to determine in advance all the ways users
will find for the software. That is partly why macros are important,
they provide a possible method to provide really unusual features at the
cost of the user needing to know some programming.
Yes I think macros are really important. And there is still a big
potential (and in my opinion need) in improving the macro features.
for example an auto-completion like the one in MS-VBA would bee really
great and would make the macrowriting a lot faster , easier and easier
to learn.
In star-Basic I need almost twice as much code as in VBA to get the same
results. The macro-recorder is not really helpful because he didn't work
in most cases, and is always using the "uno instructions" instead of the
regular methods. (I know there is another Extensin to translate the uno
instructions into normal code, but it would bee much better if this
would bee kart of LO, because many users don't that this ad-on exists,
and therefore don't use it.)
regards Frieder
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