[Adium-devl] Focus for 1.3?

[disposable at infinitenexus.com]

My clarification is more along the lines of...

Bob wants to customize his contact list just a little (like the sign  
on color because he can't see it.) He opens the prefs, has fonts, a  
couple checkboxes, and a list of themes. He clicks "Customize..." or  
some such and is told he needs a full app to make a theme. Bob is now  
scared because "I'm not a themer, I just wanted to change a color."  
so he backs away and goes back to a stock Adium, sad that he  
"couldn't figure it out."

How do we determine this? That's a tougher question, but I think user  
evaluations are something that would work. This doesn't need to be a  
quickly done decide-implement-release, it needs to bake for a while  
IMO. User evaluations, spread across the demographics we have access  
to, would be a step in the right direction. What do I mean? A simple  
survey, results to a db, with some multiple choice answers, some  
checkboxes, and some open essay questions to determine what a:
	- first time user (see Evan's thread a bit back)
	- week long user
	- month long user
	- six month long user
	- one year long user
	- lifers (see forums)

commonly use and perceive versus what we have heretofore assumed. We  
aren't really in any position to judge what's best, we are tainted  
(it's the curse of a developer) and as such metrics from those aren't  
should guide (and to steal a page, an example would be Apple using  
backup statistics for Time Machine - whether or not it was the reason  
the project started, it provides a solid baseline from which to work.)

- brian 'bgannin' ganninger


On Mar 6, 2007, at 4:56 PM, Chris Forsythe wrote:

>
> On Mar 6, 2007, at 4:52 PM, disposable at infinitenexus.com wrote:
>
>> Does this mean we ship 2 separate apps
>
> Or a plugin.
>
>> and that to configure one you need the other?
>
> Aye. In order to modify a theme you'd need the author app for  
> instance.
>
>> It seems a bit like an odd paradox, but I understand the driving  
>> (laudable) goal behind it. There must be seamless integration  
>> between them if so.
>
> Ya, that's the thing, I've been thinking about it for a while so I  
> probably am just skimming the bad parts.
>
>>
>> Might it not work better to identify what subset of features of  
>> each extra the majority uses and keep this within the application  
>> proper, pushing only the 'knobs and sliders' of the full system  
>> out into an optional app?
>
> How would we ever identify that?
>
> I'm not saying rip font prefs into a new app though, just to be  
> clear. :)
>
> Chris
>
>
>>
>> - brian 'bgannin' ganninger
>>
>>
>> On Mar 6, 2007, at 4:43 PM, Chris Forsythe wrote:
>>
>>> So for 1.1 the focus is on getting the SoC projects that were
>>> completed released. 1.2 is about Parental Controls. I was thinking
>>> that 1.3 could be about making Adium simpler.
>>>
>>> Specifically I've thought that for a while that if we put the xtra
>>> creation items into a separate application that we would be able to
>>> focus on the end user more easily within Adium itself, and on the
>>> Xtra author more easily in this separate application. On the whole
>>> I've not come up with any downside to this plan, except for the
>>> amount of work it would take to do something like this.
>>>
>>> Chris
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Adium-devl mailing list
>>> Adium-devl at adiumx.com
>>> http://adiumx.com/mailman/listinfo/adium-devl_adiumx.com
>>>
>>
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