Talk:Bibletime2 Planning
Contents |
Discussion about the Goals
"an excellent"
Every piece of software usually wants to be excellent, so that does not mean much. Is it better than others? Better than other freeware or free software?
- we wanted to avoid comparisons with others --mgruner
"cross-platform"
That is the most important change from 1.x series. The user base will explode when we move to Windows. But does cross-platform mean same as lowest common denominator? Or will there be some kind of platform integration? How about Mac users who have been accustomed to some specific kind of interface and functionality?
- for now it only means "runs on all platforms" --mgruner
"easy to install"
That means native installation systems, right? Like normal Linux packaging, Nullsoft installer package for Windows, native package for Mac. How about net updates?
- possible --mgruner
"easy to use"
BibleTime has been quite good in usability IMHO, but you can always make good one better. This needs research and study:
- reading usability guidelines, books, www-pages
- reading software reviews
- reading software documentation
- testing and analyzing software
This takes time, I know. Reading a book takes days. Analyzing one piece of software may take days. But it pays you back.
Many times usability lies in details. It's easy to take a library component and use it and think: "OK, it works, good, now I can rest". But for end user it's very frustrating to have e.g. a dialog or a widget which is too small to show all information. If Qt widgets were as good as they can be, there would be no need for KDE UI libraries. When using a library component may take one day, writing an enhanced component may take a week. But sometimes it's much easier, like adjusting the size of a component manually to be large enough for the data.
- ok, but that does not relate to our goal --mgruner
"powerful"
What does powerful mean? Almost every application claims to be powerful. Does it mean that you can do many things? Or that you can do things quickly and with little effort? The latter means nothing but good usability.
"uncommon features"
What is this? Features which we have not yet seen in any Bible software? Or those features which are great in some applications making others jealous?
- the former --mgruner
This calls for evaluation of existing software.
"to the non-technical end user"
This is good. Here we again go back to usability. But is 'non-technical' someone who is not an engineer, or someone who has never used Bible software? Whatever it is, if the software is easy to use for computer and Bible software beginner, it's easy to use for anyone.
Here we remember the usability battle between KDE and Gnome. Is it possible to give users uncommon features without sacrificing simplicity? And can software be configurable without being complicated? Does simplicity make it despised in eyes of "power users"?
- we need to make good decisions where we implement reasonable default behaviour and where we offer configurability --mgruner
"specialized functions"
See the previous item. How can software be specialized and simple for the majority of the users at the same time?
- possible. a carefully crafted UI. --mgruner
A good plugin system could save us here as I have discussed elsewhere.
"people in poorer countries"
Why "poorer countries"? There are slow computers everywhere, though maybe more in poor countries. There is software for slower computers which do not use extra database and Bible modules which does not have extra markup. They are simple to use, but cannot compete with features. I don't think it's reasonable to go to that market.
- we do. America has enough bible software already. After all, we're not a commercial program! It's the non-english, non-western users that we want to target primarily. That's why we're also not striving to get permissions for NIV et al in the first place. If it can be done, fine, but that's not our primary goal. --mgruner
Poorness is not related to language support. E.g in Africa people are generally poor in our eyes (I know that, not just think), but most of them know English because it's an official language in many countries.
Of course i18n is very important. Finland is a well-to-do country, soon there's a computer in every home, but older people don't know English. For them i18n and non-technicality is extremely important. (But even they use Windows XP or soon Vista and corresponding machines, not 95. And everyone complains that the machine is too slow.)
Usability
As we can see, most of the details can be distilled into one word: usability. This should encourage us to take time for usability studies and for analyzing other software.
- right --mgruner
reply from mgruner
Eeli, our goals are like a 'mission statement', very condensed, and do not spell out the details of everything and what's needed to achieve this. They express our desire for BibleTime as a project. --mgruner
Yes, I understand that. Much of my discussion was just thoughts thrown in. But usually short statements are so short and general that they actually say nothing. Your replies made many things clear, thanks. And I'm glad to see that carefully weighed usability is a goal.
