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[Xaignar]

Originally posted by lfroen

it makes sense to make the new program appear familar to them

That's exactly my point. "Familiar" is key here. Means "like other programs they already know"

And what is the behavior of the program that is to aMule what Outlook is to Evolution (hint, that would be eMule). The answer is that it doesn't clear the last-event field unless the user manually forces it to do so.

[lionel77]

Originally posted by lfroen
lionel77: including option is escape from responsibility. You must be thinking "more options => better", but this is wrong all over. You must have clear model of user expectation from GUI before you designing it.

I was suggesting to include an option because personally I would hate for status messages to vanish after some delay and I was expecting some other users to feel the same way. I would be more than happy to have no option and keep the status msgs around the way it currently works.

You gotta be kiddin' when you bring up Microsoft as an examble for good GUI designs. They have some techies putting together the interface who don't know shit about human factors ("click start to shutdown", anyone?) and then they have some graphic artists who slap some mediocre icons on top of that. If you want to see some examples for good interface design, have a look at Apple's products. In contrast to MS, these guys actually spend a lot of money and resources on trying to find the most ergonomic designs.
But in terms of Outlook's popularity I have to agree with you: it's like with Internet Explorer -- these products dominate their competition because of superior design and technology and not because of users' laziness or lack of awareness of better alternatives...

Originally posted by lfroen
That's exactly my point. "Familiar" is key here. Means "like other programs they already know"

The problem is that you can't compare amule to MS Word or any other "regular" GUI-app. The main difference is that amule primarily runs in the background and even then stuff is actually happening that produces status msgs. In contrast, a "regular" GUI-app just idles when the user switches to another app, so status msgs only appear when the user is working with the app and therefore able to see the message immediately. So with "regular" GUI apps there is no problem (actually it's very preferable) if status msgs vanish after a short delay, but with a program like amule that a user only checks every 30min or so it imho doesn't make sense to have the msgs go away after a short period of time. Then you could just abolish the status msgs altogether and categorically force the user to log at the log. It's sort of like an email client that only displays new messages for a short period of time.

[Rafal_Glazar]

Personaly I like the idea of having an option to set delay after which status text will be cleared automaticaly, cause I dont like when program thinks for myself (that is why I use Linux) but I would add the ability to disable it. Second it will be great if status text would be truncated into one line. And I would like to have some way to clear it on demand.

[lfroen]

have a look at Apple's products. In contrast to MS, these guys actually spend a lot of money and resources on trying to find the most ergonomic designs.

lionel77: I don't have mac @ home,  so I can't tell nothing but speculations about it. But example is ok: are you telling that you have seen option like this in some mac program ? If you did, I will take all my arguments back.