"The browser should use several easy to collect kinds of data to improve the user's ability to get value out of bookmarks."

On how the command line is to a Unix weenie like the keyboard to a pianist "I call this class of interface 'mastery interfaces', and they are curious because they are amazingly unusable to beginners and effortlessly usable to 'experts'. This characteristic creates something of an odd social dynamic amongst the userbase. The experts can barely (if at all) re-acquaint themselves with the frustrations that newbies face, and thus have very few (and skewed) insights on how to make the system more broadly usable."

A companion to The Art of Unix Programming, by ESR et al.

Peter Seebach on how users resist change

The guy is not clueless. He (justly) cares about those who are I'm glad Ubuntu has somebody who is thinking about what the system is like for a real, live, first-time Linux convert wannabe. Sure, a few of the points are probably there just so he could make the list longer ... The only two items I take exception with are #20 ("technical gibberish" displayed during startup and shutdown -- it doesn't hurt, IMHO) and #30 (display of time "for no apparent reason" in XScreensaver ... yes, maybe it should actually display the temperature too!) Among the things I particularly agree about are -- #32 -- no way to put the laptop to sleep. This is one of the major problems with using Linux on laptops right now -- each model has its own oddities and you can't know for sure until you've tried whether any particular set of kernel and userland utilities will work. (I'm mentioning this one out of sequence because I think it's the #1 killer issue on the list.) #3 -- buttons with both text and an icon are Just Wrong. I simply have to quote this: "As well as making the interface more cluttered, this slows people down by misleading them into thinking that they can decipher a transient control's icon faster than they can read its text, which is rarely if ever true." #14 -- you never know which of "Cancel", "Close", "Apply", "Revert", and/or "OK" will get you back to where you were before you opened up a dialog box which had one or more of these buttons. Many times even ostensibly modal dialog boxes have a stealth close button because the window manager supplies one. (All of this may be specific to Gnome; I could imagine that it's less haphazard in KDE or XFce.) #15 -- being able to leave open a "save as ..." dialog for a document even when it no longer exists is just stupid. #21 -- utilities don't know when the network cable is disconnected, and act stupid in various ways when they can't access the network (this example is the NTP client but this is a recurring theme). #31 -- fuel gauge in XScreensaver doesn't care whether you're typing or not (I'm about to file a bug on this one!) (Update: http://bugs.debian.org/305528 -- finally got around to actually doing it ...) #38 -- stupid static default location of newly created folders #66 -- incredulous online help (so what else is new ...) About the "mile wide high" item (#2) -- who ever wants to use the "show desktop" icon? I have never found much use for it. I don't particularly want my things on my desktop in any event. I wish the "mile high" feature were reserved for something useful instead. Just in case the comment I link to would disappear, the actual blog entry is at http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2005/04/11/ubuntu

I hadn't noticed that ESR is writing a companion to TAOUP This looks like even more essential than TAOUP, which I've so far only read snippets of on the web while it was still in writing. I need to get involved.