Month: May 2006

I mentioned recently that I’m lacking time and motivation to do more work on docs.

There are several reasons for this.

Number one is the basic underlying problem with docs: it’s a largely thankless, unrewarding task. When you code, you get to enjoy the fruits of your labour as soon as you recompile your patched module. The improvements or bugfixes you made are there for you right away. When you translate, you have to wait until the next release, but you get to use a system in your own language. When you write docs… well, you know how the application works because you’ve spent days playing with it, so you probably won’t need to check the help for it.

So point one is that there’s little positive motivation.

However, there’s quite a heap of negative. I’m going to bunch it all together under the heading of ‘coder attitude’. I’m sure that many new and wonderful things are being worked on for 2.15, but I have no idea what they are. Nobody has yet troubled the docs list with an update. Perhaps they’re not ready yet, and if so, that’s OK. There is plenty of cleaning up work that I could be getting on with.

However, I feel no inclination to do any of this until this bug is fixed. To put it bluntly, I busted a gut writing the docs for the fileselector. It was hard work to get it clear and concise, and to cover everything it can do (and it can to a TON) in a logical manner that doesn’t overwhelm, and get it done in time for 2.14. I hope I’ve done a good enough job, and I’d be glad of feedback.

So far, the response from the GTK team has been some mumbo-jumbo about introducing dependencies. Read my lips: I don’t care. That problem should have been thought about and resolved back when the fileselector dialog was first implemented.

So basically, at the moment, I can’t be bothered. On top of the fileselector business, I’m bored of having to fight geeks over trivialities that should be obvious, whether it’s insane label text in the screensaver, or mounting shares that don’t exist, or any of the million crack-brained design flaws in gimp. This isn’t fun.

Some doctors are excellent at what they do. But their bedside manner is terrible. They know lots about medicine, but they don’t relate well to people at all, and come across as brusque, uncaring, and sometimes upset their patients.

Similarly, there are some coders who I’m sure are excellent at programming, but who don’t seem to give much thought to a user’s experience of the software they are creating.

Just something to think about.