Re: [Gramps-devel] Bloat

[S. C. <ste...@gm...>]

> I would love to be able to hide whole tabs and dialogs from my system.
> Whenever I use GRAMPS it always feels like I've selected the 'Advanced
> User' option in an interface switcher.

Someone brought this up recently (I forget where -- maybe on IRC?) and
I thought it was a pretty good idea.  The comment was something along
the lines of:  GRAMPS is intimidating for new users.  Too many tabs,
too many options.

Which had me thinking:  what if we default to a "basic" mode on
installation, and didn't show some of the tabs/options in the dialogs.

Then a custom or advanced mode, where either everything is shown, or
users could pick and choose what gets shown.  Group things together.
So we don't allow them to toggle every single field/control, but have
a handful of categories.

An interesting thing might be to setup a quick poll -- or set of
polls? -- on the wiki dev page to see what groups of features users
currently avoid.  If we could say "novice users are not likely to use
....." then that might give us insight into what could be hidden as a
category.

(Somewhat related idea:  prompting.  E.g., first 3 times a user adds
siblings to a family in a new database, we could pop up a tip to show
them how to sort siblings into the right order.)

Stéphane