Graeme Lunt schrieb:
No, that's what the about dialog is for. I want to avoid too much
information on that page, because it will get more and more confusing
and less informative.
I think it is useful to have this information on the front page as
most users will never actually go and look at the about dialog. If
they can see that their copy of Wireshark is 12 months out of date
when they start it, they might look for a later version.
So how do they know that the version is 12 months old? How do they know
that a new version is available every 3-6 months or so? Do they actually
care about these details?
IMHO, this version discussion is a very developer centric point of view.
For a developer it's important to know it, if some user comes up with a
problem.
BUT - to my experience - for a common user this usually is of NO interest.
Hopefully we'll get an automatic update mechanism for the Windows
version in the not too distant future, so the version info won't be that
interesting as it currently may seem.
Unfortunately, for my user community (and I suspect others), they will
not be able to use this functionality as they will generally be on an
isolated network.
While my user community will be able to use this update mechanism, I
also have to face this problem until the update stuff is available,
here's how I currently deal with it:
a) set up an "in house" webpage, centric to the protocols and stuff used
"in house" (with a specialised changelog, install instructions of WS and
additional "in house" stuff like special settings, filter strings that
proved useful, ...)
b) set up an "in house" mailing list (low volume) where users can
register - I manually maintain this list
So everytime I get contacted by someone using Wireshark in house, I
point him to our webpage and mention the mailing list - in the long run
this saved me a *lot* of time as the number of user questions went down
dramatically! For every new WS version, I'll send out a mail with
details of the changes, where to find install files, some general news, ...
Even with all this stuff, getting a mail for a new version and alike,
users don't tend to upgrade their WS if a new version comes out.
To my opinion, most users will simply ignore the version number - and
therefore it's not a good idea to clutter the welcome page with it ...
Regards, ULFL
P.S: See
http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/principles-simplicity.html.en
