Quasi-Evil

Posts Tagged ‘Mum’

It could have been worse

My mother and I are both sat in her lounge on our laptops. Her’s is a beast of a thing at 17″ and dwarfs my 13″ MacBook. So far she’s looked at 90 million clothes shopping sites and is now looking at holidays. She’s gone from not knowing how to turn it on, to fairly ably using Opera and Google.

One thing that has become clear though, is that the internet is not nearly as user-friendly as we like to think it is for a new user. My mum is not familiar with the concept of navigation links being in the sidebar (or across the top as with so many blogs) so if it doesn’t say ‘Navigation’ or something equally obvious or if they blend too much with the layout, she simply doesn’t realise they’re there. What’s more, when she fills in a form, if the button to submit it says something other than ’search’ or ’submit’ or just doesn’t look like a button, she has to ask me what she’s supposed to do next. As for scrolling, if she has to scroll in order to find the main content of the page, she gets really confused. But apart from that, it’s going pretty well. She’s even managed a conversation on MSN, scary.

There goes the weekend

My mother has obtained a laptop. It’s a Dell Precision M90 which basically means she’s got a flamethrower to do the job when a match would have done. I’ll be spending this weekend getting her set up and teaching her to use it; scary thought. It may take more than a weekend. A lot more. So now I’m making a list of the things I want to get installed so she learns to use them from the beginning rather than getting used to e.g. Internet Explorer. And so I’ve got all the links in one place, here they are:

• Opera - I’m not a big fan of Firefox, since v2 it’s been far too buggy for me to be willing to let my mum near it. I’ll trust Opera to stop her breaking everything and it’s got the built in e-mail client so she’s learning one programme rather than two.
• Pidgin - She doesn’t actually know what IM is yet but, as with Opera, it’ll be easier to teach her to use one programme than all the different IM programmes according to what her friends have. I’ve always used Adium since I’m on a Mac and this seems to be the best equivalent. Plus I like the logo.
• VLC - It’ll play pretty much anything going and I’ve been using it for a couple of years without a problem.
• OpenOffice - I’m surprised people still pirate buy MS Office. OO is free and I love it.
• ClamWin - She lives therefore she clicks links she really shouldn’t. A virus programme is a must on Windows, especially for my mum.