On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, Jonathan Ernst wrote: [...]
"Rating with Windows" mean rating when using a real windows partition. This rating might have good reasons to be here in the past (when most apps needed many native dlls) but is now regarded as a bad feature by some of AppDB hackers. Maybe some other readers here can say what they think about the removal of this feature ?
I agree that now the 'Rating with Windows' option is not really useful any more. One of the reasons is that the result is going to be completely different if the Windows is Windows 98 than if it's Windows XP.
So the 'Rating without Windows' should become the only rating. But I like the 0 to 5 rating: 0 -- Unrated. 1 -- Does not work. Totally nonfunctional. Crashes on load. 2 -- Partial functionality. Good enough for a carefully scripted demo. 3 -- Limited functionality. Sufficient functionality for noncritical work. Occasional crashes okay, as are weird setup problems, required patches, or missing major functionality. Alpha quality. 4 -- Usable. Substantially correct. Good enough for general use, with possible caveats. 5 -- Perfect. No flaws under any mode.
The medal system seems redundant and much less precise.
Maybe representing this as stars is not the best way to convey the nuances above. Maybe it's the label that needs changing to better convey the 'How well does it work?' meaning. Maybe 'Works: 80%' would be clearer than 'Rating: 4'. Can we have a tooltip popup (e.g. using an alt property?) when the user moves the mouse over the rating? What about making the rating a link to the section that explains what it means? (the documentation was a bit hard to find, probably because I expected 'Documentation' to point to Wine's documentation)
Maybe text is the best, just use the labels above plus a color code.