Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 23:15:54 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> To: Larry Lee <lclee@primenet.com> Cc: chat@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: Commerical applications Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.3.95.970121215612.1465N-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu> In-Reply-To: <199701220142.SAA27858@usr03.primenet.com>
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On Tue, 21 Jan 1997, Larry Lee wrote: > My general assumption is that the FreeBSD kernel is pretty good, and no > more work is required here for general acceptance. There are other areas, > predominately installation and applications and general cosmetics, which > which I believe should be addressed to reduce some of the entry barriers > that newcomers experience. These are reasonable assumptions. Unfortunately the economics of FreeBSD do not support the areas of needed improvement very well. When dealing with the kernel and other "hacking" types of work, the most qualified designers and most qualified implementers are the same people. With interface design, this is rarely the case. Furthermore, while kernel hacking can be easily done by an individual working alone with email communication, good interface design is considerably more difficult, particularly when the designer and the implementer are different people. Finally, on a volunteer project, people have little motivation to work on projects they can't "own" which makes designer/implementor relationships difficult to establish. > So what kind of people are we talking about? Computer science students, > professional programmers, and Unix knowledgable commercial sites > with embedded applications; Or do you want to address the larger > arena of desktop applications? The latter is a bit unrealistic, so yes, the former. > I disagree, although I have nothing but personal experience to support > my position. I've run FreedBSD on an 386/8M, where the company refused > to even install W95, I used 3.1 instead. Without specifying a task, this is a meaningless comparison. If you say "For a web server...", I'd be in 100% agreement, but if set up FreeBSD to provide the same GUI functionality, your *only* choice is CDE which really needs considerably more than Windows 95, or about the same as Windows NT. Whether think the GUI functionality is worthwhile is a separate issue, however it *is* one of the top reasons why people choose NT over Unix so don't brush it aside so lightly. > I've never run CDE nor do I feel > that icons help someone do useful work. Judging by the 'start' menu in W95 > and WNT, I would say that Microsoft agrees. That is a pretty incredible leap of logic! If icons don't help, then would you care to explain why the Windows Explorer is the hub of the Windows 95 interface??? The "Start" menu is just one tiny part of W95, and if you take a look, you will see that (surprise) there are icons right there in the menu! Actually, this isn't alarming because HCI research has consistently shown icon + text to be more effective than text only labels, which are in turn more effective than icon only labels. > I typically run Xfree86 and > tvtwm and the twm menus work fine for me. The first and most important rule of interface design is to remove your preferences and intuition from the picture. If you have ever actually done any usability testing on anything you designed for someone else using your own intuition and preferences, you will know exactly why. :) It might surprise you, but there are many people on the planet who think and work visually much more efficiently than they do verbally. For these people grabbing two files from the desktop and dropping them on the "diff" icon requires much less mental effort than constructing the verbal command to do the same thing. Apple knows this well. Recently, Microsoft figured it out. Thankfully someone who knew this was around when Vue (the parent of CDE) was created. > So we agree that UNIX shells are not difficult to use and therefore > do not present a barrier to entry? Nope, that is not what I meant at all. Unix shells are difficult for some people to use, as is the MS-DOS shell which Windows NT has inherited. What I meant is that the differences between the Unix and NT on this front is somewhat irrelevant since the two can be so easily put on a level playing field. Creating a level GUI playing field is, at the moment, a lot harder. > As I pointed out above frequently used program are started in > .xinitrc or twm menus. I don't believe typing some commands is > a barrier to new users, YMMV. Interesting example. Let me pursue this a bit. For someone not too familiar with unix looking for ways to start things up automatically on their PC that they just installed FreeBSD on, what things might they encounter while looking for the answer? Well, how about these: /etc/rc* /usr/local/etc/rc.d/* /etc/profile /etc/csh.* /etc/inetd.conf /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/* /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/xinitrc ~/.profile ~/.login ~/.cshrc ~/.bash_profile ~/.bashrc ~/.xsession ~/.xinitrc and probably a bunch more. Should they try a "man -k start", they will be led down even more wrong paths. Okay, so, which one? Now remember, you are not too familiar with Unix.... It doesn't take much figuring to realize that the task will be simpler in Windows95 simply because the options are fewer and well documented. [With CDE, applications running when you log out are automagically restarted when you log in next. Alternatively, you can take a session "snapshot" at any time to use as your default login configuration.] -john
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