Date: Wed, 5 Jun 1996 17:04:00 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> To: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com> Cc: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: editors Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.93.960605164717.422r-100000@Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.AUX.3.91.960605142028.18110A-100000@covina.lightside.com>
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[cc list trimed, moved to chat, the proper location to bat aronud
embryonic ideas.]
On Wed, 5 Jun 1996, Jake Hamby wrote:
> would be a modular installation/admin/tutorial/monitoring type tool, that
> would be somewhat like training wheels: You would have tutorials (or
> dare I say "wizards" :-) to help you out when you are still learning (you
> ask it, "How do I create a new account?" or whatever), but on the other
Lets not call them wizards. I think "Guru" is a little more in
line with the unix tradition. Anyway, what the wizards amount to
is a fusion of documentation and functionality. First there were
racks of manuals in the other room. Then there were manuals
portable enough to have on your own shelf, then we had online
documentation, then programs with context sensitive help, and now
we have a fusion of the help and the program.
Another way to look at it is "Just In Time
Documentation"---documentation delivered to your screen at
precicely the moment you need it.
It was either Ben Shneiderman or Don Norman who put their finger
on it when they said that common tasks should be easy, infrequent
tasks should be possible.
Optimizing tools for the common case is easy. Lots of people use
them a lot and provide great volumes of feedback to the designer.
Its those infrequent tasks that are difficult. In unix,
infrequently used (but essential) tools tend to have miserably
usability. Seriously, when was the last time you manually
invoked dump without having to read the man page and puzzle as to
why you put all the options together as a string, and then put
the values all together? The most glaring problem in this area
is adding a disk to a system, which has been discussed to death
in these mailing lists but little has been done to fix it.
Installation is another infrequent task, and probably the only
in the infrequent category that is getting any attention.
> 2) Should be comprehensive, everything from adding users, setting up the
> network (including Web server, NFS, etc), tape backups, printing services,
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I was just thinking about this. This is a notable omission from
the current install. If FreeBSD came with a very basic ascii to
postscript filter, we could get basic text printing for most
peaple with locally attached printers without too much fuss.
-john
== jfieber@indiana.edu ===========================================
== http://fallout.campusview.indiana.edu/~jfieber ================
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