From owner-freebsd-chat Sat Jul 13 13:39:40 1996 Return-Path: owner-chat Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id NAA10383 for chat-outgoing; Sat, 13 Jul 1996 13:39:40 -0700 (PDT) Received: from Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu (Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu [149.159.1.34]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id NAA10376 for ; Sat, 13 Jul 1996 13:39:36 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (jfieber@localhost) by Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id PAA18616; Sat, 13 Jul 1996 15:39:25 -0500 (EST) X-Authentication-Warning: Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu: jfieber owned process doing -bs Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 15:39:25 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber X-Sender: jfieber@Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu To: Joerg Wunsch cc: Greg Lehey , freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD keyboard In-Reply-To: <199607131836.UAA01435@uriah.heep.sax.de> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-chat@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Sat, 13 Jul 1996, J Wunsch wrote: > 'cause fewer and fewer people know how to use a keyboard. > > That's why kindergarten icon games like winloose have the reputation > of being ``user-friendly''. It has nothing to do with typing ability. It has everything to do with the basic fact that humans are far better at recognition than recall. Recall may be more efficient, but only comes after a great time investment in memorization. For infrequent users, or infrequent tasks, recall will never be as efficient as recognition. While a true unix junkie will not fit the infrequent user category, they will encounter infrequent tasks. For those I'd much rather have a visual interface that facilitates recognition than dig through a bunch of obtuse documentation. Unix systems trivialize recognition enabled interfaces, Windows, and to a greater degree Mac, trivialize recall enabled interfaces. A vast majority of the computing market has made it pretty clear that if a compromise must be made, it will be in favor of recognition. It is important enough that people will put up with cheesy operating systems that crash on a regular basis if that is the only way to get it. -john == jfieber@indiana.edu =========================================== == http://fallout.campusview.indiana.edu/~jfieber ================