Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 10:19:53 -0500 (EST) From: Thomas Valentino Crimi <tcrimi+@andrew.cmu.edu> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>, Damien Tougas <damien@tougas.net> Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: GUIs are flawed Message-ID: <0sa4gNC00UwD09egM0@andrew.cmu.edu> In-Reply-To: <20000202005349.A63885@tougas.net> References: <20000129163556.A69961@tougas.net> <200002020102.SAA28403@usr09.primenet.com> <20000202005349.A63885@tougas.net>
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Excerpts from FreeBSD-Chat: 2-Feb-100 Re: GUIs are flawed by Damien Tougas@tougas.net > I have to say that I totally agree with you on that one. A this point, > it seems like the designers of GUIs do try to implement some sort of > rational scheme, but often it is more at the programming level than it > is at the user level. As a user, I really don't care how the applications > talk to each other, but what I do care about is how I can make them > do what _I_ want. And when I mean "do what I want" I don't mean > change the look of the widgets through some sort of theme package, > I want to actually use programs together to make my job easier. I've seen some methods time and time again of implementing the spirit of this (ARexx on the Amiga - now that was cool 8), Scheme most recently in GNOME apps), but they all fall back to making programs scriptable. While this is a good thing for third party programmers, it doesn't help the GUI. While IPC scripting languages are a very good thing they can't enhannce the standard user's experience unless they happen to find a particularly useful script on a web page - or users begin to turn into script writers. It comes down to making apps another object for programmers to directly control. It's not in my vision, though, particularly as someone who would be thrilled just to have the scripting language, what can be done on the user level to export a comperable, if not automated, degree of control. My view would be to make a decent and simple GUI, and excourage users to extend their environment as they wish. It is the only way to let someone do what they want. (Save programming for EVERY possibility, M$ style - nice, but there's always a template missing.). Honestly, good documentation and interfaces are the best. Most people coming out of HS today have at least written a small program and could write a small script if they really wanted to. Obscuring the fact to making it a tedious search, particularly for someone who doesn't know what to look for, will prevent a large number of people from doing it. Back in 92 or so when I bought a word processor for the Amiga (Final Copy), it came with a ARexx scripting interface and 20 or so sample scripts. For example: enabling a hotkey to make an entire sentence bold. The ability to bind programs to hotkeys was an option on the menu, as well as being able to start up arbitrary scripts. Any casual user would see this option and if inquisitive enough look it up in the manual and find all the exported function calls and a tutorial. Not to mention, once someone picked up REXX (a manual for whcih came with the OS) they could control many such apps and need only to learn the function calls of each. Now, many commercial apps do carry this scripting feature. VisualBasic is the REXX of Windows. But having nearly every vendor actively encourage extending their programs for my particular niche needs is probably what made migration to unix far more familiar than to any other platform. I don't particularly have a copy of Word, but I know it has a scripting interface. Would I know how to write such a VB script with the documentation that came out of the box? (This is a real question, I don't know :) If so, I'd have to applaud MS on that one fact. - Tom To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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