Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 18:32:06 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> To: Tim Vanderhoek <hoek@freenet.hamilton.on.ca> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD keyboard Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.94.960715181230.6636A-100000@Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.91.960714193820.6118A-100000@james.freenet.hamilton.on.ca>
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On Sun, 14 Jul 1996, Tim Vanderhoek wrote: > In the case of a road sign--a road sign is something you almost > always see indirectly. You're always trying to drive at the same time, > and even if you're not, the road sign is still going to be unexpected in > that it is always one road sign, instead of one road sign in a pool of a > thousand road signs. Have you ever driven in, say, Boston? :-) Poles and overpasses will often half half a dozen or more signs on them. Picking out the one you need to read by text alone takes far to long and in a place like Boston, that extra second could be the difference between making and missing an exit. As I mentioned in another message, where I live (Bloomington Indiana) we have a few intersections with 6 or 8 signs and because they are all uniform (rectangular, white background black two digit numbers, a qualifier of north, south, east, or west, and an arrow). If you (a) know ahead of time which direction you need to go, (b) you happen to get a red light at the intersection, allowing some time to read the signs, or (c) you have binoculars so you can read the signs from a long way back, you will likely end up going the wrong direction. Out of town visitors who I've given directions to are emperical evidence of this. > I know, when reading a sheet of paper, or a computer screen, if my name > is written on it somewhere, it almost always pops out immediately with > little more than a glance at the paper or screen. This is speculation, but I would venture a guess that your own name is a special case and it may be processed visually rather than linguistically. > When looking for a > specific word or word sequence in a large text file, if you scroll it up > a screen and pay attention the whole time, I'll bet you find it first > time even if the text is being scrolled 5-10 times to fast to be read > normally. Gee, I wish *I* could do that. :-) > I'm not contending the usefulness and friendliness of a GUI; rather, I'm > suggesting that an icon can simply not replace the name of a command, for > example, `rm', `cp', `find', `ls', etc.. And you wouldn't want it to. Making a good GUI typically involves a completely different approach to the problem. Simply making icons for commands isn't going to be useful. Look at the Macintosh finder, which offers most of the functionality of rm, cp, find, and ls. The whole mode of interaction is changed. Things are gained, you can spot files more quickly with icons than text alone; moving files is much quicker. Things are also lost, you can't easily rm `find -name '*.o'`. -john ps: pester me again if you want citations; I'm in a bit of a hurry at this instant. == jfieber@indiana.edu =========================================== == http://fallout.campusview.indiana.edu/~jfieber ================
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