Date: 30 Jan 2000 04:57:06 +0100 From: naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de (Christian Weisgerber) To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: GUIs are flawed Message-ID: <870cqi$h68$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de> References: <20000129163556.A69961@tougas.net> <Pine.BSF.4.21.0001300024530.88536-100000@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org>
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Jonathon McKitrick <jcm@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> wrote: > Well, i agree, the command line is very powerful and can be inherently > more stable and maintainable. However, most people in this day and > age of quick results don't have thhe time to read a manual and learn a > myriad options to do what they want and get punished and have to type > the whole line again if they make an error. People want > point-and-click, and i think that has its place. Sure captive user interfaces have their place. Think editors. Sure graphical interfaces have their place. Think print previews or graphical representation of data (plots). Even point-and-click has its places. If you have a drawing program (an editor for graphically constructed data sets) a point-and-click interface seems natural. I'm thoroughly a Unix person. (Probably more so and much more purely so than many a loud-mouthed advocate.) One disturbing thing I have noticed about PC users for a long time (even before MS-Windows; this was already apparent when MS-DOS was king; it's really a captive user interface thing) is their willingness to suffer, to do the computer's work, and to redefine their problems to fit the available tools. This becomes painfully apparent when you watch them confronting the Unix world. Observe new Unix users with a PC background and cringe. Say there's a way to do a certain task by entering three keystrokes or mouse clicks interactively in an application. If that same task has to be repeated a hundred or a thousand times, PC users will happily sit down and repeat the manual input for that number of times. They won't say, this is absurd, I refuse to do this, this is a machine's task, let's find a way to have the machine do it. They won't even conceive of this idea. It's an alien concept for them. The icing on the cake is when they redefine the real world problem until it can be solved with the available tools. PC users can't conceive of a toolchest. For each problem, a single program must provide an exact solution. If it doesn't, they will do any remaining work manually, no matter how mind-numbing. If the task is clearly impossible or they break down in exhaustion, they will redefine the real world problem. "I can't change the company's name in 1000 web pages. Hey, changing it in the 100 most frequently requested ones will suffice. Nobody will notice." Sociologists often gibber about computer user's turning into slaves of the machine rather than the other way around. It doesn't sound as ridiculous anymore once you see how PC users debase themselves, and do the most grueling, repetitive, mind-numbing work unfit for humans. (And of course the sociologists' computer experience is as PC users.) > Apparently M$ is trying to develop a concept based on COM++ and OLE > and ActiveZ that allows many small controls to be tied together with > standard interfaces, similar to a pipe, i guess. Who doesn't? KDE certainly aims to go that way, and GNOME probably too. Somebody call me when they're finished so I can take a look. -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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