Date: 03 Nov 2001 11:03:33 -0800 From: swear@blarg.net (Gary W. Swearingen) To: David Johnson <djohnson@acuson.com> Cc: Nils Holland <nils@tisys.org>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: NatWest? no thanks Message-ID: <63zo63brsq.o63@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <3BE2EF8D.4CB9A508@acuson.com> References: <20011102090253.G795-100000@jodie.ncptiddische.net> <3BE2EF8D.4CB9A508@acuson.com>
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David Johnson <djohnson@acuson.com> writes: > The heart of the problem, IMHO, is that computers are our first general > purpose appliance. General purpose devices are harder to use than > specific purpose devices. I agree that they usually are, but they needn't be, except for the ability to use different physical interfaces. There's two problems: 1) G.P. devices usually get many more user-controlled features than the sum of the S.P. devices. 2) G.P. devices usually get crumier user interfaces than S.P. devices, for several reasons. Often the designer is a CLI-centric technoid instead of a artistic industrial designer. Often the same user- interface ideas will be used for each device emulation, compromising the usability of one or more. So the problem is that people are being offered tools with too many features without organizing them and giving them good defaults so that they can be as easy to use as older devices to do the same limited things while having the ability to do much more for those who want to learn their use. That gets you to the next level of problem though, because that organization makes the thing more difficult for the advanced user to use. Thus the increasing ability to reconfigure the UI. Using a CLI/configfile makes all features simultaneously available and about the only way to present varying levels of usage-difficulty is to give the "man" command a "--ignorance-level" option so it could present differently-targeted man pages to people. Showing a beginner the man page for "sh", "tar", "find", or "xterm" is a good way to send them running. I guess we sort of make our featureful CLI programs easy to use by offering The Handbook, e-mag articles, Linux HOWTOs and books. Well, it worked for me; no reason it shouldn't work for everyone else. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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