Date: 03 Nov 2001 15:18:45 -0800 From: swear@blarg.net (Gary W. Swearingen) To: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: NatWest? no thanks Message-ID: <8r668rbfze.68r@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <15332.18917.367328.996483@guru.mired.org> References: <20011102090253.G795-100000@jodie.ncptiddische.net> <3BE2EF8D.4CB9A508@acuson.com> <63zo63brsq.o63@localhost.localdomain> <15332.18917.367328.996483@guru.mired.org>
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Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> writes: > If you haven't, find a copy of Raskin's "The Humane Interface", and > read it. He argues - quite convincingly - that the real problem is > that people are being offered applications at all. It's silly to have > to start a "word processor" to deal with a document with words in it > vs. having to start a "drawing program" to deal with a document with > graphics in it when the operations on the two things are fundamentally > the same: add, select, cut, copy, paste and set properties. Sounds like the main example application (and a guiding principle) of the X consortium's Fresco GUI toolkit. (It's a shame that's died, but some GPL vultures are devouring the carcass and might eventually make something of it.) Fresco also integrated the GUI kit itself and had the best menu/form/dialoge layout scheme around (and still, I suppose). That same application had the useless, but interesting, feature of being able to make copies of itself in a document which could be rotated, resized, etc. It was a little slow when created, but would be fine now (in the same same way X itself was). But regardless of whether you offer different applications, I'd think you'd still be left offering different documents or functions or features. Will it be better to use command options or menus or user-sensitive images to control your CD player or network? Etc... (I think the answer is that we want all methods to be available.) > Actually, you want it in an environment variable, so that the shell > can control it. Every time you make a mistake, it raises the > level. When you do a couple of things in a row right, it drops the > level. Commands should also pay attention to it and provide more > verbose output depending on how high it gets. Experiments with this > kind of thing have been reasonably successful, though I'd be hard > pressed to find the references. I thought you were kidding until that last sentence. I guess you can see a kind of beginner's man page in some of the GNU tool's "-h" outputs which try to be somewhere betweeen BSD's short "-h" output and a man page (and which I hate to see filling my shell window). Actually, come to think of it, the GNU "info" scheme might fit the bill better, in that the format allows for better-organized presentation of info, often at several layers of detail. I'm sorry so few people like "info"; I always have and thought it was a good compromise system that worked well enough with both a console and a GUI. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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