Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 13:13:20 -0400 (EDT) From: Tim Vanderhoek <hoek@freenet.hamilton.on.ca> To: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> Cc: Tim Vanderhoek <hoek@freenet.hamilton.on.ca>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD keyboard Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.3.91.960716124149.18582A-100000@james.freenet.hamilton.on.ca> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.94.960715181230.6636A-100000@Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu>
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On Mon, 15 Jul 1996, John Fieber wrote: > 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, > > Have you ever driven in, say, Boston? :-) I think I'll try not to. :) > 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). So how would you rework the signing so that a driver would be able to comfortably recognize the desired sign and its meaning? Would it be possible to redo the whole road naming scheme so that each road is named by a picture? The exit for the highway denoted by the icon with something that looks like a cherry would have a great big sign with a cherry-like icon on it? :) > > 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. Maybe, but then you would expect small changes in font and point size to ruin this ability. > > 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. :-) Well, I'm pulling the 5-10 number out of a hat. I should take the time someday to check and see how fast text can actually be scrolled, and how large the keyphrase being searched for has to be. But anyways, I bet you could. Find an old 386 or 286 with DOS on it, use the `type' command, and give it a try! > 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. I haven't used the Macintosh finder (confined to UNIX & Windows3|(95)). However, dragging, clicking, etc. can only replace so much. At some point, you have to fall-back to either a menu-based interface or a command-line interface, I believe. The two are essentially the same... I suppose an icon can be useful to help catagorize something. For example, given a list of files, searching for a given filename could be made faster if all text files were denoted with a small icon. But, once given this file, how is the GUI supposed to determine wether the user wants to diff it with another file, concatanate it to another file, view the file, edit the file, etc. Some of these are easy (for example, to delete it, it could be dragged to a nearby recycling bin), but some are so similar that it's hard to differentiate them without resorting to textual options. > 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'`. `A GUI makes it easy to do simple operations and impossible to do complex operations.' - paraphrase from I have no idea who. -- Outnumbered? Maybe. Outspoken? Never! tIM...HOEk
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