🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <id.GL0W.ED9@ferranti.com> peter@ferranti.com (peter da silva)
writes:

   In general, user friendliness requires detailed control over every aspect
   of the user interface (as any Apple developer about that!).

Not quite. While being able to tailor your environment to your needs is
important, it's much more important that things are consistent across
applications, intuitive in the sense that you don't need more than two or
three tries to find out how to do what you intend to do, and easy to memorize
(which, of course, is much easier if things are consistent). In some cases,
_reducing_ the options for the programmer while offering easy access to
standard funtions (eg, editor subwindows or flexible filename handling), is
necessary in order to achieve this. For a windowed environment, NeXTstep and
the Mac are the best I know of; for a commandline environment (still useful
in many cases), I don't know of anything easier to use than VMS/DCL.

   Open systems require conformance to externally defined standards and
   interoperability with software you've never had a chance to spec. It's VERY
   hard to get the two together, which is why so many people are excited about
   the NeXT.

I think people are excited about the NeXT because it fits the bill I gave
above...When first introduced, the machine was anything but inter operable
(optical disk, not all SCSI disks talk to it, nonstandard window system with
nonstandard monitors, no power switch :)). But all applications have a
consistent, easytouse and intuitive interface, and things like the interface
builder make it easy for third party products to fit in.

	Jan