🚀 go-pugleaf

From: rg@uunet!unhd (Roger Gonzalez )
Subj: Xerox sues Apple!!! (GUI Design)
Orga: Marine Systems Engineering Lab

Totally aside from the Mac/IBM debating, I'm curious about how people
feel about GUI designs in general (you too, Amigoids).

Some GUI's work well.  But, whenever I have to use one that is poorly
designed, I start to miss VM/CMS :-)

Some comments:

Don't design the GUI so that the user needs pixel-precision to do
things! After my morning gallon of coffee, the last thing I want to
do is line things up to pixels.  I like objects that recognize
themselves as wholes, and especially auto-caddish features like
"attach to endpoint".

In one of my user interface design books (I'll look up the specifics
if anyone is curious) numerous studies were cited in which menu
driven and iconic interfaces were proven to be effective methods for
(a) novices and (b) small command sets, especially hierarchical
command sets.  They were shown to be more of an annoyance in large
command sets and with experienced users.  

On a Mac, if I create a bunch of files (say 30) that all contain the
string "foobar" in their name, can I delete "??foobar.*" without
pointing at every blinking file?  I've never figured out how.

The Mac methodology seems to be "I am an object, and am associated
with the tool that created me.  I won't let you use the wrong tool,
so don't worry." PC's look at it notably differently.  They say
"There are objects, and there  are tools.  Use any tool you want on
any object.  It's up to you to figure out the right tool for the
job."  I prefer the latter schema, because it is inherently more
powerful.  More dangerous, but more powerful.  In addition, I think
its closer to the way that people think.  I may be wrong about this
whole section, but whenever I've tried to look at or otherwise hack
into things at a low level, things complained noisily because I
wasn't using the proper applications.

Comments welcome (especially from Amigoids, since I've never used
one). -Roger

-- 
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