Thread View: comp.windows.misc
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Started by dnk
Fri, 06 Jan 1989 18:29
Stirring the UI hornets' nest
Author: dnk
Date: Fri, 06 Jan 1989 18:29
Date: Fri, 06 Jan 1989 18:29
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I'm posting this on comp.windows.x, comp.cog-eng, and comp.windows.misc in hopes of eliciting some strong opinions on User Interface, or maybe even some hard info. Please pardon the duplication... On 12/30/88, roland@osf.org (Roland Stich) posted to comp.windows.x OSF's User Environment Component letter (by John Paul, 12/29) to its membership. Does anyone have any comments, pro or con, about that decision? (You certainly don't have to work for an OSF or UNIX International member to respond! :-) Here are some controversial thoughts to start things rolling... It appears to me that OSF chose a look & feel as close as possible to the Presentation Manager, thus leveraging the large expected base of SW written to that environment, and increasing the viability of UNIX in general, and the probability that OSF/1 will be the UNIX of choice. (Yes, I saw where they plan to deliver their user environment component (UEC) on SysVr4 as well.) Is this OSF acknowledgement of Presentation Manager realistic, in your opinion- or is it a mistake because it proceeds from the assumption that future workstation SW should resemble current PC SW rather than current workstation SW? What is UNIX International's current position regarding look & feel? Are they solidly backing Open Look, forsaking all others? SHOULD they? What about the OSF member HW vendors who've already lined up ISVs to write to specific toolkits which were not selected? Many have promised to continue to support those look & feels as well as OSF's UEC. How does that sit with the ISVs? Wouldn't they be better off writing to OSF's UEC to leverage their development efforts to a wider market? What proportion of UNIX International HW or SW vendors will offer or assume OSF's UEC in addition to Open Look? Will anyone try to support more than one look & feel? What UIMSs offer efficient ways to support more than one? Will the "typical" user mind intermixing applications with differing look & feels on the same screen? If they try, will there be window manager conflicts? As long as there is no single dominant look & feel standard for UNIX, can UNIX or X Windows succeed in the marketplace? Is the lack of much visible debate on look & feel because A) I'm looking in the wrong place, B) because it's premature, or C) because it's perceived as too strategic a topic? Is there a specific newsgroup wherein UNIX look & feel is being discussed? (If not, I vote for comp.cog-eng) Dan Kalikow, Prime Computer Inc. Please disregard netaddress in header; use dnk@enx.prime.com for private EMail (Standard disclaimer definitely applies; none of the above has anything to do with Prime's opinions or plans.)
Re: Stirring the UI hornets' nest
Author: Peter da Silva
Date: Sun, 08 Jan 1989 17:21
Date: Sun, 08 Jan 1989 17:21
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In article <34500001@primerd>, dnk@primerd.prime.com writes: > Is the lack of much visible debate on look & feel because A) I'm looking in the > wrong place, B) because it's premature, or C) because it's perceived as too > strategic a topic? Because it's premature. Let's figure out a programmer interface for windowing as simple and clean as stdio, then look-n-feel becomes a matter of recompiling with the right library. -- Peter da Silva, Xenix Support, Ferranti International Controls Corporation. Work: uunet.uu.net!ficc!peter, peter@ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180. `-_-' Home: bigtex!texbell!sugar!peter, peter@sugar.uu.net. 'U` Opinions may not represent the policies of FICC or the Xenix Support group.
Re: Stirring the UI hornets' nest
Author: Peter Schachte
Date: Mon, 09 Jan 1989 22:30
Date: Mon, 09 Jan 1989 22:30
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In article <34500001@primerd> dnk@primerd.prime.com writes: >On 12/30/88, roland@osf.org (Roland Stich) posted to comp.windows.x OSF's User >Environment Component letter (by John Paul, 12/29) to its membership. >Does anyone have any comments, pro or con, about that decision? > >What is UNIX International's current position regarding look & feel? Are >they solidly backing Open Look, forsaking all others? SHOULD they? NO, they shouldn't. Neither should OSF. Look and feel is a matter of individual taste, just like shells and editors. Some people are pretty passionate about vi, others feel just as strongly about emacs. People are bound to feel much the same way about their visual unix environment. Trying to standardize these things is a mistake. What should be standardized is programmer INTERFACE, and a way to build programs that use widgets (user interface objects) whose code does not exist within the executable image of the application itself, but is dynamically linked a runtime (e.g., shared libraries). This way, different people can choose different implementations of widgets, or even implement their own versions of standard widgets, with whatever features they like, and use these alternative implementations with off-the-shelf applications. Standards can be way to improve portability and increase the market for a product, or they can be a straitjacket that stiffle innovation and lead to homogeneous mediocrity. We need a way to do the former for unix without doing the latter. The standard looks & feels do both. Just my opinions. -Peter Schachte pds@quintus.uucp ..!sun!quintus!pds
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