Programming facilities (was: RE: How Do You Do Business Apps? (Morphic Design Philosophy))

Raab, Andreas Andreas.Raab at disney.com
Sat Feb 26 00:47:02 UTC 2000


Paul and all,

> For example, just a couple hours ago ago, I started FreeCell, clicked
> "submorphs", pulled a card off the table and dropped it.
[Lots and lots of stuff deleted]
> The moral is stay away from the ALT and CTRL keys I guess? 

No. The moral is to learn your system better. The public release is not
specifically designed to be a 'real' application (as you put it). But have
you ever noticed that there is an option to turn off all the programmer
facilities?! Just execute 'Preferences disableProgrammerFacilities' and
nothing of the things you've mentioned will happen. And there are different
levels of this kind of control. If you enable the #noviceMode in the
preferences you won't see several of the programming related stuff anymore
(Scott could tell you exactly what's disabled by this).

> My point is, if you create a beautiful system to do a task, you don't
> want the users (including yourself) unintentionally modifying that
> system. 

Which is exactly what #disableProgrammerFacilities does.

> You may also intentionally want to make it difficult 
> from users to change some things (the cards in the game), 
> while leaving it easy to change others (the location of 
> the cards within the table).

Which is exactly what #noviceMode attempts. Note that it's not our fault if
the designers of the applications you have mentioned don't make use of them.
You may want to blame them and not Morphic in general.

  Andreas





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