Je77 --

Good thoughts ...

At 1:11 PM -0500 2/17/01, Jochen F. Rick wrote:
>Alan said:
>>  I think that earns us the right to say that "Neither current UIs nor 
>>  Squeak's current UI are any good".
>
>I agree. This is a healthy attitude. I'm fairly fond of the Squeak UI, so
>I think it is good. Of course, I'm fairly fond of command line.

heh heh -- this is partly what I mean ...

>
>>  I think you are not giving the Internet enough credit. Most people in
>>  the world spend most of their time on computers using the newer
>>  interfaces (poorly done albeit) that they experience within a browser
>>  on the web. These are not standard Windows and Mac interfaces.
>
>The web is an interesting interface. It (at least HTML) is very limited,
>and not terribly consistent. However, there is great innovation in
>usability on the web since many people are designing interfaces and they
>learn from each other. For instance, I would argue that ordering a book
>from Amazon is amazingly easy; no additional technology or interface would
>make this process much easier. So, HTML is great for surface activities
>such as finding information and ordering. HTML is not a good interface
>for more complex and engaging tasks.

I meant this in part, but I mainly meant that the WEB, bad as it is, 
willy nilly broke people's perception that the only UI that was or 
could be was Windows. And, further, it should give us motivation to 
REALLY go after the possibilities of the Internet and the much richer 
interfaces yet to be invented. A lot of the reason for our efforts in 
Squeak is to help provide a vehicle that will help all of us make 
progress by giving us a way to bring new ideas to live and share them 
out over the net.

>
>The use of written language seems fundamental to any interface. Quoting
>Bruner: "The very essence of being human lies in the use of symbols. We do
>not know what the hierarchy of primacy is among speech, song, dance, and
>drawing, but, whichever came first, as soon as it stood for something else
>than the act itself, man was born; as soon as it caught on with another
>man, culture was born; and as soon as there were two symbols, a system was
>born." Written language is our most powerful system (besides perhaps oral
>language). Any non-specialized interface that spends too much time trying to
>replace written language as the primary means of interaction is bound for
>failure.

This is a great Bruner quote. Where is it from?

You may know that Bruner was one of our earliest gods (and still is) 
for thinking about education and interfaces. The quote I made up at 
PARC to summarize one of Bruner's books was: Doing with Images makes 
Symbols. That is, learning is done with several separate mentalities, 
and the progression that works really well is kinesthetic contact, 
configurations, and symbolic relationships.
      For the first, it wasn't so much clicking that was important but 
dragging. The second was images and icons. The third was the power of 
scripting.
      This is partly why we keep the kids programming stuff looking 
like language. The idea is that, even though a 10 year olds' main 
payoff may be to draw and drive the car (Doing and Images), our 
"Montessori game" is to entice them into doing the dynamic parts 
using symbolic language, because that is where the big powers 
ultimately reside. Etc. Etc.

Cheers,

Alan