Improving the interface (w.r.t. scrollbars)

Jimmie Houchin jhouchin at texoma.net
Tue Mar 6 21:16:24 UTC 2001


I think that consistency is great and important. But I also believe that
consistency is user defined. By this I mean that each individual by
their own usage patterns determines consistency. The corporate types
somewhat by necessity impose on it's users what consistency means. I
like the idea of configurability to the individual according to their
own personal usage patterns.

Me I don't generally do much to my desktop. My wife on the other hand
selects her image and color coordinates the fonts, highlight colors,
etc. My daughters do as their mother. I like to download files to my
desktop and clean up from there. Other people let it all go to the
"Downloads" folder by the default of their browser.

Different strokes for different folks. One problem that exists is that
many users haven't figured out that they are in control of the machine.
Rather they think they can only do what the machine will let them do,
and they don't even know what that is. The master servant relationship
is currently backwards for many people.

I would like the idea of configurable UIs where I had a pallet of
components which I could connect and configure to available user
accessible methods in the application. This may be an advanced user
feature but that's ok. Most non-advanced users I know are friends with
someone that is (or claims to be). This also could be something where
app developers provide pluggable UIs for app from which a user could
choose.

It would also be interesting to allow users to define global preferences
for Squeak when running a Squeak based app. This would potentially allow
for the user to define some fonts, font sizes and color schemes for
their preferred usage. It would also be nice if there were the ability
if the user defined global preferences clashed with the apps other UI
features for the user to have the ability to revert to the default UI of
the app for it's usage.

Personally I own 4 Macs, 1 Linux machine (mine) and use Windows 95 (yes
95) at work. I started with Macs and personally switched to Linux about
a year ago. My first programming experience was with Prograph. It
saddens me what became of Prograph. A great example of why I like open
source software. Still have Dan's book. :)

Just some thoughts.

Jimmie Houchin





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