Who has no job? (was Re: O'Reilly Squeak book?)

Bruce Cohen brucecohen at qwest.net
Thu Apr 18 21:17:42 UTC 2002


At 1:14 PM -0700 4/18/02, Charles Hixson wrote:
>Cees de Groot wrote:
>
>>Charles Hixson <charleshixsn at earthlink.net> said:
>>
>
>>The fun of Squeak is exactly that after the programmer developed some basic
>>components, the user goes on to make whatever he/she likes in the 
>>environment.
>>That's the whole idea, no distinction between compile time and run time.
>>I concur that it is not exactly suited for the majority of office 
>>applications
>>today, and it is possible to lock everything down (just download a copy of
>>SqueakNews and see whether you can 'break in'), so again the answer is
>>probably "you can do that, but it's not the mainstream idea behind Squeak so
>>don't be surprised if you have to dig a little".
>>
>But the environment that I am working in, and that I believe most 
>common, is basically still oriented around paper, printers, and 
>MSOffice.  And your dialogs need to look and act like theirs.

Oh dear God, no!.  Please don't insist on replicating all the 
horrible mistakes (in terms of both esthetics and cognitive 
effectiveness) of the last 20 years of WIMP interfaces just because 
they're "standard".  The best argument that I've heard for doing this 
is that users get confused by differences from what they've seen 
before.  Frankly, I think this argument insults and demeans users.

One common thread in the ongoing argument about GUI's is that most of 
the arguers can't seem to agree that there is more than one class of 
users.  There are new users, there are unsophisticated but 
knowledgeable experienced users, and there are expert users.  You can 
probably make a case for other classes (I wonder if there isn't a 
significant difference between what I've called "experts", and true 
virtuosi).  No one set of requirements holds for all these classes, 
so you can't make a single interface design that works for everybody. 
Usually if you try, you end with MSOffice, which works for nobody, as 
far as I can see.

Bruce

-- 
"The joke is over when the head falls off." - Scotts' proverb
=========
Bruce Cohen
5908 SW California St.
Portland, OR 97219
brucecohen at qwest.net



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list