Hi, I can't believe I have to post this.

On Friday, April 19, 2002, at 09:30 AM, Joshua 'Schwa' Gargus wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 19, 2002 at 10:34:14AM -0400, Jon Hylands wrote:
>> At Friday, 19 April 2002, you wrote:
>> I guess what I'm trying to get at here is to point out that there
>> are differences in what people prefer, and we might want to make
>> the mechanism for changing certain things like the window color and
>> scroll bar locations much more obvious for a new user.
>
> I am in complete agreement with you here.  If someone doesn't like the
> default colored windows, they should be able to easily determine that
> the colors can be changed and how to do it.
>
> Joshua

I think there's a totally different point possible here though, which is 
that preferences don't matter at all, and neither does "making Squeak 
stand apart". Squeak has *thousands* of things to make it stand apart, 
why pick an item which obviously detracts from usability? There's a 
famous quote that says that "the medium is the message". Well, if my 
medium for Squeak to new users is that they should have *low-contrast* 
Squeak text-editing page, then it's obvious to me that my message to the 
user is that they should have to do something, anything, extra in order 
to have a productive environment, because it's more important to me that 
the whole window be the same color. I don't believe that I should have 
to make the point again that users often have Squeak for months before 
they ever discover the Preferences, let alone get up the nerve to go 
through the whole list to find something relevant and know what it is 
and fix it.

This argument should start and stop at usability. Back in the early 80's 
in Apple's Lisa and Macintosh research, no prototypes ever came out with 
colored backgrounds, and partly for this very type of reason.

There, that's my finally poke at the "strawman"; now I'm going to return 
to doing something productive.

Brian Rice
~