On Wed, 2003-04-30 at 03:16, Darius wrote:
> Why is there no persistent class representing the user in total? 

Squeak being a personal multimedia environment, it could probably be
said that any image is some representation of the user. 

> Shouldnt there be something at the Kernel level? 
> Why is such a person only represented by keyboard strokes and Hand Morphs?
> Isnt the most cherished person in our programming life, the "user", more than 
> an I/O port?
> 
Because that's the bit you're interested in. If there's one sure sign of
an object modeller type gone wrong, it is that he starts modelling
reality without constraining himself with actual needs. If you're a
Morphic class library, really the only thing you are interested in are
mouse movements (I wanted to type 'mouse gestures', but 40 years after
Sketchpad we still don't have these....), not in whether the user is
interested in Bach.

Note that you do the same. If you hand your credit card to a warehouse
clerk, all you are interested in is where that clerk's hand is and
whether it already has taken hold of the card so you can let go. You
couldn't care less about his email address.

> Why dont we create class hierarchies of our GUIs to match the already 
> researched rules of cognitive science?
> 
Because cognitive science tells us the domain is too complex to be
modeled by simple class hierachies?

> The best I can do is refer you to a more detailed exploration of the topic in 
> Jef Raskins The Humane Interface 
> http://humane.sourceforge.net/humane_interface/hollands_review.html
> 
Best laugh I had in a long time, this article. The guy steps up and
invents Emacs/Vim with a lot of fanfare. 

Now, he's right about a lot of things, but he made himeself look like a
fool for making it sound like he's invented something new. 

> Certainly Squeak with its OOP methodology could get us there and gain notoriety 
> in the process.
>
As far as a 'multi-modal' interface is concerned, I do agree that Squeak
relies a bit too much on the mouse alone. But also, I think that Squeak
should have mouse gestures - there's a gesture recognizer in there after
all, and I heard good reports on them. There's a lot of work to be done
here...


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