On 19 May 2008, at 2:34, Jens Alfke wrote:
On 18 May '08, at 6:15 PM, Julius Guzy wrote:
I do not think it naive of me to raise serious questions regarding
usability given that i have made huge and increasingly successful
efforts to get into this system so I can do some heavy duty
programming.
…
Well if it were doing as good a job as you think it is then I for
one would not have lived through the nightmare of the last five or
six months struggle.
If you want to talk about this in terms of HCI usability, then you
need to play by those rules and _not_ describe the problem
anecdotally, just in terms of your own experience.
Well, in the present case I only have my own experience to go on. I
dived into this debate because someone else was expressing
difficulties and he or she was being told in essence that they should
not have been finding it hard at all because in reality everything in
the garden was rosy. So I just thought to respond with expressions of
solidarity.
Typically when this happens, it's a programmer designing a user
interface according to his own preferences, which are often very
different from those of a mainstream computer user.
Sorry, no comprendo.
In my original missive I was equating the problems of HCI design with
the problems of designing manuals for engineers.
In this case it sounds like the opposite — you seem to be finding
Cocoa a lot more difficult to learn than most do. It definitely
shouldn't take months of struggle. (CoreAudio or Security, maybe.
Not AppKit.)
Well I don't know how much more difficult I find learning it than
others have.
It would be interesting to find out.
I have perhaps expressed my true feelings more than others because
I'm not going to loose out on any jobs by admitting to a few
difficulties. On the other hand maybe everyone here has had very few
difficulties in learning this quite enormous body of knowledge. I did
ask in an earlier missive how others came to learn the system and
there seems to have been the usual mix of starting early or going on
training courses or having talent and working hard.
I don't know why that would be, and I don't mean it as a value
judgment. Different people have different learning styles. Maybe
the docs aren't matching yours. As others have pointed out, it
would be good to have more details on what you think the docs are
missing.
Yes but I like others have programs to write and very little time to
do it in. So yes, I think that would be a very good idea. I don't
know who else would be interested in contributing an hour or so a
week to the general good but if there were a consensus then I think I
might.
One thing that does seem to apply to a number of other people
asking questions on this forum is a seeming lack of ability to
experiment and figure out answers oneself. Writing code is
engineering, but debugging it and figuring out how an API works is
more like a science — and understanding how to experiment, and draw
conclusions from evidence, are vital skills.
Yes. That's what programmers do.
Julius
http://juliuspaintings.co.uk
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