On Dec 11, 2006, at 12:11 AM, David King wrote:
Not to diminish this obviously hateful situation, but what is the
alternative? Make them learn an entirely new interface metaphor that's
useless outside of the software?
Use the use-interface metaphor that all the other software on the
computer already uses, which they have already learned or they couldn't
be using the computer in the first place.
This all reminds me of people who thought that you should be writing
software by laying out flowcharts on a grid. I'm not talking about
hooking together dataflow sources and sinks on a grid, which does make
sense (and would actually be a useful model for hooking up a MIDI
network instead of having a bunch of photorealistic cables crossing on
a patch panel), I'm talking about hooking together boxes containing
program steps and conditionals, if-then-else becoming
|
/ \
/ ? \____
\ / Y
\ /
N |
Or the old SCADA programming interfaces that involved hooking together
chains of relays to produce a result, often using ASCII graphics like
---][---... the people who came up with things like B*F* weren't
operating in a vacuum.
