On Sunday 11 February 2007, Amit Aronovitch wrote: > Eli Marmor wrote: > > The programs were also friendlier, because all the options in the > > (limited) UI/menus/etc were textual, in simple English, and not > > graphical icons that you must be a genious to guess what the programmer > > meant. If icons were really friendlier than text, it could be useful in > > other fields of life; For example, instead of speaking to each other, > > we could use pantomime. Fortunately, nobody is so cruel to force the > > people to communicate in pictures (except for UI "experts" who force > > the programmers to over-use graphics). > > Menus, like Icons, are just means to shorten the learning curve. > Keyboard shortcuts rule ;-) > > While there's nothing wrong with short LC, it is orthogonal to program's > productivity/usefulness. The problem is just another manifestation of > consumption culture---nobody cares about long-term usefulness. > Add more eye-candy, make it really easy to learn how to do one or two > basic tasks (the stuff buyers normally think of when testing new > software), and you get more market. By the time they get to their more > complex needs, they'll have to buy a new version (and if they're already > locked in, you don't care about their needs anyway). > Nowadays, this has become an Ideology, well preached, e.g., by some of > Joel Spolsky's much quoted articles > (which are mostly true and clever advice---if you define "good software" > as "software that makes lots of money", of course...)
It would be useful if you would cite your sources, and give hyperlinks and quotes to the articles in question. I can think of two articles by Joel that contradict what you implied: * http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html * http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html Also see: * http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/12/09.html -------------- If you can point to a place where Spolsky advocated this strategy, I would be grateful. In regards to icons, I believe they are useful instead of text because once youg get used to them you can locate them more easily based on their pictures. And in most modern GUIs all icons have tooltips to indicate their command, so it's not that bad. Regards, Shlomi Fish --------------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage: http://www.shlomifish.org/ Chuck Norris wrote a complete Perl 6 implementation in a day but then destroyed all evidence with his bare hands, so no one will know his secrets. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
