On 11/22/12 9:57 PM, Robert Holtzman wrote:
On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 07:22:03PM -0500, Peter Davis wrote:
.........snip.........
Nope. Totally wrong. The responsibility is entire with the design
and the code, and never with the user. Otherwise it's a failed
product.
You're absolutely right...as soon as they make programmers capable of
predicting every mistake an end user will make...or the depth of every
end user's laziness and/or stupidity. Good luck!
Apparently you're unaware of the last 30 or 40 years of human
factors and usability research, or the fact that other people are
using computers besides a bunch of ivory tower geeks who think users
will follow whatever strictures and protocols they decide to impose.
Now they have mind reading software? Citation please.
This will be my last comment on the subject, since straying off topic
is, I think, a worse transgression than top posting or using long lines.
I apologize for prolonging this. I'll try to be as explicit as I can, to
clarify my views on this.
The prevalent thinking in the software organizations I've been a part of
is that products, including software, should be designed for the way
users think and behave, instead of the other way around. There has been
a surge of research on cognitive psychology, "engineering psychology",
human factors and related fields. The goal is not mind-reading, but
close. It is understanding how human cognition works, and how we can
design tools that users will be able to control effectively. It
addresses such questions as "How can we direct users' attention to the
most important information in a busy display?" or "How can we limit the
cognitive load a task places on the user, so as not to impair his/her
performance?" It's not possible to predict every possible mistake, but
it is possible to determine what conditions lead to mistakes.
Simply put, the approach is to treat the users' mental and physical
capabilities as a set of design constraints that must be imposed on any
product. This field has a long way to go, but has already accomplished
much. Makers of cell phones, tablets, cars, aircraft, air traffic
control systems, medical devices, etc. all pay very close attention to
this field.
But the fact that you refer to "end user's laziness and/or stupidity"
suggests that you have no acquaintance with this approach to design.
To bring this back to the topic, mutt is one of several MTAs I have
used. I currently have three separate mail archives (not including
backups) and use mutt, MH, Thunderbird, GMail and other WebMail
interfaces, and occasional others. Each of the clients has certain
advantages and certain drawbacks. I like the fact that I can quickly go
through a large volume of mail with mutt, using just single keystrokes
for the most part, and the fact that I can easily pipe messages to perl
scripts I've written for various routine tasks.
However, I also recognize that mutt is, to a large extent, obsolete. Of
course it still appeals to those who cling to the text/plain,
72-characters-per-line limit model from the 1970's, but that audience is
a smaller and smaller percentage of the email-using population. I don't
have any data, but given the prevalence of email, I suspect that mutt
users make up a minuscule portion of that.
Nothing wrong with that. Mutt is a great tool for what it does. But to
condemn the vast majority of email users, those who don't follow the
line length or bottom-posting conventions we've discussed, for failing
to comply with 40 year old strictures advocated by an extremely small
segment seems to me counter-productive.
-pd
--
Peter Davis
The Tech Curmudgeon
www.techcurmudgeon.com
