Re: [OT] The lessons of Ion
I suppose like anything else, a text based interface lends itself better to some things, but not others. Remember that the GUI was an experiment to see if a computer could look and feel more like people think, because outside the minority of geeks (as we were called back then and still are today) no one had the time or patience or cognitive abilities to memorize all those commands! I HATED DOS for just that reason! But I am fond of telling people today who complain about software bugs and the occasional program crash that the most stable OS I have ever used was DOS. So it all depends on what your goals are and how much time and effort you have or are willing to devote to getting there. I personally would love to be able to just start from scratch and write my own OS to work the way I would like. The trouble is, I also like beer and burgers and having a life, and those things are constantly getting in my way and taking up all my time. :-) Bob On Sep 18, 2010, at 6:25 PM, Peter Alcibiades wrote: No, I missed out on the fun with vi and ed. I am old enough to remember text only interfaces however and felt that the GUI was a great liberation from them. This was Macs, and for many years I bought into 'ease of use' and HIGs until the GUIs started to get more and more obtrusive and irritating and I began to think about why I was still doing things in some ridiculously complicated way - where were the shorcuts? They were not there, because so much of the GUI we know and love today evolved in an era when there were lots of new users for whom things had to be dumbed down so they could have instant usability. At some point I realized that it is worth spending a few hours learning something unfamiliar in order to go three times as quickly and with much less irritation at the end of it. ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: [OT] The lessons of Ion
On 9/17/10 5:17 PM, Peter Alcibiades palcibiades-fi...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: I have to tell you, this is an experience to make you think and scratch your head and think some more. If Apple were right, it should not work. If Gnome were right, it should not work. And on day 1 it does not. But on day n, it not only works, it feels just perfectly right and automatic, your fingers just do things, and you forget you are using Ion, its just how things are done here. Try it. You will never feel the same about HIGs and that guy and his silly law again. Fitts he might have been. And you will never again confuse being easy to use on day 1 for the ignorant with being easy to use when you know it well and are experienced. No, they are completely different things. Thanks for the insight, Peter... sometimes turning the UI inside out is just what's needed to work with it more efficiently. It reminds me of the once-useful and now-not-so-much-so utility for Mac OS X called Quicksilver... it allowed you to do much of the same kind of thing - hit a keystroke, type a few characters, hit Enter, and you're there - having launched an app, or invoked a process, or even run a service like web searches or text parsing. Sometimes less really IS more... Ken Ray Sons of Thunder Software, Inc. Email: k...@sonsothunder.com Web Site: http://www.sonsothunder.com/ ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: [OT] The lessons of Ion
by curiosity, are you old enough to have lived the times where the controversy in the unix world that was: what is the best editor: vi or ed (hint: at that time, emacs did not exist)? I have, and, as far as I am concerned, I avoid by any means available OSs that make you feel like you are playing colossal cave http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure The pervert idea that Firefox should be called iceweasel makes me puke. And, on a non tangential relevant point, the whole point of Revolution is to facilitate the construction of GUI programs over transcripts. Le 18 sept. 2010 à 00:17, Peter Alcibiades a écrit : The interesting thing about ion is that it makes you think really hard about what is ease of use, what is user friendly, what about those famous laws, the HIG, and the one about where your points of clicking ought to be that I always forget the name of because I hate it so much. Here is how Ion2 works. It is sort of tangentially relevant because if you were packing a one app OS, and you wanted a one app window manager, basically an embedded Rev app, ion would be one way to do it. As long as you do not have too many new windows overlapping, however. You start out looking at a totally blank screen with a top border which says 'empty frame' at the top. It is also totally black except this border, which is a quite attractive shade of blue/grey, with white lettering on it. There are no clues what to do next. You are an insider or have a crib sheet, and so you know that F1 brings up a man page, F2 opens a terminal (the second most important thing a guy needs in his interface), and F3 lets you launch an app by name, which is a nice to have but not essential, because real men launch from a terminal, of course. So lets say you go ahead, and you type in icewe followed by a tab. It will complete to iceweasel, which is the Debian name for firefox (yes, you had to know that), and when you hit enter, firefox launches and occupies the entire screen. OK, you think, how about mail? So you hit F3 again, now you type in kmail, hit enter, and up pops your email. In a tab, also occupying the entire screen. Now you have an idea. Why don't we split the screen? So now you do alt+k s. instantly, your pane is split into two equal parts, vertically, one like the first, black with nothing in it, the other with your two tabs. You want to resize? alt+r and use the arrow keys. You want to kill a panel? Just right click in the border and close. Same thing for a tab. You are geting bored and desperately want the full Debian menu? F12 brings it up. It sounds impossible, and rather ridiculous. But here is what is amazing. There comes a point at which all this suddenly becomes automatic as a way of working. You do not think about it or look for your crib sheet, you just enter a few characters, and things happen. You never have one window behind another, nothing ever overlaps. You get used to splitting up your panes just so, for instance a calculator always open in the top right of your three or four. A file manager under it. Then the main window. A terminal someplace of course. There are no, zero widgets. No taskbar. No clock or date. Nothing to tell you about the status of the network. What is F2 for, after all? Presumably one of your little panes someplace is always running a terminal, so who needs widgets? There are not even any borders. All you see is apps and a tiny little bar at the top telling yoiu which tab you are in by going a paler shade of blue grey. I have to tell you, this is an experience to make you think and scratch your head and think some more. If Apple were right, it should not work. If Gnome were right, it should not work. And on day 1 it does not. But on day n, it not only works, it feels just perfectly right and automatic, your fingers just do things, and you forget you are using Ion, its just how things are done here. Try it. You will never feel the same about HIGs and that guy and his silly law again. Fitts he might have been. And you will never again confuse being easy to use on day 1 for the ignorant with being easy to use when you know it well and are experienced. No, they are completely different things. Ion is a bit under resourced at the moment, as Richard pointed out. But for the deprived minimalist, there are other alternatives, most notably from the nosuck school of software, wmii, awesome, and a couple more of that ilk. If you are interested enough to try ion, have a look at wmii and its associates too. Anyone with a serious interest in man computer interfaces will find it worth the effort. Peter ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences:
Re: [OT] The lessons of Ion
No, I missed out on the fun with vi and ed. I am old enough to remember text only interfaces however and felt that the GUI was a great liberation from them. This was Macs, and for many years I bought into 'ease of use' and HIGs until the GUIs started to get more and more obtrusive and irritating and I began to think about why I was still doing things in some ridiculously complicated way - where were the shorcuts? They were not there, because so much of the GUI we know and love today evolved in an era when there were lots of new users for whom things had to be dumbed down so they could have instant usability. At some point I realized that it is worth spending a few hours learning something unfamiliar in order to go three times as quickly and with much less irritation at the end of it. The interesting thing about Ion is that it is not obscurantist, after only a few days, although certainly it starts out feeling that way. Its also an interface that is definitely post GUI. It is not an attempt to get rid of the mouse. Its a different approach to the relationship between the OS and applications. In a funny way, there is something early Mac like about it, in the sense that the author has looked at the interface from the point of view that what the OS interface must do is get out of the way and let you at the applications, not make you click all the time in all these nesting menus as if you were a four year old with a short attention span for learning. Why do we accept that you have to learn how to use spreadsheets and word processors and photo editors and programming languages, but think that everyone should be able to pick up a computer and use it without learning anything, and then be forced to carry on using it the same way on day 300 as they did on day 1? To get everything you need done in Ion only takes a dozen key combinations. Most of what you need can be done with three or four. It does depend on the applications working graphically as they always did. But the OS interface and all its widgets and windows and clicking through stuff just vanishes. It is not like the extreme ones like ratpoison either where you virtually have no mouse. You do use the mouse in Ion, but only for a few OS things that its best for. So you just memorize the key combinations. it only takes an hour. Why is that so awful? Iceweasel, Icedove and so on in Debian? Well, you probably know, its to do with how open the branding is and what license it comes with. I have too much respect for the Debian guys to argue very much about it, if they do it, they must have good reasons. You have to give Ion a fair run to have the AHA experience. And anytime you get sick of it, you can flip to Gnome with a logout. Try it. But try it for long enough to have that moment. -- View this message in context: http://runtime-revolution.278305.n4.nabble.com/OT-The-lessons-of-Ion-tp2544524p2545647.html Sent from the Revolution - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
