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: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution