On Dec 8, 2003, at 1:55 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
...and in some cases positively. Geoff Canyon's Navigator is very powerful,
but like Emacs it's not as intuitive as less powerful alternatives.
I keep thinking about this one Richard. It's apropos for me because I am a die hard Emacs user, but not (yet) a Rev Navigator plugin user. I keep hearing how powerful Rev Navigator is but I have yet to penetrate the GUI enough to grok it.
As for Emacs- in retrospect the only reason I sat down and studied hard and made the real effort to learn Emacs enough to become really proficient with it was: because I worked with some folks who where very experienced Emacs users. I saw how productive they were, how quickly and precisely they could edit many files and buffers. That really piqued my interest.
So I need to look over someone's shoulder and see with my own eyeballs how powerful Rev Navigator is. How about some animated demo stacks, Geoff? :-)
In many cases there is a trade-off between learnability and usability. ...
Maybe always?
Unlike Kai who thought he could paint-in the usability, or Apple's Aqua (the HIG du jour), or Windows (take the Windows Explorer GUI and clone it). Instead as xplatform, 4GL developers we should take practical steps in our apps by designing with use-cases, and making learnable, usable interfaces.
Larry Constantine says "An effective architecture allows users to move freely from one set of facilities to another [acquisition, transition, production], rather than forcing them to think and operate in one particular mode across the board." _Software for Use_ in chapter "Once a Beginner: Supporting Evolving Usage Patterns".
Meanwhile, multi-platform developers sit in the middle of the OS wars, like
third-world countries trampled in the proxy wars of the Cold War era, trying
to decide if the confirmation button in a dialog should be on the right as
in Mac OS or on the left as in Windows. ::sigh::
Another reason I like _Software for Use_ is it's platform agnostic for the most part. Most of the screen shots are from Windows apps, but it doesn't matter re: the message. Instead of having blind faith that Apple or Microsoft will give us the true answers in their HIG, Software for Use has real world, common sense, psychologically valid, useful stuff. I can only hope to one day have heeded most of the advice in the book! <http://www.foruse.com/>
But at the end, the question about placement of the dialog confirmation button will still be unanswered because the Software for Use analysis would maybe only lead us to conclude "wait, that confirmation dialog was just a hinderance to begin with" and get rid of it. :-)
Alex Rice <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | Mindlube Software | <http://mindlube.com>
what a waste of thumbs that are opposable to make machines that are disposable -Ani DiFranco
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