I don't necessarily agree with that article. The supporting idea of do-the-UI-then-the-underlying-infrastructure is that when making the UI sometimes things messed up. That just means that the task of making the UI is "incomplete", not that the paradigm is wrong.
By making the UI and then the underlying structure, I see 2 problems: 1) any new addition to the UI means complete update of the infrastructure, which IMHO is a pain and an incovenience (poor scalability) That is the whole point of using abstraction. I mean, we could write the whole kernel in a huge big file, for all we care. 2) UI complexibility defines infrastructure sophistication. If you want your user to have a simple, easy UI, then you infrastructure will lose its customability (which is one of the main strenghts that Linux has). On the other hand, if you want to make your software to have lots of options and different settiungs, then the UI becomes a surreal nightmare. You would lose all the features that abstraction has (ease of update, scalability, customization) only because of fear of problems in the synchronization of your UI with the underlying system, while a good job at designing the UI and the system would make that easier. We need to understand that due to the fact that most Linux software is Open Source (in other words, there is no one entity orchestrating the development of it), of course we are bound to run into compatibility problems once in a while. That why Apple computers don't have that many problems in that area: there are so few people developing for Macs that it is a lot easier to make sure that everything fits together seamlessly (and that is the reason of why the only games for Macintosh are Breakout, Super Breakout, and... Photoshop) -Chris Alvarez Chris Alvarez [EMAIL PROTECTED] ext. 1-3837 IS&T Web Applications Services Novell, Inc., the leading provider of information solutions http://www.novell.com >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 07/21/04 12:46 AM >>> A while ago I was complaining on #utah about how the way we use computers typically is flaw. I mentioned how MS and others are trying to abstract away the complexity of the underlying system, while still forcing you to deal with that complexity (ie when things break you have to go through the registry or the file system). This slashdot comment has some interesting comments on this very subject and makes the interesting point that abstraction is often a bad thing. Instead we should make the underlying system simpler, more robust, and less breakable: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=115172&cid=9756869 What do you all think? Michael -- Michael Torrie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
