On Fri, 09 Nov 2001 11:53:31 +0100, Jon Glass wrote:
>I have pc-using friends who are slaves to the keyboard arrows. They will
>fritter away the minutes navigating through a document via the arrow keys,
>when a quick couple clicks of the mouse would have gotten them there
>quicker. :-) It's painful to watch.
Really? I've always found one tap of the PG-DN key to be a lot faster
than mousetothescrollbarthenclickanddrag. I have Unix-using friends who
blaze through multiple documents way faster than I can dream of, and
they all tell me that my slow navigation is due to my addiction to
moving my hands off the keyboard.
Lately I've been using the pen more and more as A) it helps my RSI and
B) I get a chance to use HWR even away from the Newton, which I hope
trains me to form my letters more consistantly. HWR on Newt is great,
but correcting mistakes slows me down to about the same rate at which I
can Graffiti. If I could get near-perfect accuracy out of Newt, I'd
blow away my graffiti times.
I think, to get back on topic on this off-topic topic, that UI is
something for which there is no one perfect solution. There are so many
different kinds of tasks and so many different kinds of thinkers that
it's not possible for any one user interface system to be "best" unless
it encompasses a variety of methods or else is tailored to a particular
person, task, or "kind of person" or "kind of task." I'm sure that
there's a lot of middle ground, but one of my chief gripes with Adobe
Illustrator is how much they are trying to fit a user interface that's
great for one kind of task (image editing, Photoshop) onto another kind
of task for which the interface is less suited (vector illustration).
While there's a lot about common GUI implementations that I like, I
also recall when I first started using computers with them thinking "If
I want you to go to pick up some milk at the store, I say, 'go to the
store and pick up some milk,' I don't tap you on the forehead twice or
drag you to the car.
OTOH, When I first started using OS/2 and could take a document and
drop it on the printer object instead of opening up the application and
finding "print" in the "file" menu, I started to see how a generalized
GUI *could* be more intuitive than a command-line.
Still, specific instances dictate different methods. "grep -n steve *
>> lpr" is something that could take weeks with a mouse. And changing the color of a logo to adjust for the color of the paper is something that would be very difficult to do without sliders. Some of us find it unimaginable that Apple still ships computers with single-button mouses, others ask, "what's the point of right-clicking?" and sneer at it as a "windows" thing. Some of us think it's unconscionable that Microsoft shipped several versions of Windows without a decent scripting language, others never leave their menus. Still others gripe about Mac software not having keyboard shortcuts, while some laugh at the PC users stuck to their keyboards, and the amazing thing is that both of the last two think that they get things done faster "their" way.
People are funny. Computers doubly so. About the only thing that
surprises me is that Newt appeals to such a wide variety of different
kinds of thinkers, as evidenced by the cross-section found on this
list. A lot of things about Newt's design I think are good for me but
probably not too many others. I'm happy to see how wrong I can be.
Steve
Steve
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