It was thus said that the Great "Fred Cisin (XenoSoft)" once stated:
>
> On Tue, 22 May 2001, Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:
> > > unit made by Cannon called the Cannon Cat any info on this would be most
> > Jef Raskin's own site is at http://www.jefraskin.com/ . He has some very
> > interesting ideas about UIs and I find his work facinating, although the
> > average geek seem to miss his point (in the last year there have been two
> > articles on Slashdot (http://slashdot.org/) about Jef Raskin and the general
> > population there hasn't been kind to Jef).
>
> Raskin is brilliant, but what he likes is not going to be well received
> here. By analogy, I think that an automatic transmission, automatic choke,
> etc. are neat ideas, but I do NOT want them on MY car. I don't think that
> I "miss the point", just that I prefer manual control of most systems, no
> matter how "neat" or "clever" an automatic system is.
Fair enough. Me, while I like knowing how the computer works, most of the
time *I* don't care enough to manually tweak something, or babysit some
annoyingly written piece of software. I want my computer to run without
thought.
And that probably explains why I drive an automatic car (it even turns the
headlights on automatically). Sure, I know how a car works (generally, with
some gaps in knowledge here and there) but I view it more as something to
use. Same with most computers I work with (and that's one of my biggest
gripes with poorly run Unix networks---babysitting the damn things [1]).
> If you put a disk into a drive and the computer can't read it, do you WANT
> the computer to go aghead and format it without asking?
Similar to Unix and the ``rm'' command---make one slight mistake and well
... Have backup? Nothing worse than finding the ``rm'' command aliased to
``rm -i''. Yes! Yes! Delete the files! Aaaaaaah! /bin/rm blah blah.
It depends on what you're used to. And when I read about that (in
Microsoft's ``Programmers At Work''---great book by the way) I thought it
was the coolest thing. I felt it made a lot of sense, but yes, I can see it
being problematic in a heterogeneous setup, which I think is your concern.
> The Cat DID have a mouse input. ("as do ALL cats") And Raskin claims
> credit for the Mac having only one button on its mouse. (because 2 or
> three buttons would be too "confusing")
In his interview in ``Programmers at Work,'' he stated he didn't care for
mice at all, as it forces you to relocate your hands from the keyboard to
the mouse, and that most navigation could be done faster via the keyboard
than with a mouse [3]. And his current work he mentions his dislike of the
mouse.
> I have heard that the particular
> "confusion" was:
> 1) the user would have to look away from the screen to see which button
> they were pushing
> 2) it is hard to explain to the user to push a specific button, but easy
> to say "push THE button"
If it was him (and not Jobs) those are valid reasons, but it's not too
difficult to color the buttons differently (or put a pip on one of them like
my keyboard here has pips on the `f' and `j' keys [4]) and label one the
primary button the other the secondary button. But left handed people
present another problem in which the buttons need to be reversed (easily
enough via software). Ah well.
> [BTW, if you velcro a PCJr keyboard to the top of a mouse, then you have
> the RIGHT number of buttons, and no longer need to take your hand off of
> the keyboard to mouse! (most other computers have keyboards that are too
> massive to do that]
That's still a pretty big keyboard (I'm looking at it right now). The
idea of using the keyboard *as* the mouse (as in, the keyboard can slide
around) is intriguing, but I'm not sure if I would want my keyboad to slide
around like that.
-spc (I really enjoy Raskin's work though ... )
[1] I work in the NOC (Network Operations Center) at a large company, so
all I'm really concerned with is monitoring the network and servers
(if something goes down, I call SA). No administration, no
development. Some of the SAs are complaining about zombies [2] and
it bugs *ME* (because I'm that way 8-) that the SAs have to manually
go in and kill them (even if it's to run a shell script which does
it). I know how to fix the programs causing the zombies and it's
only a few lines of code (in C even!) that need to be added.
But it's a large company. Sigh.
[2] Zombies are zombie processes under Unix that are caused when a child
process exits but the parent process doesn't check the status. They
don't really consume any resources other than a process slot, but
the fact they're there is annoying.
[3] In my experience, that's true once you learn how to navigate a
document via the keyboard. But there are some things I like using
a mouse for though.
[4] The Apple keyboards have the pips on the `d' and `k' keys, which
annoys me, but I understand the reasoning behind Apple doing that
(middle finger is longer than the rest and will hit the keyboard
first, hence the pips on `d' and `k').
Received on Tue May 22 2001 - 22:10:19 BST