henry@rochester.UUCP (10/08/85)
From: Henry.Kautz
The Xerox STAR interface is quite different from the Mac/Lisa design.
For starters, there are no menus of any kind, only dialog boxes. Icons
cannot be dragged. Windows cannot be repositioned arbitrarily on the
screen: the most you can do is shorten a window, or ask it to be near
the left or right edge of the screen. (Can you say awkward? Sure, you
can...) Everything is done with a bunch of function keys. Eg, to move
a icon: you click on it; hit MOVE on the keyboard; a message comes up
which says "click on destination location"; finally, click where you
want it to appear. Selecting regions is different; typing appears
after the region, rather than replacing it. Typing special characters in a
document is a real tango: you press the function key "KEYBOARD"; a
picture of keyboard appears; while holding the function key, you click
on buttons to get a special keyboard; finally, you click on the desired
key in the screen picture of the keyboard. Changing font styles or
sizes is done in an entirely different way... (Get someone else to
tell you about the STAR's drawing tools. You can make pretty pictures
like MacDraw, but again, the manipulations are incredibly awkward.)
In short: Apple was the first company to do a visual interface RIGHT.
(Possibly the world's worst visual interface is on the Symbolic's Lisp
machines. $100,000+ per machine, and powered by nitroglycerin, but
every single systems program does windows, scrolling, menus , etc
differently!)
---- Henry Kautz
:uucp: {seismo|allegra}!rochester!henry
:arpa: henry@rochester
:mail: Dept. of Comp. Sci., U. of Rochester, NY 14627
:phone: (716) 275-5766mohan@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU (Sunil Mohan) (10/10/85)
> From: Henry.Kautz > > The Xerox STAR interface is quite different from the Mac/Lisa design. > For starters, there are no menus of any kind, only dialog boxes. Icons > cannot be dragged. Windows cannot be repositioned arbitrarily on the > screen: the most you can do ............... > In short: Apple was the first company to do a visual interface RIGHT. > (Possibly the world's worst visual interface is on the Symbolic's Lisp > machines. $100,000+ per machine, and powered by nitroglycerin, but > every single systems program does windows, scrolling, menus , etc > differently!) Haven't the Xerox D-machines been around longer than the Symbolics ? At any rate the D-m/c interface is FAR better than any I have ever seen, including the Mac, and Symbolics. Any info on what the interfaces on the CMU's 3M m/c and the corresponding project at MIT are (or will be) like ? -- _ Sunil UUCP: ...{harvard, seismo, ut-sally, sri-iu, ihnp4!packard}!topaz!mohan ARPA: Mohan@RUTGERS
johnson@uiucdcsp.CS.UIUC.EDU (10/17/85)
Actually, the Xerox Star does support dragging icons. For example, a document is printed by COPYing its icon to the printer icon. This admitedly requires an extra button push, but it is essentially the same as dragging an icon. After awhile, I decided that using lots of function keys instead of menus was not such a bad idea. Every program uses the functions, so it didn't take long before I was able to predict how to make a program do what I wanted it to do. I never saw a Star manual, but I wrote a number of documents on Stars. The laser printer made great overhead slides. Window management on the Star is pretty awkward. Even worse is its over-all slowness and lack of concurrency. Worst of all is its method of font selection. The XDE (Xerox Development Environment) interface is much more like that of the Mac, as is that of Smalltalk. All have movable windows, popup menus, and an overall similar feel. The Suntools interface also predated the Mac, though not (I think) the Lisa. One major difference between these systems and the Mac is that they all use two or three button mice and popup (rather than pull-down) menus. I much prefer multibutton mice. Ralph Johnson