domo@riddle.UUCP (Dominic Dunlop) (02/15/89)
As someone who did not make it to the recent San Diego Usenix conference (pass the Kleenex, Maude), I'd be grateful if somebody could post a summary of what happened at the BOF session held to discuss user interface issues in news readers. If anybody would care to send me citations for papers on news readers, I'd welcome them too. For why? I'm vaguely toying with the idea of making an interface using Hypercard on the Macintosh (seems like a natural Hypercard application to me), and need all the help I can get. (For God's sake don't hold your breath for the results. I'll just say that anything that does eventually emerge will be PD or shareware.) -- Dominic Dunlop domo@sphinx.co.uk domo@riddle.uucp
lear@NET.BIO.NET (Eliot Lear) (02/17/89)
Apparently, my message didn't make it to far, so here it is again. Let me just quickly mention that there was a hypercard Mac news reader demonstrated at the BOF done by some folks from Dartmouth. If you are interested in furthering discussion on this topic, there is a mailing list. Please contact me for more info. USENET BOF summary Our goal at the BOF was to stimulate conversation among the community in areas of improving user interfaces to the large amounts of information available to USENET readers. The idea of the discussion tree was raised, and while this wasn't a new idea, no reader implements the idea to its fullest benefits. HP had a strong showing with a number of good ideas. Jim Davis raised the concept of arbitrary review, where individuals could mark a message good or bad, and others could select messages based on that information. Jeff Okamoto proposed investigation of a standard set of low level calls to the news databases, such as getarticleby*, and others. Along these same lines, Larry Wall mentioned the idea of adding similar functionality to PERL. Keyword based systems also were mentioned during the night. Dave Taylor brought out the idea of a standard set of keywords for each group generated by some form of textual analysis. While the hair on Erik's neck was raised, he did not become overly violent when ``keywords'' were mentioned. Speaking of keywords, there was a small calling for a change in the newsgroup paradigm. Larry Wall mentioned that he would want to implement a more general selection mechanism, ie one that would select on arbitrary keys (headers, et al). Others argued for such notions as FLEXGROUPS, as dubbed by Eric Raymond in his code. And there was, once again, a call for moderation sparked by Spaf and Rich McGill. Attendence was very good. Erik and I would like to thank all those who attended and gave input. Next time, we'll ask for a bigger room. -- Eliot Lear [lear@net.bio.net]
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (02/19/89)
In article <Feb.17.01.59.07.1989.20990@NET.BIO.NET> lear@NET.BIO.NET (Eliot Lear) writes: >Let me just quickly mention that there was a hypercard Mac news >reader demonstrated at the BOF done by some folks from Dartmouth... Small correction: what they demonstrated was a *mockup* of a hypercard news reader, done as a demo and design study, not functional software. -- The Earth is our mother; | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology our nine months are up. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
lear@NET.BIO.NET (Eliot Lear) (02/19/89)
Apologies. I stand corrected. What we saw was indeed a mockup of a proposed interface. -- Eliot Lear [lear@net.bio.net]