davidra@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (David A. Rabson) (06/01/88)
I was recently talking to an acquaintance of mine who was complaining about
learning to use one of those supposedly easy-to-learn editors, Word Perfect.
The problem, I soon realized, was the lack of an internal logic, an ideology
of editing, or better yet, an entire ideology of the user interface. The
MacIntosh has addressed this need admirably, but no one, as far as I can
tell, has yet implemented an editor entirely in conformity with the MacIntosh
philosophy. I would like to propose just such an editor, which I will call
MacWordMasterPerfectStar.
One of the more confusing aspects of using the MacIntosh for the beginner is
the complexity of the hierarchical file structure. Most novices find it
difficult to understand the difference between files and folders, and named
icons can be intimidating. MacWordMasterPerfectStar avoids confusion by
eliminating all such computereese concepts: old documents are simply left
lying on the desktop at full size so the user can tell which is which.
What many first-time users find most difficult to deal with on the MacIntosh
(or any computer) is the keyboard. Every keyboard is slightly different
from every other, and it just gets too confusing to remember. Even the
letter keys are in confusing places--who ever thought of putting E next
to W next to Q? MacWordMasterPerfectStar does away with the keyboard
entirely: absolutely everything is controlled by the mouse. A pull-down
menu includes an alphabet submenu
----------------------
| Graphic Shapes |
| Special Symbols |
| Alpha--------------------------------
| Numbe| select letter with mouse |
--------| ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ |
| abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz |
|______________________________|
from which every letter, upper and lower case, is available. The
user points to the letter he or she wants, clicks down the mouse button
to "grab" it, then moves the mouse into the page area and releases
the mouse button at the point at which he wishes to place the letter.
It should be noted that, unlike conventional type-setting systems,
where there is only a finite number of metal letters sitting in the
tray, the MacWordMasterPerfectStar "tray" of movable print is
inexhaustible. A user could cover the entire page with the letter "e"
and never worry about running out.
An early version of MacWordMasterPerfectStar included a feature whereby
the user could line up all the type on the page by clicking the mouse
button twice; alpha testing, however, showed that many people had
trouble understanding when to click once and when twice. We remembered
how early predecessors of the MacIntosh had mice with three keys, and
how, in a similar way, users could never remember which to hit when, so
we went one step further and eliminated the troublesome defect of
"click once" versus "click twice." All MacWordMasterPerfectStar mouse
clicks are treated the same way. This meant abandoning the line-up-type
feature, but after only a little practice, the user will have no
difficulty at all getting the letters on the page to line up neatly
and straight--all with the mouse.
The final user-friendly feature we decided to implement in
MacWordMasterPerfectStar was a highly simplified way of saving documents
on the floppy disk. Users told us how they hated not knowing which
document was on what disk and in what folder ... and so on.
MacWordMasterPerfectStar eliminates all confusion by putting exactly
one saved document on each disk. The user merely writes the name
of the document on the disk label, and then the document is no harder
to find than any conventionally-prepared piece of paper. Moreover,
a single MacIntosh disk can hold the equivalent of hundreds of pages of
paper but is much smaller.
Finally, it should be noted that MacWordMasterPerfectStar operates
quite strictly on the popular what-you-see-is-what-you-get (wysiwyg)
system. Everything from the placement and rotation of letters to
the screen resolution and page size is precisely duplicated when
the document is sent to the printer. There are never any "hidden
commands" or complicated formatting procedures to master--everything
is moved by the mouse and looks the same on the printer as on the
screen.
For information on ordering MacWordMasterPerfectStar, write to
devnull@kgbvax.peristroika.comgaynor@constance.rutgers.edu (Silver) (06/05/88)
> easy-to-learn > for the beginner > Most novices > first-time users > [etc] Let me point out that novice users remain so for only a short period of time, depending upon the learning curve for the product... More later... [Ag]
gaynor@constance.rutgers.edu (Silver) (06/05/88)
> The problem, I soon realized, was the lack of an internal logic, an > ideology of editing, or better yet, an entire ideology of the user > interface. The MacIntosh has addressed this need admirably, but no > one, as far as I can tell, has yet implemented an editor entirely in > conformity with the MacIntosh philosophy. Indeed, the MacIntosh-style interface (viz Xerox'x PARC interface, I believe) is noted for its organization and consistency. Point for Apple. > One of the more confusing aspects of using the MacIntosh for the > beginner is the complexity of the hierarchical file structure. > [Avoid confusion by] elminating all such computereese concepts. This particular example is a particularly bad choice of a `confusing computereese concept'. Tree-structured hierarchical directory structures are not very confusing. It even has a real-world correspondence in envelopes, manilla folders, desk drawers, etc. Just because an idea requires learning does not make the idea confusing or unsound. > ... old documents are simply left lying on the desktop at full size > so the user can tell which is which. Havoc surely ensues for any non-trivial number of documents. I rarely let a directory contain more than 20 or 30 files, because I have a lot of trouble dealing with more than two handfuls of objects at once. > Every keyboard is slightly different from every other, and it just > gets too confusing to remember. Too true. It's amazing that keyboard layouts have not been standardized. I someday hope to see reconfigurable keyboards to sidestep this problem, or even a means to make them portable between machines (they say you can't take it with you? :-). > Even the letter keys are in confusing places--who ever thought of > putting E next to W next to Q? This was done in the early days of manual typewriters to slow typists down to a rate that the machine could handle without jamming. Precious little success with that idea. See Devorak's work on keyboard layouts for a detailed discussion on more reasonable keyboard configurations. > [symbol menus easily accessable by the mouse] So far so good. Consider also a menu of transformations defined for each symbol or category of symbols. The PostScript language designed by Adobe is an interesting and orthogonal implementation of many of the standard concepts of graphic layout. See The PostScript Language Reference Manual by Adobe for more information. > [more than one mouse button vs. clicking patterns] I am an advocate of mice with multiple buttons simply because we are physically capable of dealing with them. It takes only a finger and an opposing thumb to grip a mouse, leaving three fingers available for other tasks. It is up to the designer of the interface to make sure that the buttons are treated consistently. An extension to this concept is `chording'. Unless handled very carefully, though, chording can become overly complicated (control-shift left-and-middle-button? Hmph.) > [one document per floppy disk, to avoid confusion about the disks > contents] You present one fairly weak argument in support, without addressing any other issues. - Floppy disks cost money. Not much, but it adds up. You're saying the remaining space on a disk be forgotten until used. - You are restricting your memory medium to floppy disks? What have you decided to do about mass storage media, like hard disks? This is a preposterous idiom to follow in this event, of course. - Some groups of documents belong together; you leave it up to the user make sure that the physical disks are always grouped together. This goes along with the concept of directory structure, above. - (Fill in your favorit argument in the space provided.) ___________ __________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ > ... (wysiwyg) ... A good idea in most cases. There are times when it's inconvenient, though. There are lots of programming concepts that can easily be lost if care isn't taken to preserve them, like functional abstraction, data hiding, etc. Regards, [Ag]
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (06/07/88)
> This was done in the early days of manual typewriters to slow typists > down to a rate that the machine could handle without jamming. Sigh, again this old myth surfaces. It was done to put frequently-used letters far apart, to minimize jamming. This tends to *speed up* typists slightly. > ... See Devorak's work on > keyboard layouts for a detailed discussion on more reasonable > keyboard configurations. All independent attempts to verify Dvorak's claims have been unsuccessful. Improvements on the order of 10% are typical. Useful, but not worth the pain of conversion. -- "For perfect safety... sit on a fence| Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology and watch the birds." --Wilbur Wright| {ihnp4,decvax,uunet!mnetor}!utzoo!henry
robert@pvab.UUCP (Robert Claeson) (06/13/88)
In article <Jun.5.02.10.06.1988.3586@constance.rutgers.edu>, gaynor@constance.rutgers.edu (Silver) writes: > It's amazing that keyboard layouts have not been standardized. I saw some prototype layout for some ISO or some-such standard one or two years ago. It looked much like the IBM AT-3 or maybe DEC VT220 keyboard.