david@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (David E. Smyth) (03/02/91)
Note that this is cross posted, intentionally.
Don't follow up with flames or garbage, because it goes to ALOT of people.
Motif, OpenLook, etc etc etc. What's it gonna be, boy, Motif or
OpenLook?
I look at my environment, and in fact most of it is Athena based,
because by very far most of the X tools are passed around on the net,
and most of those tools are Athena based.
I really don't have a big problem with it. I don't, and never have,
had a problem with going from the shell to an editor. Sure, the set of
keyboard commands changes totally. But so what? The job I'm doing
changes totally.
Your car and your toaster have totally different user interfaces. Do
you burn toast because the toaster doesn't start with a turn of a key?
Do we really have to be fascist about this? Does it really bother you
that some of your tools work differently from others?
My daughter is 11. At her school, the kids do some work on Apple
IIe's. When we go visit my grandparents, she writes stories on their
Mac. I asked her what the difference was.
"Oh, no difference, they work exactly the same. The Apple doesn't have
a mouse or anything, but otherwise they are the same."
"No mouse? How do you, say, save files? Or change the type in point?
or delete stuff?"
"Oh, you type Ctrl <something>, or move around with the arrow keys,
and Esc <this> or Esc <that> does the other stuff."
No difference at all. FYI, she also doesn't notice the difference
between Athena and Motif applications here on the Suns at my office.
One problem I have with this entire L&F Jihad is that it assumes that
anybody really needs to choose. The PC world has clearly demonstrated
that amazingly huge amounts of money can be made selling a mixture of
radically different and IMHO always terrible user interfaces.
Sure, the Mac has always has a unified L&F. But PCs have beaten the
crap out of the Mac in the commercial market place. Why do we X and
UNIX people feel that the path to success requires emulating the Mac?
Perhaps as an industry, we should take a course in recent history:
History 101: "The PC vs Mac, What Matters and What Doesn't".
While we are at it, we should also come to the realization that the
choices currently offered are not all that good. IMHO they are both
a giant step backward from the fluidly evolving environments available
on the Xerox workstations by the mid 80's. One more recommended course:
History 102: "The Various Xerox Window Environments
- Still A Decade Ahead of Motif and OpenLook"
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David Smyth david@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov
Senior Software Engineer, seismo!cit-vax!jpl-devvax!david
X and Object Guru. (818)393-0983
Jet Propulsion Lab, M/S 230-103, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109
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One of these days I'm gonna learn: Everytime I throw
money at a problem to make it disappear, the only thing
that disappears is my money...
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