[Am-info] Gates: Antitrust trial "a waste of resources"

[Steve Cohen]

While it's possible, nay, even probable that I am so warped by all my experience that I cannot conceive something outside the box, I must say I haven't got a clue as to what kind of interfaces
Mr. Raskin would be satisfied with.  From this fragment, he is cataloguing places where the current interfaces fall short and I can agree with many of his points - but I find it hard to imagine how improvements along the lines he suggests may be created.  Modelessness may be desirable, but modality arose from a need to keep the machine's context simple enough to be understood.  

If we are to hope that a machine will "know" what we want to do, then we must be willing to accept the fact that sometimes it is going to get in the way by misintuiting what it thinks we want to do.  The annoying "defaults" of Microsoft come most readily to mind.  That is not a road I'm necessarily inclined to go down.

I can agree, though, that too much effort is spent on getting the new user up to minimum acceptable speed and not enough is done to help the experienced user do things more easily.  Still, I doubt very much that a return to the command line is what Raskin has in mind.

--

On Thu, 15 Jun 2000 09:02:56   Dan Strychalski wrote:
>Paul Rickard (mail@msbc.simplenet.com) wrote --
>
>> ====== On 06.14.2000 7:35 AM, Wandered Inn typed: =======
>>
>>>>     What would Windows possibly look like if Apple had won? Something
>>>> like Microsoft BoB, or perhaps little more than the old DOS shell
>>>> programs? If Microsoft had to come up with its own interface, Windows
>>>> would have been a failure.
>>>
>>> There are those of us who believe it is still a failure.  Unfortunately,
>>> it's a very successful failure.
>>
>>     I meant a failure in every way, both technically AND monetarily.
>
>Not to mention more important ways....
>
>    ``In short, the major paradigms that underlay most of today's
>      interfaces, plus many other methods and details not mentioned in
>      this summary, are far from helpful to good human-machine
>      interaction. Available interface building tools invariably embody
>      these ineffective paradigms and methods, and condemn those who use
>      them to create interfaces that do not advance the state of the art.''
>      -- Macintosh creator Jef Raskin, in summary of his book _The Humane
>         Interface_ at <http://www.jefraskin.com/summary_of_thi.html>.
>
>Dan Strychalski
>
>
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