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- From: jan@pallas.neuroinformatik.ruhr-uni-bochum.de (Jan Vorbrueggen)
- Newsgroups: comp.arch
- Subject: Re: <None> (Should be Open Systems, bloody NEWS system...)
- Message-ID: <JAN.92Dec22131534@pallas.neuroinformatik.ruhr-uni-bochum.de>
- Date: 22 Dec 92 13:15:34 GMT
- References: <BzGL07.2wK@dscomsa.desy.de> <fWPrzAU@quack.sac.ca.us>
- <BzIx0C.C6G@dscomsa.desy.de> <id.GL0W.ED9@ferranti.com>
- Organization: Inst. f. Neuroinformatik, Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum, FRG
- Lines: 30
- In-reply-to: peter@ferranti.com's message of 21 Dec 92 21:42:13 GMT
-
- In article <id.GL0W.ED9@ferranti.com> peter@ferranti.com (peter da silva)
- writes:
-
- In general, user friendliness requires detailed control over every aspect
- of the user interface (as any Apple developer about that!).
-
- Not quite. While being able to tailor your environment to your needs is
- important, it's much more important that things are consistent across
- applications, intuitive in the sense that you don't need more than two or
- three tries to find out how to do what you intend to do, and easy to memorize
- (which, of course, is much easier if things are consistent). In some cases,
- _reducing_ the options for the programmer while offering easy access to
- standard funtions (eg, editor subwindows or flexible filename handling), is
- necessary in order to achieve this. For a windowed environment, NeXTstep and
- the Mac are the best I know of; for a commandline environment (still useful
- in many cases), I don't know of anything easier to use than VMS/DCL.
-
- Open systems require conformance to externally defined standards and
- interoperability with software you've never had a chance to spec. It's VERY
- hard to get the two together, which is why so many people are excited about
- the NeXT.
-
- I think people are excited about the NeXT because it fits the bill I gave
- above...When first introduced, the machine was anything but inter operable
- (optical disk, not all SCSI disks talk to it, nonstandard window system with
- nonstandard monitors, no power switch :)). But all applications have a
- consistent, easytouse and intuitive interface, and things like the interface
- builder make it easy for third party products to fit in.
-
- Jan
-