Re: [9fans] User Interface

[phaet0n <phaet0n@hotmail.com>]

I have to admit that reading this newsgroup is
perhaps the most amusing thing one can do on
the internet. Having followed it in silence since
release 3, I've decided to break silence.

Plan 9 is gorgeously designed. It's actually
refreshing. But I've not touched it recently.
More later.

The UI crisis can be traced to the fact that no
developer ships documentation with commerical
end-user software any more. Online help is
appauling. Moreover, developers have no
consistency of metaphor. Apple's success can be
traced to the fact that their UI guidelines were
with development documentation. I've never
encountered an Apple user who didn't have at
least minimal command of a new application,
mainly because developers tried to adhere to
those guidelines. If you expect those guidelines
to be followed by every OS, well you're an idiot.
However, if you expect the UI to be intuitive,
then you're dead right. The installer for Plan 9
is intuitive. In fact, Rio is intuitive. I felt
at ease immediately using them. The only
curiosity was the ESC feature in Rio which
required reading the man page. As you see, I don't
even know what it's called, but I use it...
intuitive. This minimal intuitiveness is all that
is required. The rest falls on the user to gain
acquaintence with the metaphor used by the OS
designer. This is where Plan 9 becomes truly
refreshing. Please read about how it treats
process namespaces, how the snarf buffer works,
how rio can be run within itself, and thus how
hardware devices are multiplexed and treated as
files. The list goes on and on. But it requires a
little work on your part so, please, read the
papers on website.

Intuitiveness is framed by personal experience.
If someone could only get this into the skulls of
the HCI people at schools. We use elevators, hand- 
guns, can openers, etc., not because they're
inherently intuitive, but because we've seen them
being used since we were very little. This is not
some kind of Freudian condition that requires
having intefaces resemble your mother in order to
be intuitive. Although it would explain why
going down is so popular in others OSes.

As for having not used p9 recently that's because
I'm not willing to work in 8bit under my Matrox
MII. I don't know how to write PCI drivers. So
for now, I'm developing a compiler for a (yes, 
another) functional language, since I hate C and
can't get GHC, or nhc to build. I'm working on
BeOS, which is very nice but dying. It works and I
get to use OCaml to develop the compiler. Now all
I have to do is to ask you kind folks where I can
find out about Plan 9's object format so I can
port the Netwide assembler and get it to emit
proper object files. Then hopefully we can all
look forward to a nice compiler in the future
which emits objects for both Plan 9 and ELF.

Thank you. And keep me laughing, or crying.
Thanks to Rob eh, and the gang at Bell Labs.
Your work is greatly appreciated.

ph
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