From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: phaet0n Message-ID: <758512ed.0108160506.3c0f4d33@posting.google.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit References: <20010814125559.826F319A3E@mail.cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] User Interface Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2001 13:45:14 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: dea97396-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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 --