Re: [9fans] interesting potential targets for plan 9 and/or inferno

["Joel C. Salomon" <joelcsalomon@gmail.com>]

On 2/26/07, Paul Lalonde <plalonde@telus.net> wrote:
> The fundamental issue with the GUI isn't one of prettiness.  It's one
> of naive/novice use.  Like the rest of Plan9, the GUI assumes an
> expert user.  But ever since the original Mac, the marketing message
> has been that GUIs are designed for instantaneous ease-of-use, and
> any training required is strictly application-centric instead of
> interaction-centric.

Depends what the GUI is an interface *to*.  As an interface to the OS,
rio works great without buttons and dialogs and menu bars.  Individual
graphical applications might have different natural interfaces.  (I've
heard nice things about the interface to inferno's debugger, for
example.)  And there's *lots* of "application-centric" to go around;
how many different things are meant by right-click, or click-and-drag,
in various applications?  Take many word processors, for example:
click-drag to select a block of text, then click-drag to move it.

If you're designing a program that needs a complicated UI, the
existence of "standard" GUI guidelines might help with the learning
curve.  Or they might get in the way of a better interface designed by
an interface expert (rarely the programmer, rob pike being the notable
exception).

--Joel