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

[Paul Lalonde <plalonde@telus.net>]

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Preaching to the choir (I hope):
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.  Rio, sam and acme defy this; in exchange for  
more usable screen real-estate and fewer interaction events (both of  
which are good for expert users) the ease of initial use has been  
sacrificed.  For people who drive ed, vi, and/or emacs, and had  
little experience with GUIs, the jump was easy.  Add to the system  
that you *really* have to be comfortable with the command-line to be  
productive, and I think the pool of possible users of the P9 GUI is  
pretty small.

I do a fair bit of remote interaction (code reviews, design,  
debugging) using skype and VNC.  It's interesting that the older  
folks (who grew up without GUIs) I do this with have little trouble  
taking the 1-minute "point to move the cursor, chord like this to cut- 
and-paste, click like this to execute a shell command" and being  
reasonably useful with it.  The younger, just as smart crew however,  
throw up their hands and say "whatever man, that's whacked".

It makes me sad, but I don't expect to see any innovation in GUIs  
oriented to expert users.  There's just too much resistance to change  
and too little attention payed to the load that the novice parts of  
the current interfaces incurs on user interaction.

Paul

On 26-Feb-07, at 4:03 PM, Eric Van Hensbergen wrote:

> On 2/26/07, ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 2/26/07, erik quanstrom <quanstro@coraid.com> wrote:
>> > plan 9 is having trouble keeping the converted.  why would
>> > adding one more layer of goo to the gnu goo stack convert
>> > the hardened of heart?
>>
>> Because the first thing that most people say when I show them rio is
>> 'yuck'. And, in most cases, they don't stop saying 'yuck'.Acme does
>> not help.
>>
>> Sorry, but most people hate the Plan 9 GUI. It is off-putting enough
>> that they are not that interested in seeing the beauty of it all.
>>
>
> Regardless, neither rio or acme will work well on a cell phone.
> Probably be best off with mux.  However, I think we can all agree --
> while the underlying infrastructure of the Plan 9 GUI continues to be
> innovative and interesting, the GUI itself has never been a focus nor
> a strength of the system.  I'm not saying we should merge Qt and Gtk
> or any of the Linux variants -- I continue to think we need to focus
> on our strengths rather than getting bogged down in eye candy.
>
>           -eric

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