Re: [9fans] UI design | enhancements.

[Chris McGee <newton688@gmail.com>]

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Hi Darren,

Your goal seem to be to make the system less daunting for new users. I
think there are a number of ways to accomplish this.

Dressing up the UI and/or making it more like popular used interfaces might
be one way to make new users feel more comfortable. One concern with doing
this is that it allows them to come with other assumptions that may
confusions about how the underlying system works. This effort could also
increase complexity and size of the core system. Simplicity, size and
consistency are aspects of Plan 9 that I really value. Otherwise, I might
as well just use BSD or even Linux.

In my experience one of the biggest hurdles to getting curious new users to
give Plan 9 a try is just getting access to a namespace so that they can
give it a try and learn. I think that the quickest path at the moment is to
install it onto a VM like qemu (or yuck, virtualbox) since you can bypass
the whole hardware selection and compatibility pain points. I put some
YouTube videos up showing people step-by-step with a decent number of views
and comments, so I think this helped some people just to get their hands on
it. There are more ideas that I'm playing with to help people get started,
such as building a website where you can get a drawterm in your web browser
and give it a try.

Once a new user has access to the system there could be some exercises and
tutorials to engage them. There could be a variety of these depending on
the background, whether programmer, Linux user, librarian, whatever. The
key in my opinion is to not hide the core system with layer after layer of
"pretty" GUI's, but instead reveal it gradually with decent explanations. I
think that the core of Plan 9 is much easier to explain than other systems
because of its smaller size, relatively consistent interfaces and
versatility. Once you grasp one area it is much easier to begin grasping
more of it using the skills you already have. I can't say the same thing
about Linux or any other system that I have used. Like any tool, there is
some required learning and practice. Good tools amplify your learning as
you practice with it.

Once someone understands how Plan 9 works then I think they will have many
of the tools that they need to build their own networks with it. I
recommend digging into man pages and /sys/doc at this stage. There's a
wealth of well written guides in there, although some could be made a bit
more current. A guide on how to build a home network using raspberry pi
terminals and a CPU/file server from easy to acquire, but well designed,
modern hardware would be a welcome addition.

The system is far from perfect as others will tell you but there's advances
and fixes happening steadily. I'm just not sure if focusing on the initial
user experience through UI look and feel is adding much. I think a more
general discussion of GUI capabilities, such as video and 3D graphics
capabilities, would be great, but more in the context of what kinds of
tasks people want to accomplish. The trick is to fit those improvements
into the rest of the system and not just jamming them in.

Cheers,
Chris

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