Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Simplicity In the Age Of The GUI

Posted by timothy on from the decluttering dept.

evenprime writes: "Wired is running a story on Mark Hurst's extremely retro GoodEasy computing environment, and how it's old fashioned *nix approach to computing -- flat text, small simple programs that can be chained together -- increases user productivity" It's an interesting, hyper-simple approach, though any user outside of Mark's agency would have to apply some creative adaption. Every few months, I try to re-organize and simplify the documents and programs on my system, this looks like a good experiment for the next time.

2 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. Good and Easy slashdotted already? by Ghoser777 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Geez, you don't get much simpler than a text file. Maybe they should spend more time working on their server than just the interface.

    But I have to admit the stripped down version of everything to text files sounds effecient and fast - but most users also like the colorful bell and whistles. Might try this out sometime... if I can ever get at that blasted text file.

    F-bacher

    --
    James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
  2. Cleaning up MS-Word generated HTML by Louis_Wu · · Score: 5, Informative
    My office email is filled with people mailing MS Word documents to me for Web-related projects. Often there's nothing in these documents but plain text and some bolded topic headlines. If I try to convert them to HTML to make my job easier, it doesn't work, because MS litters Word-generated HTML with styles and nonstandard tags that only IE5 can understand, all to make the Web page look as much like the Word doc as possible.
    HTML Tidy, a program available from the World Wide Web Consortium, will strip out the junk from Word-to-HTML documents you've converted to HTML. Go to the HTML Tidy web page and search for "Support for Word2000" - it should be a page or two down.

    You can grab binaries for several OSs, binaries of other programs which have incorporated Tidy into themselves, or get the source. Hope that this works for you.