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Simplicity In the Age Of The GUI
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.
...though why Office 98? It's a well-executed program, but it's a monstrosity...
A simple desktop is not a bad idea, and it's sort of a shame that what he's doing doesn't really apply to OS X (there's a reason Apple hides the Unix directories from public view -- it can get very confusing).
I have one particular thing I've always done on Macs that's worth mentioning, though -- I keep a tabful of aliases down on the bottom corner of the screen of both of my Macs (near the trash, but just far enough away) that lead to various important applications on my system (BBEdit, Netscape, Stuffit, etc.). It's a great convenience factor for me, and since it all snaps out of the way it manages to avoid ugly desktop clutter.
/Brian
But thats where i keep all my STUFF!!
*tip of the hat to The Tick*
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
It would really depend on whether or not you're wanting to produce music, layout a magazine, and whatnot. If you're wanting to just use the applications included (Calendar, very lightweight web browser, email, etc) then I imagine it would be great. Definitely cuts out the bloat.
If you use a *NIX then you probably know the ease of running Lynx to hit a webpage, or just WGET'ing a file real quick. Let alone hitting Pine for email, or a ton of other oft-used apps without the overhead of a GUI environment. (Plus remember the hardware requirements that come with a decent GUI environment.)
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
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."
My wife uses our Mac at home. She clutters her desktop with icons, rarely empties the trash can unless I tell her it's essential, and (like the article says) never looks for more than one way to do a task, once she's found a way that works.
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.
Friends use instant messenging to send me short, two-sentence "hi"s throughout the day. Half of them use brightly-colored backgrounds, harshly-contrasting text colors, and hard-to-read fonts because they look cool to them. They rarely use good spelling or punctuation to make sentences easier to read. "KISS" is a slogan that has never occurred to them. They probably never empty their desktop trash, either.
All these people have something in common: they don't think like a computer. It doesn't occur to them that searching for data is easier if everything is in plain text, or that organizing your files into directories makes them easier to archive and find later, or that removing all the pretty colors and fonts and complicated layouts would make it easier for others to read what they've written. They're just here to have fun.
They're the reason for XP's Luna and MacOS's Aqua. Pretty colors and gradients don't help anyone get the job done, but it makes the computer more "friendly" and less computer-like.
Meanwhile, I send all my IM's in high-contrast colors and sans-serif fonts. I email plain text whenever possible and RTF whenever it's not. I organize my files pathologically so that I don't have to throw old things away to find new things. And my desktop background picture is only two colors: medium blue and navy, so it doesn't distract or take half a minute to redraw whenever I minimize my browser.
Because I do think like a computer. I like plain, readable text; I solve problems logically; and (unfortunately) I have a "stateless" memory which loses track of one thing as soon as it starts another. Keeping everything in neat lines and plainly-marked boxes is the only way for me to get any work done.
But if I didn't spend 8-12 hours a day in front of a computer screen, I probably wouldn't know that. I'd probably prefer the pretty colors and chaotic fonts, too.
It doesn't. But then, that's like saying that a saw is a lousy tool because it won't drive a nail easily. And a mouse and keyboard in a GUI is (IMO) a horrible tool to produce music. That's why we have MIDI keyboards and hardware mixing boards that interface to computers. And why we still sell guitars, violins and flutes in the age of computers. The slight nuances that I can add completely intuitively with a fretboard far outstrip the control you can have with a mouse interface.
That is not to say that purely electronic music is not good, but even people like Chip Davis, Trent Reznor and Wanda Carlos use all sorts of dirty tricks and analog processing to create their music, not just a mouse.
The right tool for the job... that's the point here.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
it lacks to take into account needs of different users, as well as it assumes that everyone is an office drone that only does two, three tasks on their default-set Dell with a bunch of aliases everywhere.
I like the overall idea of simple computing, but the fact is that power users, who use their machines multiple tasks, would not find most of the recommendations in this article useful.
Sorting out and organizing stuff according to your preference and style of computing is something that may work best for you.
I think that saying that 'this is the only good way' or 'this is the good way, other way is a bad way' is shortsighted and unreasonable. Some people cannot afford to have only 4 folders for specific purposes. And desktop was a designed as a place for aliases that allows you to organize and speed up the workflow.
After all, I feel that "GoodEasy" computing environment is not one that is as simple, basic, and unified as it can be. The real "GoodEasy" computing environment is the one that allows you to feel most comfortable in and lets you be most productive, depending on the tasks, work ethic, type of work, and your preferences.
And I think most people who program under some kind of unix do too. It's a combination of the GUI and the command line, not choosing between the two.
.emacs and .Xresources files that I can't work without (I can use vi just fine though). At least my preferences aren't in some registry.
Windows users can't seem to grasp it for some reason. In my Red Hat class last quarter, whenever the Windows users needed a terminal they hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get to a virtual console instead of just opening a terminal emulator. And when they did discover that the terminal emu did everything that the console did, they still didn't grasp the idea that they could have more than one terminal on the screen at once.
The only problem is that no operating system default is set up exactly how I want, so when I get to a new system, it takes me a while to set everything up the way I like... it's especially silly having to carry around a copy of my
Microsoft's Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and much of Access, are all built around the idea that bits are most useful when converted to atoms.
...
Unix uses quick-to-transmit plain text files instead of large, slow, printer-centric documents. Unix ties together multiple small programs to create systems both simple and powerful, instead of building complicated, monolithic applications that must compromise between flexibility and ease-of-use.
So Microsoft application's are based on the idea that computer users eventually want paper but Unix isn't -- but it's text-based?
I personally prefer to develop my code in a Unix, non-IDE environment, but I still think that piping text around is a real throwback. Even slightly advanced users will find themselves gluing bits of data together in a single line of text, and then using something along the lines of regular expressions to pull it apart.
For example, think about stdout and stderr. In Unix, you need two separate streams. Interleaving them is a bad idea because then you can't tell text in one stream from text in the other. You could have a single stream of output if each item in the stream were, let's say, a Text object or an Error object. You could then, in the next application down the pipe, choose to examine either Text object or Error objects, or pay attention to both. Also, the interleaving of Text and Error objects would convey useful information; something that's harder with two independent streams.
If you like the ideas of command-line, and small functional units that can be composed, and you want to build an environment from scratch, why focus on text as the main paradigm? Other things that programs could input, output and pass around include objects and tuples, which would have more intuitive tools for putting together and taking apart complex data that would otherwise be encoded into a line of text.
All these people have something in common: they don't think like a computer. It doesn't occur to them that searching for data is easier if everything is in plain text, or that organizing your files into directories makes them easier to archive and find later, or that removing all the pretty colors and fonts and complicated layouts would make it easier for others to read what they've written. They're just here to have fun.
The reverse is also true, y'know. Most UIs need to be redesigned (hence Luna and Aqua) because they weren't made to work with someone who thinks like a person. Specifically a business person.
Y'know, someone where the trash is emptied regularly, where chatting is a way of life, and where things are filed long-term, but they're also kept short-term on the desk--not because they're filed there, but because they stay there because you *haven't* filed them.
The ideal would actually be the best of both worlds. Filters that can convert an e-mail attachment at a single command. A switch to filter out your "buddy's" preferences. And a way to have files you open and don't "file" head to the desktop, where they're periodically "saved" as a backup.
Too bad we'll never get that ideal.
My wife uses our Mac at home. She clutters her desktop with icons, rarely empties the trash can unless I tell her it's essential
Wow. My wife gets mad at me because I clutter my desktop with papers and rarely empty the trash unless she yells at me to do it.
Sumner
rage, rage against the dying of the light
And you know what? I have lots of friends now, and I regularly sleep with two beautiful women at once. I've got another perl script that filters their cruft into my own vanilla format. You might say I've developed my own private babelfish. Things are good for me. They could be good for you too.
Embrace and extend, grasshopper.
my desktop.
Along the left side of my screen are launchers for my most often-used programs. Thanks to badgering of programmers on my part they respond to edge-clicks, making them easy targets.
The top of my screen has hacked versions of the deskguide and tasklist which also respond to edge-clicks. Thus, I can switch desktops and windows quite quickly with the mouse
I have a transparent terminal for when I need it. The large panel on the bottom is auto-hide. The applets there are too big to fit on a 24 pixel panel. Brak is there for dancing to music.
I don't believe the Keyboard is God, I think my setup is quite efficient, pleasant to look at, and very functional.
I've always seen the Unix way of doing things (small chainable components) as derived from patchboard/signal flow ideas that are used in music studios among other things. But that doesn't mean it 's the only way, or can't be improved upon. The GoodEasy solution to the interface pap from MS, Apple, KDE, Gnome, etc. is nostalgia. This may work quite well for math and word processing tasks (hurst's intented purpose), but productivity in many fields has nothing to do with anything of the sort. The main problem I see with creative tasks and the Unix way is that it constantly forces the user to interact with the file system, which can be a needless distraction.
The main problem I see with creative tasks and the Unix way is that it constantly forces the user to interact with the file system, which can be a needless distraction.
A needless distraction from what? One of the beauties of Unix is that everything is a file, hence once the user knows how to handle files, they know how to handle everything. "Interacting with the file system" is just a long way of saying "using the computer". So, needless distraction from what?
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
IMHO
(From SF fandom via Usenet) In My Humble Opinion. Also seen in variant forms such as IMO, IMNSHO (In My Not-So-Humble Opinion) and IMAO (In My Arrogant Opinion).
a violin is no substitute for a computer either. There is no Drum and Bass violin music
Again, the point is: The right tool for the job. Trying to draw a wave form for the vocal lines of Pie Jesu would be ludicrous (*if* you're going for a human feel), but the Mighty Steven Hawking is damn cool. Jimi Hendrix's legendary performance of the US National Anthem is great, as is Lords of Acid's Sexy Space Chorale, which wouldn't be the same without computer use.
You're talking to someone who spent months on Amiga and PCs using various software and hand assembling MOD files (or before that, did 6502 asm to generate Star Trek themes on the Apple ][). I'm well aware of the fact that computers can generate music in ways that acoustic inturments cannot.
The point is - right tool for the job. Keeping my phone book drawn in the gimp would work. I keep it in a text file, and grep -i for names. There are a myriad of "right tools" and "wrong tools"... I use Konqueror to browse, and often wget files. All of this proves the *authors* point that you use the tools you got used to rather than what might be better or faster.
Music wasn't the best path to go down... the thread will invariably wind up somewhere devolving into a debate on shielding on patch cords. ;)
--
Evan (Who was up all night, and shuddered when he read the ramble above).
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
The part in goodeasy where he says "your first job is to clear off the desktop" reminds me of two funny calls I had when I did Mac tech support (which by the way, is 10x easier than the Windows tech support I do now but only 1/10 as easy as the VM/CMS support I did years ago)...
In the first call I determined the cause of their problem was that their hard drive was full. Caller disagreed so I Timbuktu'd in and examined their hard drive and showed them it was full. Caller said I was still wrong as "All of my documents are kept in this folder on the desktop". They took the mouse and opened a folder on their desktop... sure enough it contained hundreds of (MS Office) files. "See, all of my files are on the desktop, not on my hard drive." Of course I had explained that what is on the desktop is really on the hard drive too. The user says "You mean they are not stored in the monitor?"
The second caller was a person who kept all of their files in their trash (recycle bin for you Win people). When I asked them why they said "That way they won't take any disk space!". I explained that they actually do and in addition to it being rather awkward to keep all their files in the trash they ran the risk that somebody else using their computer would empty the trash and wipe out their files. User says "Yes, that has happened several times already".
UGGHHHHH!
...a program that watches what I type and when it sees me repeating a word or phrase several times, suggests a short cut without interrupting me, e.g. displaying it in the info bar at the bottom of the window. For example, if I keep typing "String", it might suggest [S][T][space] as the shortcut.
I don't want to have to stop working and think up shortcuts since the computer would be better at identifying which words and phases I use most. I don't want the computer to try to guess what I'm going to do next since no matter how good it was, it would still piss me off when it was wrong (and it's none of the computer's business whether I'm writing a letter).
Where can I find it?
Of course the combination of some sort of a GUI and command line is very powerful, having the best of both worlds. Even in a graphical environment you can do most things with the keyboard in a more efficient way. I don't understand fancy mice with wheels and all when the good ol' keyb does the scrolling just as well. That's literally reinventing the wheel.
What's interesting that in the 80s and early 90s people were quite happy to learn shortcuts in DOS applications; someone already mentioned WP5.1 being more efficient than Word. Then came the GUI and suddenly everything just had to be graphical, even many things that have nothing to do with graphics.
Speaking of IMs, I am more than happy with MICQ. That is IMHO the easiest and most natural interface to IM. The command line.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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.
"All these people have something in common: they don't think like a computer."
This reminds me of economists, who have spent 30 years building theories of human behaviour based on utility maximization and rational choice. When they finally realize that real humans are neither utility maximizers nor particularly rational, rather than change their theories they get mad at the humans for not behaving the way they "should"!
sPh
As anyone read the actual guide? goodeasy. From the the wired article and these post this sounds like this was done on some sort of Unix. Wrong this was done on a Macintosh.
These things have always been part of the Mac philosophy. Apps do one thing and do it well, use keybinds for everything. This is why IE defeated Netscape on the Mac side even with Mac Users often fanactical hatred of Microsoft. IE just a web browser and supported Inter Config. In Inter Config you can say what apps you whant to handle http,ftp, news etc. Of course Netscape would not allow you to use other apps for email, or news. It had all that built-in.
Of course Linux GUIs and other web browsers are over-bloated "suites" or "platforms". Mozilla a "platform" for developing appications. Konqueror is a file manager was a built-in web browser. Nautilus is a file manager, web browser, note taker and help browser. Are lynx and IE for Mac the only web browsers that exist? I know IE for windows is os is supposed to be a file manager/web browser. But they don't do that on the Mac, knowing Mac users will have little tolerance for that.