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Advice for Developers: Make Common Usage Easy
Ken Hendrickson writes "Thomas Sowell has some fantastic common-sense advice for software developers from the viewpoint of an ordinary user: Make it easy to do what almost everybody wants to do. I don't believe he uses Free Software; that means that Microsoft is not satisfying their customers, and Free Software can perform better than Microsoft even in the ease of use area!"
Make common easy??
isn't that like:
Message to blonds.... Breathe in, breathe out?
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Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
Easier said than done. UI design sounds easy but it's not.
that's what you UI people have been saying for years. It's like us developers saying "Writing safe, bugfree code is impossible." Bah!, i say. You're just saying it to demand a premium pay and more flexible schedule. UI's are simple! just look at Emacs.
(just busting your balls, i'm completely kidding)
I disagree. UI design is very easy. For example, take MS Windows. Much too complicated interface. They should concentrate on their main function, and simplify the interface accordingly. Why all those clicks just to get a blue screen? Simply show the blue screen directly after booting! Damned easy UI, and it's not at all hard to write.
Now, of course there are some experts who want to do something else besides looking at blue screens, like infecting their computer with worms and viruses. This could be solved by just adding a button "Infect my computer" to the blue screen, and as soon as you press it, it connects to the internet (through a pre-configured, expensive phone number, so you don't have to go through the hassle of installing those dialers to increase your phone bill) and downloads a collection of the newest worms and viruses.
So, you see it's not hard to design an easy, intuitive UI. The UI I've described is much simpler than the Windows UI, without missing any important functionality.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
My car must be psycopathic. I've found my way home thousands of times, and I never told my car where I live.
The main thing I have learned from the slashdot moderation system is that the difference between funny and flamebait is the degree of clueness of the moderator.
Make easy usage common!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
LOL.
I'd love to see that guy try and use EMACS. Ctrl-X Ctrl-S is "Save/Quit" and Ctrl-Meta-PowerButton-Esc is "Go back to your fucking scrabble"
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Append some extra data to a CD...
./source && cdrecord -dev=0,0,0 -v image.iso && rm image.iso
mkisofs -C `cdrecord -dev=0,0,0 -msinfo` -M -dev=0,0,0 -J -r -o image.iso
So exceptionally intuitive...
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
What? Oh, please. This is exactly the kind of problem that we have in a lot of software, especially smaller projects. First of all, why should I tell the car where I live just because I want to find the nearest Taco Bell? A perfect (although unintended) example.
Ok. So we make the car have a "find the nearest Taco Bell" button. Because everyone wants to find the nearest Taco Bell. All those people that prefer some other fast food joint are SOL.
Of course, 75% of the population can't eat Taco Bell without getting the runs 15 mintues later, so we need to add a "find me the nearest public toilet" button.
Then when you get there you find the toilet is stopped up with about 30 pounds of mostly digested Nachos Del Grande, so you need to add a "find me the next nearest toilet, prefereably one not stuffed with other people's crap."
That proves a bit more difficult, and you wind up desperatley looking for someplace to go because of your high potty standards. You've also added a "nope, that toilet is covered in pee, find me another one" button and a "I'm not really sure what took place in there, but I bet the Pope wouldn't approve" button.
By that time you're at a gas station in a part of town you never even knew existed, there's a strange man in a fuzzy purple hat asking you if you wanna be his bitch, you're out of gas, spent all your money at Taco Bell, and have no idea of how to get home.
It sure would've been nice if your car knew where your house was. It's really too bad, since now you're turning tricks for the cash to buy gas and a map to get out of there.
"Oh no. It's the Monty Python Argument sketch all over again.."
No it isn't!