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Top 8 Reasons HCI is in its Stone Age
UltimaGuy writes "This Editorial describes 8 reasons why HCI (Human Computer Interaction) is in its stone age. It laments about screen corners, filesystem, GUI Design and also 'spatialness'. "
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Just to clarify what is built into Mac OS X by default...
In Mac OS X, built into Mac OS X 10.4, you can trigger any of the following from any of the four corners of the main screen.
1) Expose - All Windows
2) Expose - Application Windows
3) Expose - Desktop
4) Dashboard
5) Start Screen Saver
6) Disable Screen Saver
Also on the main display (the one with the menu bar) you can slam the mouse into either of the upper two corners and click. On Mac OS X 10.4 the upper left corner brings up the "Apple" menu and the upper right corner brings up "Spotlight". The later allows typing for spotlight search without having to click to gain focus.
...what the LARGEST KEY ON THE KEYBOARD does. Well... this key? Right over here? Ah, the chubby one! It.. spaces... kind of... leaps.. a tiny bit. In the text... See...? Nothingness! Hey, I know how this must sound... Hey! Wait!! No!!
Hey, how about maybe it's the largest key on the keyboard because it's the MOST FREQUENTLY USED? Wow, imagine that, making something that you use often larger and thus easier to find. Doesn't seem stone age to me, seems more like tried-and-true.
It's a rant on a stupid blog. Slashdot refers to it as an "Editorial"
... See point six." And what's with 8 having no title? Point 8 isn't a point. It's a use case.
The guy's simply a moron. At least half of his "points" are opinions. Others are just not really points at all. "4. Multiple representation of the file system.
Finally...
We wish to rotate an image, shrink it 50%, attach it to an e-mail and send it to a deaf musician. Say Tip a quarter to the right, crop by half and e-mail to Stevie Wonder.
You sir, have failed. You just sent it to a blind musician, not a deaf one.
Meaningless jargon in messages.
:)
Although a lot of programs may lay it on a tad thick, computer users NEED to learn a bit of jargon if they hope to have any shot of dealing with modern technology.
You can't use a car without understanding what the brake and accellerator (and sometimes a clutch) do. When you take it in for repairs, even if you don't know how to fix it yourself, you want to know if you need a spark plug or a timing belt (not just "it broke, please pay $xxxx for the next 20,000 miles...").
The same goes with computers. Your example, of an "instance", I consider not that bad... How do you phrase that better? "GAIM is already running"? Since such errors usually happen when you have a ghost process, I suspect most users would find that even more frustrating (I know how my grandfather would react - "God damn it, if I already had it running I wouldn't have tried to start it, you worthless pile of (stream of obscenties ommitted)").
Cutesy tooltips.
I agree 100%... You can actually turn those off, at least the ones that come from Windows itself, but XP has a rather obnoxious bug wherein you will eventually get them back, and can't turn them off again (because you already have them off).
Oh, and your peeve about the task bar - Drives me absolutely batty. To re-quote the grandfather, "God damn it, if I wanted to switch to that window, I'd click on it, you worthless pile of (stream of obscenties ommitted)!".