It all suggests to me that "internet" is nor a focused enough domain for what might be called an "Information appliance" - maybe we should be developing an "e-mail appliance" for the bedside table or a "news appliance" with CNN and the BBC and whatever for the bedside table, just scrollable with minimal hardware for the morning, or...?
Maybe those things would also be much cheaper and more immune to upgrade issues...
with mobile phones, web appliances maybe finally looking more viable, WebTV and all that, I think this is just a plain wrong assessment of where we are.
The browsing world is getting more diverse, not less. Major commerce sites won't want to lose WebTV users' purchasing power.
I just binned this when he started criticising Eric Raymond for believing in gun ownership. I'm as anti-gun as you get, but two pages about the NRA in an essay about free software? And that just after he'd spent ages criticising the term "free" when many people reject it for exactly the kinds of reason he was discussing...
Instead of looking for the core arguments and taking them on, Meyer takes the extreme views around free software and slags them off. The nature of the free software community makes this easy, but it does no credit to him.
This is all really very simple - the microsoft monopoly has pushed Word onto everyone's desktop as a standard you can't be without, so there's no pressure for interoperation anymore - and so no pressure for a common standard. I remember a time a few years back when every document I sent, I sent in RTF - because WordPerfect users needed to access it. Now? Microsoft monopoly tactics more or less killed them, and everyone sends word documents.
Oh, also of course, all those nice little OLE features of your mail reader are oh-so-supported by Word...
Thr trouble with having my attention drawn to the Microsoft monopoly is that it makes me really angry - I realise how much, every day, my life is adversely affected by it. How much stupidity I have to put up with for it. And no, a few advanced clever features do NOT justify it.
These days I find Word unusable (too complex, translated documents in particular seem to be impossible to edit or reformat) - so I mostly use an HTML editor, which is a big step backwards, but if someone could enhance it a bit (cut and paste of table cells...) it would be all I need. I'll happily live with the standards that are out there - they are enough.
UI Guidelines probably wouldn't work for linux - what incentive is there to comply? - but something like an "interaction quality" guide might, I would think. Documenting user expectations (trained or semi-intuitive) on certain types of control or arrangements of control, documenting standard patterns of UI design, documenting approaches to solving interaction problems.
Of course I don't really believe the linux comminity as it is can do it - I'm spending a lot of my time now doing interaction design and I do find it's totally incompatible with software engineering - apart from needing contradictory instincts, with my interaction designer hat I need to understand software engineering but not be frightened by the work involved in doing something that's just entirely what anyone coming to the system would expect, but just happens to be very hard to implement.
BTW, Alan Cooper's "The Inmates Are Running The Asylum" is the current bible for designing user interaction - it's methods are the best I know of.
Who wants to input to it? Why? Surely it's about output primarily, and all you need is low bandwidth input to control that and occasionally do a search or something.
Though on the other hand, why not a motion sensing pen that you just scrawl on any surface with, and watch the results written on your private monitor? Mice demonstrate that we don't need the direct feedback involved in ink pens. So I could just write on my hand & have it parsed like a pocket pc?
the privacy angle seems interesting - I can sit and browse whatever i like in any situation without anyone being able to look over my shoulder - maybe Personal Computer is a term we should have saved for this. No compromise required. In fact of course it's just revolutionary and we can have no idea - the first decently powerful mainstream-priced one of these will change everything, but I'm betting end 2003 for that.
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Maybe those things would also be much cheaper and more immune to upgrade issues...
with mobile phones, web appliances maybe finally looking more viable, WebTV and all that, I think this is just a plain wrong assessment of where we are. The browsing world is getting more diverse, not less. Major commerce sites won't want to lose WebTV users' purchasing power.
I just binned this when he started criticising Eric Raymond for believing in gun ownership. I'm as anti-gun as you get, but two pages about the NRA in an essay about free software? And that just after he'd spent ages criticising the term "free" when many people reject it for exactly the kinds of reason he was discussing...
Instead of looking for the core arguments and taking them on, Meyer takes the extreme views around free software and slags them off. The nature of the free software community makes this easy, but it does no credit to him.
Oh, also of course, all those nice little OLE features of your mail reader are oh-so-supported by Word...
Thr trouble with having my attention drawn to the Microsoft monopoly is that it makes me really angry - I realise how much, every day, my life is adversely affected by it. How much stupidity I have to put up with for it. And no, a few advanced clever features do NOT justify it.
These days I find Word unusable (too complex, translated documents in particular seem to be impossible to edit or reformat) - so I mostly use an HTML editor, which is a big step backwards, but if someone could enhance it a bit (cut and paste of table cells...) it would be all I need. I'll happily live with the standards that are out there - they are enough.
UI Guidelines probably wouldn't work for linux - what incentive is there to comply? - but something like an "interaction quality" guide might, I would think. Documenting user expectations (trained or semi-intuitive) on certain types of control or arrangements of control, documenting standard patterns of UI design, documenting approaches to solving interaction problems.
Of course I don't really believe the linux comminity as it is can do it - I'm spending a lot of my time now doing interaction design and I do find it's totally incompatible with software engineering - apart from needing contradictory instincts, with my interaction designer hat I need to understand software engineering but not be frightened by the work involved in doing something that's just entirely what anyone coming to the system would expect, but just happens to be very hard to implement.
BTW, Alan Cooper's "The Inmates Are Running The Asylum" is the current bible for designing user interaction - it's methods are the best I know of.
Though on the other hand, why not a motion sensing pen that you just scrawl on any surface with, and watch the results written on your private monitor? Mice demonstrate that we don't need the direct feedback involved in ink pens. So I could just write on my hand & have it parsed like a pocket pc?
the privacy angle seems interesting - I can sit and browse whatever i like in any situation without anyone being able to look over my shoulder - maybe Personal Computer is a term we should have saved for this. No compromise required. In fact of course it's just revolutionary and we can have no idea - the first decently powerful mainstream-priced one of these will change everything, but I'm betting end 2003 for that.