On 2/26/07, Paul Lalonde <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The fundamental issue with the GUI isn't one of prettiness. It's one of naive/novice use. Like the rest of Plan9, the GUI assumes an expert user. But ever since the original Mac, the marketing message has been that GUIs are designed for instantaneous ease-of-use, and any training required is strictly application-centric instead of interaction-centric.
Depends what the GUI is an interface *to*. As an interface to the OS, rio works great without buttons and dialogs and menu bars. Individual graphical applications might have different natural interfaces. (I've heard nice things about the interface to inferno's debugger, for example.) And there's *lots* of "application-centric" to go around; how many different things are meant by right-click, or click-and-drag, in various applications? Take many word processors, for example: click-drag to select a block of text, then click-drag to move it. If you're designing a program that needs a complicated UI, the existence of "standard" GUI guidelines might help with the learning curve. Or they might get in the way of a better interface designed by an interface expert (rarely the programmer, rob pike being the notable exception). --Joel
