Joerg Dietze wrote:
>
> Hi folks,
>
> I monitored some of the last postings about the hotkeys, icons and GUI
> stuff and it drives me a little bit nuts. I think Michael tries to make
> A. as comfy as possible for the newbies. There is no question that
> Windoze style desktops are very common today....
And just because they are common is no reason to assume that they are good
or that everyone likes them.
Hi Joerg;
Yes, maybe the clicky stuff is less scary to the newbies, who can only come
from the Windows world these days. It's no longer a matter of creating a GUI
for people that are afraid of reading, it's a matter of interfacing to new
users who have never had any reason to use the keyboard at all.
Of course, everyone overlooks the fact that apparantly these GUI users are
obviously all psychic, because there is no other reasonable explanation for
the fact that they would even consider clicking on a totally unrecognizable
heiroglyph and expect something to happen, let alone something specific !!
Others have already pointed out that the keyboard interface is both faster
and more logical for them. I am also in this group - which is probably made
up mostly of computer users who got involved way back in the light ages.
It's hard to find a new way to put this rant and still be polite.
We don't LIKE the slow, poky, dragy, kliky stuff.
We don't like having to move our hands from the keyboard to the dead rodent
and then back again.
We ESPECIALLY don't like long selection and confirm sequences.
I say here for the hundredth time: It takes 8 klicks to clear my cache
in Netscape/Win3.11. It's just F8 _once_ in Arachne !!
We want the room for the coffee cup back.
Arachne is actually VERY well designed in this respect. There are hotkeys
for everything. And the hotkeys are the ONLY way to navigate in Arachne
when using fullscreen mode.
When in a "Windows" style reduced viewport mode, which should be familar to
the newbies, there are plenty of "klicky" bits to make the psychics happy.
But in the intermediate mode, where we get the maximum screen possible but
still have status information available, I don't think we want to give up
information space (Title bar, URL window and Arachne ver#) to make room
for MORE klicky crap which is already fully available in the cramped window
with the big icons.
IMHO, the following would seem to be a logical progression for sequential
F5 pushes:
Start: Big icons - Full status information - FULL clikiness.
Next: NO icons - Full status information - NO clikiness.
Last: N0 icons - NO status information - NO clikiness = Fullscreen.
It's only the intermediate step that we have been discussing, I think,
because the rest are already perfect, and there were no complaints about
the intermediate step that existed up until A1.68, so it was also perfect.
The three step program is only limited to these steps in 640x480, which is
the old fogey complainer video mode. ;-)
- Clarence Verge
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