Richard L. Hamilton wrote:
Seriously, the next thing you know, you'll want a "wizard" or dancing paper clip or some such to step the newcomers through the choices that can't just be defaulted (like what kinds of systems do you want to be able to read this CD: Apple (Mac OS X), Solaris, Linux, Windows, ... (which says something about which format would be best for the CD)).
And what is wrong with 'wizards' or animated paper clips if it helps some people get the job done? (I personally find animated clips a wastage of precious CPU, but *if* it helps, why not?) I for one have always preferred well designed GUIs and wizards to commands.
Even that wouldn't be good enough for my aunt, who only uses a computer in place of a typewriter; when I asked her for a recipe, she typed it into (probably Word) and _mailed_ it to me. I mean, I'm no tree hugger, but _really_, is that necessary? She can't even handle Windows (not that she's dumb, but that she's _convinced_ herself she can't do a bunch of things), so what do I care if she never uses Solaris?
I would say your aunt did pretty well. She successfully sent you the message, perhaps not very efficiently. I have worked with this class of users too - my dad. He keeps forgetting that to shutdown the PC he has to go for the 'start button! ;) I remember, when I first started working for Sun (2004), I was given a Sun Ray that had no xmms, no gaim, no root permissions... My first couple of week at work were spent trying to compile them and install in my home folder. :-P Most of my (real) work was over telnet (not ssh ;)) sessions to lab machines and looking at core dumps. I came from a windows background, by the way, and found it a pain. Before I ramble on too far, the point I am trying to make is that for many users (like your aunt and my dad) there is no glory in remembering commands and options, no glory in reading the 'fine' manual. I find no glory in it either and if I can do it with a GUI, I always do. How I have wished mdb had a front end like WinDbg... how I have wished for source debugging for the kernel.. (but that's a rant for another day). I have no issues with command line interfaces to utilities like cdrecord. But let's not brush away the usefulness of (good) GUIs and say we do not care about that segment of users! Regards, Manoj PS: I use Ubuntu and await the day VMWareServer works on OpenSolaris. :) -- Manoj Joseph http://kerneljunkie.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
