At 10:36 am +1030 27/1/05, David Purton wrote: >Hehe, I bet you love the Gimp interface too ;)
Actually, I do. I was using it to remove the backgrounds from a couple of the photos at the same time as working in Scribus, and the Gimp felt very natural. All its cmd-click features were in its menus, which were along the top of the window. I found myself using both. Surely the original point of menus was/is a way to group related actions you wish to perform (on the current selection/page/document/application). Give me a pile of 150 commands and I have to remember every one (aka Unix). Give me them in seven discrete groups, related by function, and I have less to remember. That's the point of the Graphical User Interface - to take the weight off the technical portion of your brain and let your physical memory handle more stuff. I guess that Mac people work/think very visually, Unix people work/think intellectually, and Windows people are a bit of both. Witness the tenacious struggle of long-time Mac-heads to get to grips with the Terminal and all it power - its hard work but I'm sticking with it because I can see its benefits. But I don't want to replace my GUI with it. OTOH if most of the developers who're building the app have a Unix mind-set (and why shouldn't they?) they are probably more comfortable with a Unix-y way of doing things. I was just trying to 'flag up' how it felt for a first time user. >I blame Mac with it's one button mouse... Actually I prefer X11 apps in this regard. My native Mac OS X apps use 'ctrl' for contextual menus, which is right over on the left of my keyboard & awkward to reach with my little finger. With my right index finger on the trackpad, my thumb rests on the mouse button and my ring finger sits nicely on the cmd-key, which is mapped to the contextual-menu key in X11. Nice :) At 12:24 pm +0800 27/1/05, Craig Ringer wrote: >There seems to be a perception that Scribus is a Quark / InDesign >"replacement" or somehow designed to "convert" users. Sorry, that exactly wasn't my intention. I was referring to 'Quark/InDesign converts' as people-who-do-DTP. Those people may have been PageMaker people to start with, who switched when Quark came along. Or Quarkers who switched when ID came along. They're people who will use whichever tool helps them get the job done with the least waste of mental energy. They will switch to Scribus if the pain barrier is not too great. I'm not talking about killing Quark/ID, just about being the best. Which, being open and flexible, I've no doubt you can be. Nor am I talking about slavishly following Quark/ID interface/method/whatever. But Quark stole the market from Aldus because it 'fitted' more closely how people expected things to work. Quark, after a lot of use, feels like hand in glove. You think it, you do it. It mimics how you would do stuff if you were working with paper cutouts on a real pasteboard. That's why people like it. Golly, they must do to learn all the myriad shortcuts! I'm saying there are things that Quark/ID do right - there's a reason people spend all that cash purchasing them. (Which is not to say there aren't lots of things that should be avoided). John. -- ------------------------------------------------- T:01274 581519 www.kershaw.org M:07944 755613 E:john at kershaw.org | skype:johnmkershaw AIM:johnkershaw | Y!/MSN:john_m_kershaw
