On Thu, 21 Aug 2008, Devyn Cairns wrote:
You are absolutely right. The first idea is a good one. But a problem
with the second one: that would only really work on Mac OS X, and, in
Why is that? I'm using WinXP (and sometimes Vista) and PuTTY[1] has a
customized menu available from the window frame. I don't have a
clue how to set that up, and it may be that the toolkit used to
develop shoes on mswin won't support that, but I would be a little
surprised if that were the case...
fact, it already is. But I do agree that it should be in the docs
somewhere that you can <alt-/>
I'm thinking that if it is discoverable by blundering around the interface
with the mouse, then people who have not read the docs so thoroughly
could still find it. I can see that for some apps people might want
to disable this facility (an unnecessary annoyance once debugging is
done).
Anyway, thanks for your favourable response.
Hugh
[1] http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 6:52 AM, Hugh Sasse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
There are a couple of difficulties for people who try to use Shoes
with the knowledge that it is Ruby based. The first is that for
"What is going on?" type diagnostics, they are likely to use puts.
Many ruby examples do just that. The trouble with that is that in
shoes the output doesn't go anywhere. I'd suggest that it should go
to the errors console if there is no tty, or maybe regardless of
whether there is a tty because people forget conditionals.
The second problem is the errors console is pretty secretive.
"Shoes: sneaking a console through the system" to paraphrase a much
missed blog :-) If you know <alt-/> all is well (unless your
keyboard code eats those, as mine does in one program I was playing
with). My suggestion is that it should be put into the Window menu,
where people will be likely to discover it. This fits in with
Donald Norman's design principles about putting knowledge in the
world where people will look for it.
I don't know how easy these things are to achieve, though, as I
don't do much cross platform GUI stuff.
Hugh
