On Saturday, Oct 12, 2002, at 00:50 Australia/Sydney, Rob Cozens wrote:
This conformity question tends to be framed as expert/creative vs new user. The expert has depth and better ideas than those enforced by the theory police while the new user is a tabula rasa, needing either simple repetitive rules or a creative interface which they can learn in depth and enjoy to the full.For me, (and recall I'm not a professional developer), there is aJudy, et al:
difference between apps that all look identical (which is what everything
done in VB tends to be) and apps which merely leverage a
previously-learned UI, consistent adherence to which is often touted as a
learning advantage.
That seems to be part of Apple's marketing hype since the first release of Mac OS. And, frankly, there might have been good reason for it initially: the mouse & pull-down-&-select were new to the industry, so guidelines on how to use them helped show the way.
But when it gets to the point that reviewers ding Revolution (or any other application) because Quit is under the File menu (where it was "supposed" to be in OS 9) instead of the Applications menu (which Apple has now decreed as the place Quit is "supposed" to be), it reaches a level of pedantic absurdity.
This presentation ignores breadth. Please spare a thought for those who use a very wide variety of tools. Glancing down my dock (I am not alone in this of course. ) I currently have seventeen applications open (many trivial like mail and a web browser as expected) and another ten or so which I use regularly, after which you get to less common tools and utilities. For me these cover a wide range of application areas in management of information (principally people, events, plans and finance) and manipulation of ideas, words, numbers (five for numbers alone) and diagrams as well as management of the system. One of the permanent attractions of the Mac compared with any alternative over nearly twenty years has been the ease with which I can switch between apps, including less commonly used ones, and expect to find all controls neatly to hand and behaving as I expect, leaving only the unique components of the app to be recalled in context. This facilitation of depth in breadth is and has always been enormously powerful, yet the Mac interface has improved over time.
A down-side of conformity to me personally has arisen where a common interface which is a complete dog, e.g. that of MS Word, is taken up by other manufacturers in the interests of keeping things "easy".
So, happy to see innovation (anyone remember Apple's experimental mouse-driven 3D space into files and the web?). However, please consider on the one hand that the person learning your creative interface may also be a user of other similar tools, not of yours alone, and on the other that bad design is not improved by repetition.
I'll pay a penny for this one.
regards
David
--Rob Cozens CCW, Serendipity Software Company http://www.oenolog.com/who.htm "And I, which was two fooles, do so grow three; Who are a little wise, the best fooles bee." from "The Triple Foole" by John Donne (1572-1631) _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
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