On Jul 13, 2005, Colin Walters <walters@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Think of it this way: what if GNOME's historical audience had been > musicians? Then the right click menu might have had > "Open Musical Score Composer". Having that makes as much sense to the > general population as "Open Terminal" does. FWIW, when I first introduced Cygwin to a musician friend of mine, he absolutely *loved* the ability to issue commands without having to point and click, and the ability to write scripts to automate common or repetitive tasks. Terminals should not be thought of as power-users only; they're useful for everybody. Perhaps our desktop approach should take a stance similar to AIX SMIT (sp?), a system administration front-end that would not only enable you to perform various tasks with a point&click interface, but *also* let you know the commands it was running to perform those tasks. I'm told Autocad is very much like this as well, and even architects without any prior programming expertise end up being able to automate tasks using the lisp-based programming interface, which is one of the features that makes it so powerful. This gave you the option to remain clueless if you wanted to, but also to learn the underlying infrastructure if you chose to, such that you could perform the same commands more efficiently afterwards, even in situations in which a GUI is not an option. The GUI shouldn't be the whole picture, it's just part of the picture. Every user interface should expose a model through an API in a powerful scripting language that enables people to automate tasks should they choose to (*). Point&click is just *way* too annoying for things you have to do often and/or repetitively. Letting people learn the underlying API through point&click brings the best of both worlds. (*) Although I always believed this, Scott Collins confirmed that in his talk at FISL 6.0, ``Building User Interfaces that Work''. Sure enough, the underlying API needs not be shell-based. But you pretty much need a terminal to run python or whatever other scripting language your API is designed for. > With respect to the interface changing; that's true, but it seems to me > that the GNOME/Fedora interface has been changing substantially in other > ways (e.g. panel revamp from FC2->FC3) Did it change? I didn't notice any changes whatsoever in my panel. Sure enough, I would, should I wipe out all of my gnome settings and started from scratch, I guess. (Un?)fortunately there's no easy way to track the defaults while keeping the settings you've overridden, AFAIK. Open Terminal, OTOH, has changed regardless of my settings. -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org} Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org} -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
