::scr saving

[celia romaniuk]

On Wed, 20 Feb 2002, Chris Devers wrote:

>  Once I understood that it had to do with the fact that the whole system
> was kept in ram it made a little more sense, but just the simple fact
> that it *was* like writing on paper made it seem like such an obvious
> step forward over normal computers.

Yeah, it's a mental model vs system model issue, which is nicely explained
here:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000058.html

(excerpt from the UI Design for Programmers book, which I've been reading
through this afternoon, and is really good so far).

I thought it was interesting that you wanted to know *how* it worked -
because you have an expectation about the way it *should* work. In
contrast, I didn't notice for a while that the Palm was saving
automatically. I think it's because you rarely (ever?) get 'save'
dialogues, you just get 'Done' when you get to the end. And because use of
the device involves a lot of flipping btween apps, you seen realise that
it's saving stuff. Perhaps. FWIW, I know that Palm did a lot of iterative
design and interface testing when developing their software. They took a
lot of notice of what people expected. It seems they solved the potential
"this isn't what users expect" model quite nicely.

-- 
celia