::scr Dressing up the computer

[Chris Devers]

On Fri, 8 Mar 2002, alorenz wrote:

> easy to learn != easy to use. I've never been able to test ride BeOS,
> but the idea of organizing things by their attributes rather than in a
> tree-like hierarchy looks like a very, very good thing to me, and I
> don't even think it would be any harder to learn or "too complicated"
> for newbies. 

Exactly, that was the nice thing about it: superficially, it wasn't all
that different from the other common desktop systems today -- in fact it
rather explicitly ripped off good ideas from Macs, Windows, and X11. And,
let's be honest, I bet almost everyone that used BeOS was probably already
familiar with at least one of these going in, so there really wasn't a
learning curve to deal with for such an audience. It was only after you
started poking around that you'd realize that it had this rich attributes
system, and that you could apply it in very clever ways. 

Thus it nailed what might be a common idea for good interface design (it
seems to apply for web design, and maybe application design too
[...maybe]): nail the lowest common denominator, and only after that
should you start layering on new stuff. So in web design, make sure it'll
work well on text browsers & old versions of Netscape and will be more or
less consistent on different OSes, and *then* start layering on the stuff
like JavaScript doodads, Flash, etc -- being careful all along not to
break the foundational layers. So too with BeOS, which first matched and
then surpassed the main contemporary desktop metaphors. 

...I still miss having a system I could run it on regularly...



--
Chris Devers

"Okay, Gene... so, -1 x -1 should equal what?" "A South American!"    
[....] "no human can understand the Timecube" and Gene responded
 without missing a beat "Yeah.  I'm not human."