[openbeos] Re: More misc ideas

Hi,
Don't get me wrong, I'm not confusing power with ease of use, neither with 
ergonomy or GUI
power without ease of use: ASM
Ease of use without power: MacOS
ergonomy != GUI, I mean Terminal is sometimes way efficient. 
Try to do this with Tracker:

for fic in /boot/home/*.cpp; do mv $fic $fic.old; tr -d '\r' <$fic.old >$fic 
;done

As for the ease of use, point and click is fine, unless you want to go past 
what the GUI creator intended you to be able to.

The power always needs control, and though I like some GUI interfaces (I'm not 
a console guru, since I use X at school... Well, I don't have the choice 
anyway :D), the CLI is more efficient in many cases. So if you want to make 
full use of the power, you need not to stick to CLI, but to nkow how to use
both wisely.

Ergonomy != ease of use:
ergonomy can be define as 1 / the number of operations needed to perform 
a specific task
ease of use = 1 / the number of buttons you need to click 
(not for everyone of course) and it depends on the knowledge you have

With the above example, ergonomy is way better for shell,
with Tracker you would need to open each file separately...
but of course its easier for average use that doesn't know shell.

more interlaced below:

> >> legacy cruft that should be brought up to 1995 standards.
Hmmm, thought we were in 2001 ;)

> >> 
> >> Don't get me wrong, I can live with UNIX and use it on a daily
> basis,
> >> but I think it's pretty badly laid out.
Just a matter of taste anyway

> >
> >I completely agree (and I'm writing this from a FreeBSD system).  When
> I
> >first started using unix a while back, my first thought upon hearing
> that
> >/etc was where settings were kept was "WTF!!  That's retarded, I'd
> never
> >have guessed!".  Now, of course, it's second nature to me ;) But why
> >complicate things when you can explicitly have a folder called
> "settings" or
> >something?
> 
> Yes, classic UNIX folder logic is ... cryptic, to say the least.

1) not for everyone
2) the UNIX folder logic is ... logic, in its way of course.
3) talking about the average joe not knowing about it:
what if the average joe wants to learn ?
Of course there are BeOS specific docs, well done ones.
But being able to use UNIX docs without getting lost adds a huge amount 
of documentation. (remember what joe1 will apreciate to read and understand,
joe2 won't like and will search for a better doc)

++
François.

Other related posts: