creat 1224
that Wonderful! :-) by number But it all starts as data entry. I think I'm trying to make the...
Well, you don't HAVE to work that way. If you prefer to use the Windows or KDE paradigm of "everything...
Yes, spouses, particularly preternaturally gifted ones, are useful for that kind of thing! (I've been fortunate enough to have had some experience of that -- still ongoing, I am happy to say.)
No, I think I do get it pretty well. I was just pointing out the the majority of data that computers deal with nowadays -- including counting the source code as data (even though any given CPU might or might not ever see any of the source for the code it runs!) -- isn't entered by humans. This is admittedly a somewhat tangential observation.
of I've But only because you graciously spent the time making me rewrite my rewrites :-). Yes. I'm even claiming that there won't be "developers of tomorrow" because we won't...
Okay, that's clear now. I agree that understanding the user is essential to designing the interface. The interface, by its very nature, faces both the user and the machine -- it is (or rather, should be) built around the user as much as it is built around the program.
What I'm not convinced of is that, as far as evaluating the utility of a user interface is concerned, one needs to get deeply into how the programming that made the interface possible was done or might be done differently. As far as human interaction with the machine is concerned, (apart from questions of the human being able to modify the interface by rewriting its programming on the fly) the whole GUI and-or CLI plus application program and OS may as well be a black box. What counts for the "user experience" is how the thing behaves, not the mechanism that produces the behavior. Of course implementation issues are going to effect what interface designs are possible or practical to implement, but that really is a "mere matter of programming" that the user typically never sees directly.
Let me put a concrete example: does it matter to a journalist whether the stories that he or she keyboards are stored in ASCII, EBCDIC, utf-8, or cuneiform marks on clay tablets. Answer: no, except when character-set issues make it difficult to produce the glyphs that are needed. At that point, I'd say what you've got is an example of your internal data structures coming poking through the user interface and exposing themselves to the user, which is almost always an indication that the interface design is flawed.
-- Roland HutchinsonÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWillÊplayÊviolaÊdaÊgambaÊforÊfood.
NB mail to my.spamtrap at verizon.net is heavily filtered to remove spam.ÊÊIfÊyourÊmessageÊlooksÊlikeÊspamÊIÊmayÊnotÊseeÊit.