Iconitis

[Glenn L. Austin]

In article <10040 at smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>In article <28836 at apple.Apple.COM> austing at Apple.COM (Glenn L. Austin) writes:
>>I find what I call the "mainframe mentality" in that many programs change the
>>environment that the program runs under without restoring the environment to
>>what the user specified on exit of the program.  This seems to be more
>>prevalent in the UN*X environment than anywhere else, this "I know better what
>>the user wants than the user does" attitude of programming.
>
>What in the world are you talking about?  UNIX's design is such that upon
>exit of a process the environment is necessarily back to what it was upon
>initiation of the process, with the possible exception of terminal handler
>modes, and even there unless the process was "stty" it is universally
>understood to be a bug to have unilaterally altered terminal handler modes.

How about environment variables?  I have seen *MANY* cases where the
environment variables get changed, and never restored.  This was also the
case with terminal handling (not restoring the terminal setups).  This is
simply poor programming, which has no excuse.

>I find the "we know better than the user what the user wants" attitude to
>be more prevalent in the Apple party line ("Human Interface Guidelines")
>than elsewhere.  For instance, when DiversiTune first showed up, the users
>were ecstatic, but Apple's comments were nearly universally "hey, it
>doesn't follow our HIG!", as though that were really important.

Considering that the HIG was put together by experts in the field of user
interfaces, it is the best overall guideline for graphics interfaces.  However,
like all experts, some things get overlooked.  The *MOST IMPORTANT PART* of a
user interface isn't that it matches a published guideline, although this
should be important to the designer, but rather that the interface is intuitive,
that it is easily understandable, and that it caters to the users' needs.


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| Glenn L. Austin             | The nice thing about standards is that      | 
| Apple Computer, Inc.        | there are so many of them to choose from.   | 
| Internet: austing at apple.com |       -Andrew S. Tanenbaum                  |
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| All opinions stated above are mine -- who else would want them?           |
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