Iconitis

[Sean Malloy]

In article <2132 at pur-phy> sho at newton.physics.purdue.edu.UUCP (Sho Kuwamoto) writes:
<In article <7910 at pyr.gatech.EDU> is813cs at pyr.gatech.edu (Cris Simpson) writes:
<<In article <28679 at apple.Apple.COM> austing at Apple.COM (Glenn L. Austin) writes:

<<<Compare the time it takes to type "DIR<return<" with double-click.  If you
<<<notice, it takes a lot less time to double-click than it does to type the
<<<command.  [..]

<< Fine.  To keep it appropriate for this newsgroup, how would you
<<double click   "dir *.c<CR>" ?

<This isn't exactly what you want, but on the mac, you can select
<view by type, which will clump all the files created by your 
<c compiler together....  I forget whether it sorts by only creator
<or by creator and file type.

But doesn't this lose you the speed advantage that the double click is
supposed to give you? And look at your first sentence, "This isn't
exactly what you want, . . .": This is exactly the point Cris was trying
to make -- if all you want to do is what the programmer decided was what
you would want to do, then the iconic interface may be faster; however,
if you want to do anything else, then the iconic interface gets in the
way of doing what you want.

An iconic interface protects the user from the gritty details of
running the program; a command-line interface protects the user from
the programmer's preconceptions of what the user wants to do.


 Sean Malloy					| "The proton absorbs a photon
 Navy Personnel Research & Development Center	| and emits two morons, a
 San Diego, CA 92152-6800			| lepton, a boson, and a
 malloy at nprdc.navy.mil				| boson's mate. Why did I ever
						| take high-energy physics?"