Iconitis

[Rajiv Sarathy]

In article <1360 at uw-entropy.ms.washington.edu> charlie at mica.stat.washington.edu (Charlie Geyer) writes:
>
>In article <11555 at lanl.gov> jlg at lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:
>
>> My major objection with icons is that often I know very well what I want
>> to do, but I can't do it without walking down some menu.  This requires
>> ...
>> icon interface simply slows down experienced users.
>
>Emacs, vi, sed, awk, and the like are infinitely more valuable than any
>dumb editor no matter how "user-friendly."  They can often be easily
> ...
>Dumb applications are suitable only for novices.

Actually, dumb applications are the ones suitable for us smart programmers.
Something like 'ed' is incredibly powerful in the hands of an experienced user.
A novice would be lost.  However, something as simple as MacWrite might not
be as powerful as ed, but is a hundred times smarter.  (Little things like
when you remove a word, it also removes a space so that you don't have two
spaces between words.  In ed, you'd expressly have to remove the space as well
(ie s/word //)
          ^
Icon interfaces do slow experienced users down, no doubt about it.  That what
makes NeXT so good.  You can use either icons or just plain vanilla text,
or both!

-- 
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