Re: gEDA-user: fritzing

[John Doty <jpd@xxxxxxxxx>]

On May 7, 2009, at 10:50 AM, Dave N6NZ wrote:

> David C. Kerber wrote:
>> One possibility would be to do something similar to what Cisco does
>> with the GUI they have for their security appliances:
>
> If ever there was a poster child for the most obnoxiously brain-dead
> approach to putting a gui on a product, Cisco's tools would be it.   
> That
> crap nearly makes me homicidal.
>
>> a gui that
>> handles basic setup,
> when it works...
>
>> and issues commands in their standard cli format
>> to the appliance.
> when it works...
>
>> But the gui is optional, and if you want to use
>> just the cli because that's what you're familiar with, or to do high
>> level stuff that can't be done with the gui, that works fine as well.
> And what is the point of writing a gui then?  The Cisco approach  
> creates
> a usability chasm between basic, primitive functionality and expert  
> use.
>   The newbie->expert transition needs to be a smooth curve, with no
> cognitive discontinuities.
>
> Slapping a gui on top of a command line, in 100% of the cases I have
> personally experienced, has been a disaster.
>

I think some of the GUI software package managers, like Synaptic and  
FinkCommander, are pretty usable. I've also been happy with TeX GUI's  
like Kile and TeXShop.

One key, I think, is transparency. The NeXT InterfaceBuilder is a  
fine example of something that started out as a great learning tool  
and then ran off into the weeds. In the beginning, it output actual  
Objective-C code to set up the objects to implement the interface.  
You could draw a simple GUI and see the code to implement it. I  
learned Objective-C GUI construction this way. You see the code, and  
it's "Aha! That's what the manual meant...".

But our @#$! CS profs all indoctrinate the students with idolatry of  
opacity. So, InterfaceBuilder was soon changed to generate opaque  
binary representations of already initialized objects. Now, in the  
MacOSX world where this wound up, it's harder to learn: you still  
need to do advanced stuff in Objective C, but there are few examples  
of simple stuff to learn from, because most people do that opaquely  
in InterfaceBuilder. The student doesn't have such good control,  
either: you can't draw something and then see its implementation.

John Doty              Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
jpd@xxxxxxxxx




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