What I'm doing

["Dan \"Effugas\" Kaminsky" <effugas best com>]

Welp...

Yeah, I've kinda shut up on this list for now; trying (and failing at the
moment) to get alot of various proposals typed up.

It's been a crazy month or so, and my one observation I have to say...could
people please consider the importance of whatever they're arguing about?
Could people please start asking their friends what annoys them about
computers?  Could we all start trying to fix the things that are genuinely
being done *WRONG* before we try to tell the world that what they think is
right really isn't?  Help is a pain in the ass to use in most UI's.  Most
error messages evoke fear in the user without providing a link to an
explanation of what went wrong.

I cannot believe I spent so much time arguing about File.  Gleef, noun,
verb, antecedant, whatever, it doesn't matter, users have no problem with
File and seem to like it.  That's about as correct as I care about.  If we
can manage to make everything else so perfect that users start actually
realizing that something might be wrong with File, fine, whatever.  It just
so happens that there are a couple thousand different things that PISS
PEOPLE OFF about computers, and changing the File menu will actually *join
the crowd* before pleasing people.

I read an interesting comment a while ago:  Open Source is succeeding now
not because of the religion but because of the pragmatism.  Open Source apps
work, closed source apps do not.  This is the type of slant we need this UI
to take.  Purism?  Sure, yeah, fine, but only as far as it is pragmatically
helpful.

The orders, the icons, hell, even the whitespace are irrelevant.  This
document we all design has to have one thing in mind:  THIS INTERFACE MUST
WORK.  That doesn't mean it's empty, it's featureless, it's spartan.  This
means that it interfaces better with human psychology than anything else.

I don't want to hear a *WORD* about File until everything that genuinely
pisses off users is fixed.  How's THAT for a Proposal?