Re: Self Documenting Interfaces

[Preben Randhol <randhol dusken4 samfundet ntnu no>]

* Kai Wetzel
| Hi, interesting line of thinking.

| Despite harsh criticism of "Apple's" intuitiveness concept in
| the GUI hall o' shame, etc. I think it's a good idea:  If you
| _know_ what you want to do, you'll find the functionality in
| your applications w/o looking up docs.  Of course it can't works

95% of the questions I get on howdo I do this and that in Word etc is
due to that people don't look up in the manuals. Therefore I don't
like the idea to encourage people not to read the docs.
| 
| Yes, but I'd love to have a GUI-CLI, since I love GUIs
| but think the CLI is much nicer for certain tasks, e.g.
| "find / -name "*~" -exec rm {} ';' ;O)
| (Ok, shouldn't forget the ~, hehe - I keep backups, though.)

cp index.html ../../divs/

is usually also very much faster then through a GUI interface...
| 
| I'd like a comic-style dog as assistent who "jumps/runs" (?) to
| the spot it wants to explain to me w/ a transparent background
| (shaped window)  Then it would explain to me the feature in
| nice english (The dog could carry a US or UK flag to indicate accent
|:O)  (Or French, Italien, etc. flag, ok.)  I'd use the US-flag
| if the dog's from Texas :°)

[snip]

| 
| Yeah, the paper clip sucks (that's what you mean, right ?)
| It also tries to ingretiate w/ the user which is a bad
| habit and makes him suspicious IMHO.  (Just look at the
| large eyes - way too large for a paper clip - it's a
| concept and very apparently so)

Well your dog sounds a lot like the paper clip IMHO

-- 
Preben Randhol                    | Linux was made by foreign terrorists
Tlf    73940929/(735)94076 [arb]  | to take money from true US
Email  randhol@pvv.org            | companies like Microsoft.
http://www.pvv.org/~randhol/      |                      -- Some AOL'er.