KDevelop editor interfaces - ups

[Richard Dale]

On Thu, 03 May 2001, you wrote:
> In user interface studies people have been assigned tasks
> they should solve with different user interfaces. It has
> always turned out that they were less efficient with overlapping
> windows. And this is nothing new, it was known at Xerox PARC
> twenty years ago. Even Marlin Eller talks about it in his
> book :-)

FYI

"Some of the smaller areas were obvious and found their place in the framework
immediately. Probably the most intuitive was the idea of multiple overlapping
windows. NLS had multiple panes, FLEX had multiple overlapping windows, and the
bit-map display that we thought was too small, but was made up from individual
pixels, led quickly to the idea that windows could appear to overlap." 
...
"An intuitive way to use windows was to activate the window that the mouse was
in and bring it to the top.. This interaction was modeless in a special sense
of the word. The active window constituted a mode to be sure - one window might
hold text -  but one could get to the next window to do something in without
any special termination. This is what modeless came to mean for me."
...
"Let me attack a few more sacred cows. For example, the desktop "metaphor". I
don't want a screen that is much like my physical desk. It just gets messy -
yet I hate to clean up which in the middle of a project. And I'm usually
working on lots of different projects at the same time. At PARC they used to
accuse me of filling up a desk until it was uselessly tangled and abandoning it
for another one! One solution to this is "project views" as originally
implemented by Dan Ingalls in Smalltalk-76. Again, this was more of a user
illusion than a metaphor. Each area holds all the tools and materials for a
particular project and is automatically suspended when you leave it. A bit like
multiple desks - but it is the magic that is truly important. Here the magic is
that every change to the system that is made while in a project area - no
matter how deeply made to the system (even changing the meaning of integer
"+"!) - is logged locally to the project area. Yet each of the project areas
are parallel processes that can communicate with one another. This is a user
illusion that is easy to understand yet doesn't map well onto the physical
world"

>From 'The Art of of Human Computer Interface Design', User Interface: A
Personal View by Alan Kay

-- Richard

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