Subject: Re: commit -- [manifesto] no more mangling
From: Mike Meyer (mwm@mired.org)
Date: Sun Jun 18 2000 - 11:46:01 CDT
Jon Niehof writes:
> On Sat, 17 Jun 2000, Aaron Lehmann wrote:
> > a tab implemented that was named "Platform-specific
> > options"?
> No offense, but that sounds like something from interface
> design hell. I can understand how it would simplify the
> design and such, but I'm just envisioning my mother trying
> to figure out what "platform-specific" means on the one hand
> and how the hell she's going to get those thingies after the
> dot on the other hand.
> I htink part of the point of a cross-platform product is to
> make sure the user doesn't know what platform they're
> running on.
That's pretty clearly a violation of the church secretary
principle. For such a user, the application should follow all the UI
guidelines of whatever platform it's being run on. This means that it
is going to be slightly different from platform to platform, as
different platforms will have different UI guidelines.
That doesn't mean you're wrong, mind you. Any cross-platform product
has to decide whether it's going to make it easy for it's users to
move between platforms with it, or for a platforms users to move
between it and other applications on the platform. There are good
reasons for doing it both ways.
If you opt to make it easy to move between platforms, you then face
the question of which platforms UI guidelines is it going to follow
("none" being a valid choice). Making it easy for my mother to use
would make that platform Windows, which I suspect would make the
people who user the Gnome-ified version unhappy.
<mike
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