The real Challenge for every development platform

[Judy Perry]

Yes, but, frankly, I suspect the whole UI needs to be redone for the
newbie crowd as well.  Take a look at the toolbar; what's the purpose of a
toolbar?  I'll take a stab that it's to offer a visible shortcut to
frequently-performed commands that are obvious to that particular
software's audience.  So, perhaps as it stands now for developers the
toolbar is fine (if albeit large), but how many of those commands/options
would be readily understood by a newbie?  My guess is few to none.

Another newbie issue -- the cursor.  Those two selection cursors simply
look waayyy too similar, the operative distinction between the two is not
visually intuitive, and, as someone here noted, you often have to look
long and hard to see which one you're using at any given time (leading to
the sort of modal errors that could entirely frustrate if not directly
turn away a newcomer).

I try to keep in  mind the 90-10 rule: 90% of a software's basic
functionality aught to be readily comprehensible during the first 10
minutes of use.  Additionally, as I think it was Norman who noted,
software aught to be minimally useful directly out of the box, which, for
the newbie audience means directly accessible code snippets that do the
sorts of programming things newbies would need but not necessarily be
able to immediately create.

You know, kinda like what Hypercard provided.

Judy

On Sat, 22 Jan 2005, Alejandro Tejada wrote:

> on Fri, 21 Jan 2005
>
> Do you know what i'll like better to see?
>
> Four tutorials, plenty of code and screenshots
> that guide novice users to create each of these
> apps... That would be a challenge.
>
> Who will learn quickly?
> Those novices starting RR?
> or Those starting RB?
>
> That is a real challenge! ;-)