Another Doc Thought

[Charles Hartman]

(since I'm one who said something vaguely curmudgeonly about the UI)

No, it's not opaque, and the underlying concepts are _unusually_  
clear. I think it behaves oddly. Focus, especially, seems to trip up  
(dumb old) me all the time. I press a left arrow thinking I'm about  
to nudge a widget, and suddenly cards are going by, because the focus  
isn't on the widget even though its "selected" box is showing. That's  
an example of the kind of absolutely microscopic problem which, for  
someone just getting used to any environment, gets translated, or  
magnified, into an impression of conceptual difficulty.

Another example: I put up an Inspector for my main stack, and lock it  
so I can refer to the list of my custom properties while I inspect  
other stuff. I select and Inspect and edit various other objects. At  
some point (??) I discover that in the locked Inspector the name of  
my main stack has been changed. (The title of the Inspector window  
and also the Name property it shows.) Alarm! Is my main stack about  
to get screwed up, saved under the wrong name, or what? I panic and  
change the name and close the Inspector. Don't know what happened,  
but I'm nervous about trying that again, and since I'm paying  
attention to all the other stuff I'm trying to learn about the  
language, the interface, my design, etc., this avoidance registers as  
generalized UI dread. Again, this isn't (I think) a big deal -- it  
only _looks_ like a big deal and translates into an impression of a  
confusing interface, even though it's a detail and not a genuine  
conceptual mystery.

Charles Hartman

On Jul 26, 2005, at 1:27 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:

> But the question here is:  Is Rev's UI really that opaque?  Or is  
> it the underlying concepts which drive the UI?
>