Economics & Eye Candy

[Dennis Brown]

There are two classes of problems to solve.

1.  Develop commercial applications for others to use to solve a  
problem without knowing how it is done.
2.  Write your own tools to solve your own problems.

Number 1 is hard and requires a lot of expertise.  The user is  
delighted with a custom pleasing (eye candy) interface.  He feels  
that he has gotten his moneys worth, because he could not have made  
such a nice piece of art.

Number 2 is easy (that is the goal).  The interface is utilitarian,  
because the effort goes into solving a problem.  An easy way to have  
a pleasing interface more or less automatically, is a delighter, but  
not absolutely needed.

The beauty of Revolution is that it can do both of these for most  
problems.  However, it does neither perfectly yet.  It is a work in  
progress.

The documentation needs are very different between these two.

Developers can invest the time to learn all the nooks and crannies of  
the tool, because the overhead will be repaid in the substantial use  
of the tool.  They need an in depth description of each operation  
along with all the possible side effects.

The "hobby" user needs the tool to do what he wants in an intuitive  
way, with very easy index into the documentation by the theme of what  
he wants to do.  Simple script examples that he can modify are a  
world of help.  The tutorial series is also a wonderful introduction  
to the basics for everyone.

THIS NEEDS TO BE APPROACHED IN A STRUCTURED WAY!!!

The philisophy needs to be articulated, then the goals need to be  
formulated, and then a plan of action to meet those goals  
developed.   I hope RunRev realizes this.

Dennis

On Jun 7, 2005, at 4:29 PM, Trevor DeVore wrote:

> On Jun 7, 2005, at 1:10 PM, Gordon Webster wrote:
>
>>
>> Transcript has the potential to be so much more than
>> just a cool GUI designer.
>>
>
> Well, I can't design a GUI to save my life and I still find lots of  
> things to do with Transcript ;-)
>
>
> -- 
> Trevor DeVore
> Blue Mango Multimedia
> trevor at mangomultimedia.com
>
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