[OT] The lessons of Ion

[Peter Alcibiades]

No, I missed out on the fun with vi and ed.  I am old enough to remember text
only interfaces however and felt that the GUI was a great liberation from
them.  This was Macs, and for many years I bought into 'ease of use' and
HIGs until the GUIs started to get more and more obtrusive and irritating
and I began to think about why I was still doing things in some ridiculously
complicated way - where were the shorcuts?  They were not there, because so
much of the GUI we know and love today evolved in an era when there were
lots of new users for whom things had to be dumbed down so they could have
instant usability.  

At some point I realized that it is worth spending a few hours learning
something unfamiliar in order to go three times as quickly and with much
less irritation at the end of it. 

The interesting thing about Ion is that it is not obscurantist, after only a
few days, although certainly it starts out feeling that way.  Its also an
interface that is definitely post GUI.  It is not an attempt to get rid of
the mouse.  Its a different approach to the relationship between the OS and
applications.  In a funny way, there is something early Mac like about it,
in the sense that the author has looked at the interface from the point of
view that what the OS interface must do is get out of the way and let you at
the applications, not make you click all the time in all these nesting menus
as if you were a four year old with a short attention span for learning.

Why do we accept that you have to learn how to use spreadsheets and word
processors and photo editors and programming languages, but think that
everyone should be able to pick up a computer and use it without learning
anything, and then be forced to carry on using it the same way on day 300 as
they did on day 1?

To get everything you need done in Ion only takes a dozen key combinations. 
Most of what you need can be done with three or four.  It does depend on the
applications working graphically as they always did.  But the OS interface
and all its widgets and windows and clicking through stuff just vanishes. It
is not like the extreme ones like ratpoison either where you virtually have
no mouse.  You do use the mouse in Ion, but only for a few OS things that
its best for.   So you just memorize the key combinations.  it only takes an
hour.  Why is that so awful?

Iceweasel, Icedove and so on in Debian?  Well, you probably know, its to do
with how open the branding is and what license it comes with.  I have too
much respect for the Debian guys to argue very much about it, if they do it,
they must have good reasons.

You have to give Ion a fair run to have the AHA experience.  And anytime you
get sick of it, you can flip to Gnome with a logout.  Try it.  But try it
for long enough to have that moment.  
-- 
View this message in context: http://runtime-revolution.278305.n4.nabble.com/OT-The-lessons-of-Ion-tp2544524p2545647.html
Sent from the Revolution - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.