Wimp Testimonials

A few quick superficial comments from a non-programmer user:

-Mouse: great for CAD

-Manuals: I love them: I'm afraid I love my set of WordPerfect (win) 6.0 & other Borland office suite manuals (1993-4?): nothing like hard copy and the ability to mug up on things with the machine switched OFF!

-Windows: (confession time) hardly ever use more than 1 at a time

-Keyboard: often much easier than pointer stuff

-Online Help: I hate it - its usually trite & circular and seldom scratches where it itches.

--MartinNoutch

Some additions:

Windows: Requires large screens. If you have ever seen a UI based on a window concept running on a 14" screen, then you know what is wrong with the idea of windows. If you have a large screen, however, windows can become a powerful concept - in case you can mentally keep up with what happens in your 30+ open windows (as there happen to be on my 21" monitor in six virtual desktops at the moment).
Icons: The idea is based on the wrong concept that there is one visual language meaning the same to all potential users of a software. Boy, most icons hardly mean anything to the people who "designed" them. How should they mean anything to the potential users? Tooltips are just trying to cure the symptoms.
Menus: The concepts have blurred. Once "File" actually was meant to contain operations on the application as a whole, so should have better been named "Application". "Edit" comes from the brain-dead idea that everything in a window is a "document", and menu items under edit are supposed to manipulate the document's content. Same for "View". It was supposed to give options on how the "document" itself is displayed. The world is not full of documents, so the concept is inherently broken. Menus like "Options" and "Preferences" try to fix this, but fail because they have no clear concept on their own.
Pointers: an endless fight for space on the desktop (the real one), and for the wrist's health.

I've often maintained that the desktop metaphor is a great idea -- if you like doing work on a desktop that's effectively the size of a 3 by 5 inch filing card.

I'm an expert computer user. Still I'm well known as "MrMaximize?:" 99.9999% of the time, I operate on windows that are maximized -- on a 17 or 19 inch monitor! I'm constantly pushing my coworkers to maximize their windows, to avoid the dreaded "scrollbar within a scrollbar" problem that confuses my even relatively sophisticated peers.

-- JeffGrigg

That means that you had a million chances to maximize a window, and only once you didn't.

I'm constantly frustrated by my monitor being a desktop and not a page - Have you ever tried to look at a Word document zoomed to 'whole page' with the document map up on the left? Eeech. Part of the reason this fails so badly is that someone made us all have the wrong aspect ratio for our monitors...there are certainly times that I like the horizontal layout, but there are times I'd like to rotate the screen; there were systems that did this in the 70's...the aspect ratio is made even worse by all of the tools inserting menus above and below the document, and not to the side of it. One of the nicer aspects of the SmallTalk UI is that the menus, scrollbars, etc only appear when in use; even the mac only has a single 'active' menu, not one-per-document.

However what I meant to post was while I sympathise with the maximizers I don't altogether agree. A common operation is to compare two documents, or a document and a spreadsheet, or have the code up with the running UI, or whatever. What I find is wrong-and-difficult in this context is overlapping windows, the great innovation that Apple and MS fought over. The fact that the windows can overlap makes it more difficult to arrange them side-by side. And the fact that they have active controls (toolbars, scrollbars, menus) when they're 'tiled', even when not active, just reduces the amount of screen left to use...

There was some discussion on the mailing lists in the early days of Gnome about choosing a better UI layout. It was turned down (as I recall) because people wanted to compete directly with Windows first rather than do something new and different. I get the feeling the user base of Windows is now too big for a revolution - instead the UI is going to evolve to something different (a New!! Desktop Plus!! extension will appear, then become the standard, as with the Active Desktop). --BrianEwins

Back in the bad old days of WP5.1 and 286s I had a paper-white page-aspect monitor (I shudder to think what that thing cost!) Every engineer who happened into my office either "Ooooh"d or "Ahhhh"d. It gave the whole space an intelligent feel! --BenTremblay

I personally like windows, but I agree that they are awful for new users. What I think would be ideal would be to have an enviroment where you set a software switch to use windows versus a tab system where all programs are full screen and you switch via a tab at the top. On linux this might not be too hard to implement by writing a custom window manager. Such a WM would be of great using linux in net cafe settings.

This was the suggested (and rejected) innovation early in Gnome

(IonWindowManager)

Really?!?. It doesn't matter. As long as the programs can be resized, then we don't need the GNOME steering committees consent to do such a thing. After all, I like GNOME, but I use Window Maker, and have turned off the GNOME panel in favor of the WindowMaker dock, all of which are actions that the GNOME group also turned down.

See here: http://www.jimpick.com/gnome/ui-proposal/interface-ramblings.html [BrokenLink as of 2003-03-10] for what was actually proposed. Its not quite as radical as your approach but close. If you're an I-do-everything-in-emacs person, the step from Jim's proposal to only having one window open, and using it as you describe, is very small...

When it comes to Icons I'm of mixed opinion. Again, I agree they are awful for new users. However, I don't want just text either, since text takes more room. I think most programs should switch to the IE/Netscape way of handling this which is that the user can choose text, icons, or both.

Menus need to be reorganized, but I think the concept is sound, even for new users. I'm embarrassed that GNOME is going with the windows convention for menus, although they aren't as bad yet. Maybe EaZel? will convince them to correct course here.

Pointers are great for some things, awful for others. On one of my computers, I run linux in command mode only (I seldom use X on the machine). I keep a mouse connected, and I don't use it a whole lot, but the mouse is a great way to save time by cutting text from one virtual console to another. I often compose email on this machine, and I tend to use the mouse to copy output from compiles into a mail message, and things like that. I also use this machine for editing perl scripts, and it isn't uncommon for me to reach over and grab the mouse to copy text within the document. So here, I am in a mostly keyboard environment, and I still use the mouse.

On my notebook (back before the screen got broken) I mainly used word, emacs, netscape, and sometime excel. I usually never bothered to connect the track ball when using the machine except when using netscape. I find that for netsurfing I usually prefer to use only a pointing device, particularly a mouse. I don't like surfing with touchpads, touchscreens, trackballs, pen tablets, or any other device I've come across yet.

When doing graphics work, a pointing device is in escapable. I go back and forth between mouse and pen depending on the program. GIMP, gsumi, photoshop, and painter are all pen only programs. Illustrator, Corel Draw, freehand, and sketch I go back and forth between pen and mouse. Pagemaker, MS Publisher I use mouse only. 3D graphics programs are usually mouse only as well, except for 3D paint software. That said, mice aren't the best interfaces for 3D graphics. I think the best interface would be a small keyboard, a touch screen, a spaceball, and a phantom haptics device. Most work would be done with the spaceball and phantom (think holding object with spaceball, and carving it with the phantom), with the keyboard and touch screen for selecting options and entering parameters. I believe such setups exist, but I've never had the pleasure of using one.

When coding on my main computer, I am almost exclusively keyboard only. For coding I use emacs and rxvt, and just hotkey between them.

I think that wimp isn't so bad, just that we need to be able to tone it down (and in the case of windows turn off) for new users. I do that much needs to be done to optimize programs usage of wimp. I wish that GNOME were doing a better job at this that is currently is. I think that the whole way information storage is represented (InformationStorageRepresentation?) is just as bad as the abuses of WIMP.

A mouse is no harder to control than a pen. We all have to learn sometime and today's children are being raised on mice, trackerballs, joysticks etc.

Similarly, they grow up expecting WIMP software. I don't think there will be another generation which will have to adapt as fast as we did.

So you expect a slowdown in computer evolution? I'm tempted to say that the next generation will have to adapt even faster to new technology than we have, and the most adaption to technology we will have to do in our lives lies not behind us, but in front of us. Expect all your current tools to be completely obsolete in five years (except for Emacs or Vim, that is...)

At first I thought this must be an April fools joke, then I decided that it had been around for longer than that. WIMP is great. All of my kids taught themselves to use a Mac by the time they were 4. I'm sure something better will come along someday, but at the moment WIMP reigns supreme. -RalphJohnson (who uses NT, Solaris, Linux, and Mac OS nearly every day. And who started computing with punched cards.)

Windows - I love them. I love them all maximized. I love flipping between them with alt-tab and shift-alt-tab. Once in a while I'll shrink a few to copy files.

Icons - I hate them. I have no idea what any of them mean and no desire to learn.

Menus - I love them if they are well named.

Pointer - I love it for drawing and selecting blocks of text. I wish I didn't have to touch it to get the task bar to appear. I use the keyboard for everything else.

I have 15-30 windows open at any given time. I keep the task bar on the left hand side of the screen with auto-hide on so I can see lengthy window names when I want to. The "window" nature of my windows is minimal. A tab layout would work as well.

-- EricHodges