Re: Great SWT Program

On Oct 19, 6:08 am, blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The notion that they could gain something from learning a particular
interface implies that it's equal or even superior to others.

I don't agree. Even if you regard all interfaces other than the
currently popular one as inferior -- you know the old adage about
those who don't know the mistakes of history being condemned to
repeat them?

My personal experience has been that students and budding designers
and such will repeat them anyway, and learn from them. This is one of
the things school is for -- to get that phase over with before they
are making stuff for actual consequential purposes instead of as
educational assignments. :)

There's also the distilled wisdom of the usability professionals and
their reams of documents, guidelines, and whitepapers, plus the "copy
something you know works well" approach.

Hell, us Java coders just need to not egregiously abuse the ability to
make custom Swing components and L&Fs to get a UI that should be
decently usable. We concern ourselves with putting the particular
controls into the UI that are needed; Swing concerns itself with
making them work properly with the keyboard and mouse. Larger-scale
usability issues arise of course, such as how to organize things, but
even there there are standard patterns you see everywhere that you can
copy, and the Swing guidelines and Java Tutorial and conventions and
even the way the controls themselves work tends to push one toward
making a "normal" UI.

[ snip interesting speculation ]

"Speculation"? It's a surer bet than whatever your local weatherman is
forecasting for tomorrow. :P

Not those specifically, but what about those hand-hackable config
files with no alternative to modifying them BUT hand-hacking that you
mentioned earlier?

I don't remember ever having a problem finding their names and
locations somewhere in the man pages or other documentation.
Of course, this is blmblm the weird we're talking about here,
who has the superhuman ability to extract information from the
admittedly imperfect Unix/Linux help. It's possible, too, that
I'm forgetting about some old-style tool that used configuration
files whose locations weren't discoverable via documentation.
"Modern" tools, though, seem not to document at all where they
store configuration information. It's "magic". I think I've
made that point before, though. <shrug>

Usually, they provide their own interface to change the information,
and expect a) only the savvy user or geek-squad repairman to want more
and b) those people to know where to look. There are conventions.
Windoze apps store stuff in their Program Files subdirectory and/or
the registry. The registry has a global search. Put in the app name
and (after a few tens of minutes perhaps) as a general rule you will
find its registry keys, if it has any.

.

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