Re: Great SWT Program

In article <7e5669e0-b1f7-42b5-a74c-10305cbf2c58@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<bbound@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Dec 3, 7:31 am, b...@xxxxxxxxxxx (Bent C Dalager) wrote:

Stick to debating the relative merits of an environment with more
input options and an environment with fewer, and drop the straw man
arguments centered on a hypothetical individual badly-written
application AND the false conflation of the two only loosely related
issues of environment input options vs. individual application input
options.

You can hardly blame anyone but yourself for your own inaccurately
worded claims. If you want to discuss something other than, or
something more specific than, what you originally described, then you
shall have to come up with a complete, new, description of your claim.

I didn't, and you didn't. What we did was receive an interface to use
to do a job - we would have no access to its programming.

Then you're still babbling incoherently about the hypothetical
situation of a specific application that's badly designed, which is
irrelevant to whether an ENVIRONMENT with more input options that
application writers can choose to use is INHERENTLY worse, which is a
ludicrous claim that you've formerly made and, I suspect, you're now
realizing is unsupportable.

Even this adjusted claim of yours is easy to prove wrong. A physical
input device with many input options can easily be made to be less
convenient to use than a different physical input device with fewer
input options. One trivial example would be a 100-key keyboard where
each key requires 20kg of force to push down vs an 80-key keyboard of
the more normal variety.

FORGET the designer's skill and other irrelevancies. Let's make this
REALLY FUCKING SIMPLE for your REALLY FUCKING STUPID EXCUSE FOR A
BRAIN shall we?

Right, so when desigining an input device, the skill of the designer
is an irrelevance in Twisted-world?

Behind Door #1, we have the best possible design using keyboard and
mouse. Best possible design. Period.
Behind Door #2, the best possible design using keyboard alone.

So now we're discussing best possible designs? Please get back to us
when you're done moving the goal posts.

Irrelevant. Programmers bad at such a thing should program something
else, like the backend engine or something. Or let a widget library
like Swing take care of the detailed handling of the input mechanics,
if possible.

Perhaps they should, but that has nothing to do with your claim.

None of this digression of yours about programmer skill has anything
to do with my claim.

You're the one who suggested that the input device would need to be
remapped by software. Are you now suggesting that this software should
write itself?

Straw man alert! No GUI app I've used wants mouse inputs this specific
and clunky. There are left and right clicks, double-clicks, and drags,
and that's about it. Hovering can produce extra information but is not
needed to do anything really important as a rule.

What we are discussing is what is /possible/, not what has already
been done. Surely, you are capable of debating hypothetical
situations?

Yes, but your behavior is ludicrous. You claim that GUIs can never be
better than text-mode

I have not.

because it's possible for someone apparently
bent on active sabotage to make a horrible GUI.

My claim is that it is possible for a GUI app to be worse than a
text-mode app.

That's stupid. ***,
just "see above". I've shot your latest bull*** down in flames up
there and proven my original assertion beyond a reasonable doubt.

Congratulations on setting another one of your own straw men on fire.

Please just concede this point now and MOVE ON ALREADY.

I concede that you have successfully killed one of your straw
men. Moving on ...

You implied that you suspected that I did, a while back.

What I /have/ said is that you actually /admitted/ to looking at your
keyboard while typing, although not constantly. The impression you
gave was that you do so occassionally, but this remains unclear.

Generally when I start to type after having used the mouse or actually
left the area of the computer, and generally not at any other time. In
other words, at exactly the same times you would have to, save that

I do not, of course.

you never actually use a mouse so in practise it will only happen for
you when returning to the computer from having done things completely
elsewhere.

Why would this force me to look at the keyboard before I start typing?

My evidence is [insult deleted]

That's an insult (#604), not evidence.

Your own statements may be an insult to you, I suppose, but they
nevertheless form important evidence about your computer use.

Plus, you continue to grossly underestimate the number of characters
you'd have to type in general to navigate with search,

I don't have to estimate it at all since I do it all the time.

Well, keyboards in North America seem to be heavily standardized.
Almost 100% of them have exactly the same layout down to the
millimetre.

When I look at keyboards on your average online shop, I see all sorts
of creative placement of function keys, arrow and other navigation
keys, and even shift keys. When moving between Sun, Apple and Windows
type keyboards, the differences are even more pronounced. The only
thing people appear to agree upon is the alphanumerics.

There's the odd exotic one, like the weird curving,
fractured-QWERTY-area MS one (which violates your claim that the
alphanumerics are "entirely standardized" if you consider a single
exotic exception to render the whole idea useless)

The ergonomic MS one has the alphanumerics in the correct places for
each hand, which is what matters the most to a touch typist. While
they do take some getting used to, the skills and concepts are largely
the same in this regard.

But for a North American, there's one keyboard layout that is so close
to ubiquitous that it can more-or-less safely be depended on.

Apple and Sun would tend to disagree with you.

There's a double row of maximize, minimize, close buttons. The state
is still visible.

Only indirectly

No, directly.

Ah, so it actually says, in plain text, "This is a window in an MDI
application" in your version of Windows? Interesting. What sort of
special edition is this?

and only to trained users.

We both assume trained users -- though you tend to assume ones with
weeks (or more) of intensive training, and I only assume the basic
proficiency in bog-standard GUI usage that someone entering high
school should already have as part of their K-12 education.

Actually, your claim has been that Windows is entirely intuitive and
requires no training for an untrained person to use.

Are you now claiming differently, that is, that a person /does/
require training in order to use Windows?

This is why you never really know what you'll get
when you're using Word, because older versions will have MDI and newer
will not.

There are exactly two alternatives and they are easy to visually
distinguish.

.... to a trained user.

Spoken by the person who cannot even open a new tab to browse
newsgroups in while writing a news posting in the original one . . .

I can. I won't, however, because of the unknown risk invoked by having
two concurrent google groups logins to the same account.

Very well then, spoken by the person who is too afraid of his own
superior tools to actually use them to best effect.

This is all the more remarkable coming from the person who only
recently stated:

"You claim to do so, but your lack of experience with tabs suggests
that either you are lying or you do not use either browser to its full
potential."

You really are your own worst enemy.

The shortcut not existing is your straw man. Nothing about the mere
existence of the mouse compels a programmer not to include a keyboard
shortcut for anything in particular, after all.

Probably not, but that is neither here nor there.

On the contrary, it is at the very heart of my assertion that the mere
availability of the mouse as an input device does not automatically
ensure a terrible UI.

Since I never claimed this anyway, you seem to be arguing against
yourself again.

No, over your argument that adding mouse support and graphics to a
user interface automatically dooms it to awkwardness.

I never claimed this

Yes, you did. You have since tried to retroactively change your claim
to merely that "it's possible to write a bad GUI app", which is
trivial since it's possible to make an atrocious UI of any type if you
really set your mind to it.

Stop trying to rewrite history and accept that you've lost.

I would have, of course, if I actually let you write my claims for me.

[snip irrelevant mutterings about some graphical port of emacs]

Only in Twisted-world is the fact that emacs is a graphical app
irrelevant in a debate about graphical user interfaces.

Of course, the problem you are facing is that we are in actual fact
comparing an exceedingly good text-based interface (emacs in my case)
with mediocre GUI-based ones (notepad, word, etc.).

We're doing nothing of the sort. Notepad's is a good GUI.

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about GUIs are
at all true.

(...) apparently I overestimated
your IQ *again*. I think it may be as low as the upper forties, if not
lower, at this point;

It must be painful for you to get so badly hammered by someone so
stupid :-)

Having fewer input options can be a better thing if their design

DESIGN IS IRRELEVANT. See above. The issue is which ENVIRONMENT is
better: one with a mouse or one without it (both having a stock 101-
key keyboard).

Without software to control with it, the "environment" is of no
interest whatsoever.

Not whether some SPECIFIC APP is better or worse than
another. You claimed that an environment with a mouse is worse than an
environment without it,

For some specific environments, certainly. The generalisation of this
to cover all environments is your own creation.

simply because some jerk CAN make an app to
run in that environment that lacks a keyboard shortcut for one
infrequently-used command or some such rot. I called bull*** on that
claim, and I still do.

Then you should stop making up such claims.

(I notice that you're now stooping to falsely implying that I've
broken the law (...)

That implication is only within your head. As far as I can recall, you
have not yet fantasized much about illegal drugs, only the sorts you
can get from pharmacies or the local super market.

The problem is that modern GUI software isn't actually easier to use
once learned than what e.g. emacs is - it's just easier to learn in
the first place.

Sure it is, because various things behave more consistently than e.g.
undo or backspace(!) in emacs, you don't need to personally keep track
of as much esoteric stuff or count the number of times you've done X
to anticipate how it will interpret keypress Y, you can see the
context of your actions, and so on and so forth.

Since the above are only problems in your own imagined text-mode app
anyway rather than in any /actual/ app under discussion here, the
above paragraph is only tangentially relevant to the discussion.

And the Windows Explorer, of course. Oh, and Microsoft Word, Excel,
etc.

?

That's right, keep blocking those facts out! You may save your sanity
still, if only you can repress those thoughts!

The implication being that you think I lied. Of course, I actually did
nothing of the kind.

The implication being [snip disingenuous "innocent explanation"]

I don't believe that that was your motivation, or what you intended to
imply to our mutual audience.

Of course you don't - you /do/ need an excuse not to have to pony up
the reference after all, seeing as it doesn't actually exist.

You should really shut up now, before you sprain your poor broken
brain by trying to actually think with it or something.

You /finally/ worked out what "sprain" means? You may not be fast, but
you get there eventually.

Responding
to cogent arguments with things that amount to "Is not" or "I think
you're lying" with no real reasoning and zero evidence is a sign that
you've lost the argument.

If we were to measure who has written "Liar!" and "Is not" the more of
us two, it is not I who would come out with the highest count.

Only because sometimes I can't be arsed to repeat a whole argument in
detail.

Which, by your own rules (as quoted above), means that you have lost
the argument.

So I write a lengthy paragraph proving you wrong, you write
"Is not!", and I write "Is too!" instead of repeating the whole
fucking paragraph. That doesn't magically make me wrong and you right.

You /do/ follow your own rules, don't you?

That you'd even suggest otherwise does, however, make you an ***.

I suppose I /would/ be an *** if I expected people to follow your
rules, yes. Expecting /you/ to follow them isn't really all that bad,
but it does leave an unpleasant sort of feeling afterwards. I suppose
I'll just have to live with that.

Cheers,
Bent D
--
Bent Dalager - bcd@xxxxxxx - http://www.pvv.org/~bcd
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