In a slashdot thread a year or so ago a lot of these
things were discussed, particularly about software
interfaces. Someone in that thread suddenly said:
"Why do I have to click 'save' in a
wordprocessor? Isn't it obvious I'm typing the text in
to store it?" Excellent thinking, which totally
makes todays solutions worthless crap. That remark was
about the core of what is truly useful: do not worry
about the obvious.
Huh. Nice thought :)
Actually your Excel quirk isn't entirely correct. If you
CTRL-C then RETURN (copy and paste?) you only get one
time. But if you CTRL-C then CTRL-V (copy and insert?)
you can do it as many times as you wish. I'm not sure
where I picked this up from, but it's been a major time
saver for me.
Dave: What I'm talking about is that you *can * multiple
paste as long as the cell you CTRL+C'ed is highlighted
with that blinking rectangle thingie. What if you COpy a
cell, then go to another cell and press DELETE on that
cell? can you still paste that cell you copied?
nope. gone forever....
Another thing that really bothers me, and Microsoft does
this too much, too-- when you get a dialog box that asks
you "Do you want to do this or that?"
and then you get YES/NO or OK/CANCEL buttons... The
buttons should be the actual answer to the question!
Kenneth - Yeah I know what you mean. You *know* you're
doing something wring when you have to explain which
button does what...
As for the door, no handle is ok if the closer works at
an acceptable speed, otherwise how do you close it
behind you if you're going out?
Okay, no problem. I was in agreement and just wan't sure
by how you wrote it whether you realized this behavior
in Excel existed.
While I am in agreement, I'm curious how you feel MS
stacks up relative to other widely-used 'integrated'
software. I've often thought their fairly consistant
used of menu shortcuts/text and toolbar icons/placements
were a reason nobody has really jumped on the Linux
desktop much. I'm certainly not going to deal with the
retraining issues and frustrated power users that have
to learn different keystrokes for the same function in
various 'integrated' packages.
I too am constantly amazed at how so-called visual
programmers have no clue how to program a usable
interface.
Darrell: Yeah. Great Book. I think it's even on my
"purchased and recommended" book list
:)
Funny Amazon story about that book:
I was in amazon preparing to order the book, when
suddenly I see that amazon was having a
"sale" .You know, they have this
little title saying "Buy this book along with
*that* book and get a discount.
well that title was saying "Get 'the design of
everyday things' along with 'The Psychology of everyday
things" and get a discount'.
well, natuarally, I went ahead and bought both of these
books, only to later realize that they are both the same
book with different titles!.
I was so convinced that the two books compliment each
other, that I didn;t even bother checking it out first.
Impulse buys suck!
Heh. Norman even says in the opening of his 'new' book
that he wanted to change the title to 'the design of...'
because 'the psychology of...' was scaring people away,
except for psychologists , that is...
I was totally fooled, but that's a sign amazon has a
good marketing design... :)