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Thoughts of a new comer

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cnewtonne:
Yes, I agree on the following ....

- QuickSilver is the landmark. Every time I hear QuickSilver I drool till I drown. 
- Final details can NEVER be anticipated. It is ALL in the usage. Software that is born out of the coder desk only, is useless. I have a dozen of software I can list for you where features meant the world for the developer (in terms of effort and knowledge) but translated little or no real life efficiency when it came to daily usage and experience. Will not mention names though.
- The ultimate goal for any software (after stability and performance) is EFFIENCY and nothing more. I measure efficiency in terms of ...

- number of steps.
- Time taken
- Human resource expenditure e.g. how much software relies on human memory, visual coordination and so forth. Even though taken for granted, these are most expensive of all. The least you force users to use them, the better.

Based on this, I can tell you what elements of the user interface design I think FARR should DEPART from and not use them (unless for emergencies)... This is the bad list when it comes to retrieving data ...

- Trees and hierarchies: too expensive in terms of human resources. Imagine having a tree of 100 branches with 20 child each. I can never understand software that users this is as a way to retrieve data.

- Aliases: bad, bad, bad. A software that users this approach will encounter 2 major hits/setbacks. First, there is an overhead to create and organize aliases. Second, there is the expensive operation to remember the alias as you need it. It just does not work. For one software, I had created 100 aliases. How on earth I'm supposed to remember all.

- menus and worst the cascading styles. I think it time has proven this to be bad.

I once paid $60.0 for a file explorer software that had me access any file I wanted from any application using manus. It displayed file system using cascading menus that I had to chase till I either had my mouse falls of the table or out of frustration in the trash bin. Compare this to a free software from sf.net that I used later to get the deepest folder in less than 3 seconds using auto complete.

I truly enjoy software and the source of this enjoyment is the fact it very truly reflects the limitless bounds of human imagination and abilities. The ultimate goal of any human endeavor to invent is to do one thing and ONLY this thing; it is to save resources whatever they are, specially resources related to our central nervous system e.g. attention, coordination, concentration, remembering, ...etc. The more you save the better the invention is.

Enough said for today. Got get back to work now. 
 

jgpaiva:
Compare this to a free software from sf.net that I used later to get the deepest folder in less than 3 seconds using auto complete.
-cnewtonne (July 20, 2006, 02:31 PM)
--- End quote ---
Would you please tell which program is that?
I've been very interested in typeandrun too, so i think i'd love that program you mentioned ;)

mouser:
well i actually agree with amadawn (and nontroppo made similar suggestion); holding out till everything is figured out is a recipe for endless internal debate.  releasing intermediate attempts is a good idea and i'm going to try to do that, it's just easier said than done and sometimes the internal debate about alternatives can paralyze you.

mouser:
- Aliases: bad, bad, bad. A software that users this approach will encounter 2 major hits/setbacks. First, there is an overhead to create and organize aliases. Second, there is the expensive operation to remember the alias as you need it. It just does not work. For one software, I had created 100 aliases. How on earth I'm supposed to remember all.
--- End quote ---


well you'll notice one of the special things about farr is that you can just type name of program and dont need to add aliases.

but it does support the idea of custom aliases which let you use regular expressions and groups/menus, launch web searches, etc.

ps a trick:
type: agroups
to see a list of all known aliases.

cnewtonne:
I spent 2 hrs today to try to get FARR to display the group aliases. Nice trick

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