Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Remembering Brief & Freedom of Being Unique

Back in the 80's I used the text editor, Brief.  Many of us did.  It was a wonderful product with many features but the feature I remember most was the use of the Home key.

If you hit the Home key once, it would move the cursor to the beginning of the line.  If you hit it again it would go to the beginning of the line at the top of the screen.  Finally if you hit the Home key a 3rd time it would move the cursor to the beginning of the document.

This was a unique feature.  I don't know if you can credit it to the Brief developers but it was my first encounter with the commands.  I thought the idea of using only one key to handle 3 functions was brilliant. It meant your fingers only had to find 1 key and after that the effort to hit it 1,2 or 3 times was insignificant.

Today, there is a tremendous desire to conform; to be in compliance with the look and feel, do what the user expects.  Look and feel, you don't hear that phrase much anymore.  I wonder what the landscape would look like if Microsoft didn't simply buy their way out of the Apple lawsuit over look and feel.

There was that great fear lead by the League for Programming Freedom over being able to copyright the look and feel.  Developers would have to always think out of the box; forced to come up with something new.

I wonder if Apple had a grand plan when they sued.  They tricked Microsoft into paying them for their look and feel.  Microsoft comes up with the compliance schemes for developers to follow.  We get trained to think we need to be compliant.  And Apple marches off and builds great new products like the iPhone with looks and feels that change our culture.