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.
4 comments:
I hear "look and feel" all the time. I'm a consultant and all my projects have to conform to the organizations' overall look and feel. Forms have to be designed with windows standards in mind (i.e where does the save button go in relation to the cancel button).
In the realm of business apps, there is little room for visual creativity. Far more appreciated is the art of making a form so intuitive that there is little training required for a minimum wage hourly worker to be able to figure out how to use it. If you're building a personal site, or a more "media" driven app, you'll have more flexibility to be creative with look & feel.
Thanks Marti for your comment. You’re the 1st on this blog and I really appreciate it. I find there is a little humor in getting someone to comment:
I have in the past spent a lot of time trying to write my posts; trying to regain some of my limited writing skill I used earlier in my career. This post I wrote in 15 minutes. I did it because I was frustrated that a post in my other blog did not get pinged to Technorati which seems to be the one place were I get readers. I wanted to see if this post would get pinged. I finally got around to registering my blogs at Technorati a couple days ago. I feared the act of registering made me invisible to Technorati.
I guess if I want comments, and I do, all I have to do is whip something off the top of my head and post it no matter how reckless the content.
Back to your comments:
I can’t argue with anything you said. I failed to convey that I don’t try to build fancy web sites. I’m much more into creating products that enhance the user’s ability to carry out an activity. You stated: “Far more appreciation in the art of making a form so intuitive there is little training…” I like that. Your customers require that you duplicate their look and feel and build it on top of windows standards. Windows has been in continuous evolution and sooner or later your customers and their workers will have to make adjustments to these changes and it might not be because they are more intuitive.
I wish it wasn’t just Microsoft or even Apple making the changes. I love thinking about how to improve things. But remember, I’m not working and it sounds like you are. Hope you like what you are doing and making a lot of money too.
It's impossible to predict what will trigger someone to comment. You probably have a lot more lurkers than you know, unfortunately without a hit counter this is not something you can really easily determine.
I find myself torn about Microsoft. On the one hand, I hate that they can essentially dictate the direction of application development (on top of the direction about just about everything else operating system or software related) and that they essentially have a captive audience. Until every packaged software title is available for Mac as well as Windows, there isn't really a truly equal choice between them. And despite how some of my geekiest friends love to say they can do anything in Linux that they can do in Windows, the average PC owner isn't savvy enough to run Linux. I had enough trouble teaching my mother to buy plane tickets over the internet; I shudder to think about trying to teach her even the most basic Unix commands.
This natural distaste for Microsoft's monopoly I have to balance with the fact that by chance I've essentially become a Microsoft technology specialist. I've been working primarily with .NET and SQL Server technologies since .NET was still in beta. At this point it is my bread and butter and wouldn't really make sense for me to try to seek employment with another technology, because my competitive advantage is my MS experience. And truly, I really like the technologies. I think MS did a lot right with .NET and SQL Server (although I think they did a lot *wrong* with Vista and Office 2007) and am one of those fortunate people who really does like what they do for a living. Part of the satisfaction comes from the technical side and part of it comes from giving the clients what they want and need and having them be happy with the result. I'm not a pure enough technologist not to crave the approval part as well.
I love C#. Visual Studio is by far the most polished development environment I’ve used. At one time I had a certification with VB. I even did some WPF work at the beginning of the year. (My only paid work this year.)
At one time, your description of where you are and why you’re there pretty much matched my position. Probably most developers plus or minus some skill level would say the same thing. I had some anxiety over whether I was positioning myself for the future, but I was too concerned about delivering my jobs to notice that I was really not in control.
The last real W2 job I had ended in 1999. I was halfway through a scheduled delivery for a program to design sprinkler systems when the owner decided to stop all projects. He was a former banker and he couldn’t stand to see others making a killing in the dot com industry so he took everything he had and put into buying in a business. I loved the sprinkler application. We showed my work to a few select customers and they were excited. It had a revolutionary interface (of course that’s my opinion). If I could have finished that work it would have spawned other engineering apps.
After that no one wanted to hire someone of my age but I got plenty of short term high paying jobs from past acquaintances. I did Linux, embedded and a whole host of exotic work. These people never even asked to see my resume. They knew I could figure out what I needed on the fly. But it really wasn’t the fun work I’ve been able to do in the past. Then suddenly they were giving my work to overseas teams in Russia and China.
While I was trying to find new work, I became sick. For the first time in my life I went in the hospital and ended up getting financially wiped out and a dysfunctional career.
Sorry to spout off like that. There isn’t even a moral to the story. Thanks for you comments Marti.
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