Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!ucbvax!THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM!nsb From: nsb@THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM (Nathaniel Borenstein) Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew Subject: Re: Why isn't ATK more widely used? Message-ID: <8afNS8q0M2YtAKlng0@thumper.bellcore.com> Date: 25 Jul 90 12:58:48 GMT References: Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 26 Excerpts from internet.info-andrew: 24-Jul-90 Re: Why isn't ATK more wide.. Bill Janssen@parc.xerox. (4883+0) > - when the R4 help tool came out, it core-dumped almost every time a man > page was requested. After having that happen to them 3 or 4 times, most > pioneers around here turned to xman instead, and have never turned back. > This has the added effect of making the documentation on ATK harder for > them to read, since they are not used to help. I myself have `man' > aliased to `/bin/man $* | col -b | pipescript'. I really enjoyed help > under R3, but it got too Byzantine and unpredictable under R4. Yeah, that was bad. It has gotten reliable again with later patches, but I can understand your giving up. > - no new user appreciates ATK menus. Well, that may be true if you define "new user" to mean "someone who is used to Motif (or Macintosh, or whatever) menus and doesn't want to learn something new. But the ITC did a lot of real testing of what I consider "new users" -- people without preconceptions -- and that's how the ATK menus were chosen. So while I personally think that ATK menus should be changed to match Motif menus, I think so because the latter are becoming standard, not because they're intrinsically easier to use -- I still suspect that the truth is the opposite. Most of your other comments ring true to me. -- Nathaniel