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From: donnel@helix.nih.gov (Donald A. Lehn)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc,comp.windows.ms
Subject: Re: give me solid facts: Windows/Mac
Message-ID: <1125@nih-csl.nih.gov>
Date: 27 Mar 91 14:20:14 GMT
Article-I.D.: nih-csl.1125
References: <1991Mar27.033317.23763@cs.uoregon.edu> <91086.010558CXT105@psuvm.psu.edu>
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>
>I have it on apparently reputable word (from William Woody et alia)
>that the user interface guidelines for Windows are not as rigorously
>defined as those for the Mac; they seem more a set of suggestions
>than the N Commandments.  Some time ago, Apple realized that "drift"
>in developers' use of the interface tools provided with the Mac was
>causing damage to the inter-program skill transferral I mentioned
>above, and began publishing its Human Interface Guidelines (and
>started spreading rumors about the User Interface Thought Police :-).
>
>I'd be very interested in knowing how different the user interfaces
>for, say, WordPerfect and Microsoft Word are under Windows 3.0.  These
>are two very popular applications that have extremely different command-
>key usages in their straight DOS versions; how have they converged in
>translation to Windows?
>
>-------
>Christopher Tate

Just what the world needs a Windows Interface Guidelines enforcement
team.  Hey maybe all of us Windows users can chip in $10 each and 
hire a bunch of thugs who will monitor all Windows programmers and
if they see a programmer who uses an ounce of creativity and who tries
to make his/her product somewhat different they will superglue their
fingers to their keyboards.   ;-)

Christopher, lighten up.  Don't you think it would be a tad bit stupid
for all Windows wordprocessors to be identical?  Why would we then 
need more than one vendor?

The key to a good program is to make it as intuitive as possible.  If this
can only be achieved by breaking some arbitralily defined standard than so
be it.  The arguments made about the Mac or Windows being better than the
other based on different programs on each are rubbish.  I've use Pagemaker
on both the Mac and with Windows and I could easily switch between the
machines with no problems.  The key here is that the programmers at
Aldus chose to make the two products virtually identical.

What I really find interesting is that a Mac user would ask for "standard"
interfaces.  Isn't that what the people at Apple are against.  Aren't they
the bozos who are suing Microsoft for making windows look like a Mac. 
Imagine all of the lawsuits that would be brought if Wordperfect were to
make its new Windows wordprocessor look identical to wfw.

Don