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From: gnu@hoptoad.UUCP.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news
Subject: Re: Jim Fulton's comments
Message-ID: <8705261006.AA14448@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: Wed, 27-May-87 04:15:05 EDT
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Posted: Wed May 27 04:15:05 1987
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Date: Tue, 26 May 87 03:06:47 PDT
From: hoptoad.UUCP!gnu@cgl.ucsf.edu (John Gilmore)

In article <8705221517.AA05422@maximo.uucp>, Mike O'Dell writes:
> Quite frankly, given the choice between a system with lots of
> individually good, but collectively randomly-behaved software,
> and a system which runs a lot of essentially-equally-powerful
> software with a very consistant interface, the randoms have
> little hope of commercial sucess.

I absolutely agree.  I have had an old Unipress Emacs with mouse support
for years.  I cannot use its mouse support because it is different
from the mouse support provided by the basic window system (SunView)
and I can't remember what it does.  So I end up copying text around
into files and inserting the file in Emacs, because it doesn't have
a Stuff command in the mouse menu like all the other windows.

NeWSfolks at Sun, please remember to define a good user interface for
NeWS.  When the interpreter works and is complete and fast, you are
only half done.  If you don't provide a user interface at least as good
as SunView, everybody will write their own, and we users will be
mightily confuzzed.  (SunView tends to suffer from too many frobs and
too little effort put into simplicity and ease of use -- try the
so-called editor sometime -- but its advantage is its ubiquity.
Applications CAN'T override it so they learn to live with it.)

This job has clearly not been done in the NeWS prerelease tape,
though I don't fault the prerelease for the lack of it -- something had
to go out the door to get people familiar with programming in NeWS.  A
very good skeleton is there; it just needs flesh.