Xref: utzoo comp.sys.mac:13449 comp.windows.misc:166 Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!eos!lyman From: lyman@eos.UUCP (Lyman Taylor) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.windows.misc Subject: Re: A/UX window systems, Mac tool...( Hum Interface) Message-ID: <241@eos.UUCP> Date: 3 Mar 88 07:03:43 GMT References: <4129@hoptoad.uucp> <283@rhesus.primate.wisc.edu> <1710@ssc-vax.UUCP> <7523@apple.Apple.Com> <1719@ssc-vax.UUCP> Reply-To: lyman@eos.UUCP (Lyman Taylor) Organization: NASA Ames Research Center, Calif. Lines: 91 Keywords: window human computer interface Summary: Human limitations Sender:lyman@ames-aurora.arpa or In article <1719@ssc-vax.UUCP> benoni@ssc-vax.UUCP (Charles L Ditzel) writes: .... ( deleted comments Byron Han made about multifinder ) >Still sounds awfully serial to me. What happens if you have two windows >at the top (i do this on a sun, usually two editting sessions) maybe >different editors side by side...? Your menu bar would be constantly >changing as you go back and forth (cutting and pasting)... (all that >wasted mouse travel time and a wasted mouse click ) >I think context-sensitive menus make more sense (try SunView applications >and see how well they work) :-) (Seriously, I think a menu bar starts >making less sense in a multitasking environment were more than one >application is running at a time in a number of different windows ) Multitasking saves the World! Come on, the only person I know of the can actually use two applications at once is Mr. Spock of Star Trek due to the unique features of his Vulcan mind ( i.e. he is not a human being ). Unfortunately, us humans can only handle ONE high level cognitive task at once. Therefore, we only need ONE menu at a time. Anything above that is a nice HACK, but not all that useful for us mortals. Needless to say, it ignores most of what about Human Computer Interaction. [ Like people operate best in a CONSISTANT environment which is why the Mac is so easy to learn and use. And UNIX is well UNIX ( a terrific puzzle, but not as great a tool as it could be. And why NeWS and X applications are often thought of as HACKS by people who did not 1) create, 2) pay for, or 3) forcibly made to use the application in the first place. ] Think about it. When have you ever seen anyone, including yourself, doing two things at once ( like running a spredsheet and SIMULTANEOUSLY writing something into your favorite editor ). I give you a hint most computers I seen have ONE keyboard per user. This applies to general human behavior also. For example, people can only handle one conversation at a time. Some people can easily and rapidly " task switch " from conversation to conversation ( doing something remarkably similiar to a multitasking operating system ) but they cannot do it in parallel. This is not to say multitasking is not useful. Multitasking and timesharing used to mean just about the same thing. Then came the single user system. It is useful on a single user system to run a BACKGROUND task(s) that needs NO iteraction with the user, like laser printing a 50 page document. The important point is that menus and the mouse and all that WIMPy stuff are for INTERACTION with the human. WIMPy stuff is used by the human to directly controlthe program unlike the MS/DOS and UNIX environments with their prompts, with which the program ask YOU the questions. The psychological types call this User Directed Software. Humans do not need to control background tasks that is why they are background tasks. If programs need to talk to other programs THEY don't need the menu for hopefully they know what each are talking about :-). As for your example of having two editors going at once. 1) If this was two copies the SAME editor open on two different files then I would same that this is a malfunction of the EDITOR. Take a look at most Mac word processors; they have the capability of having multiple windows open at once. Even emacs has multiple buffers ( it user interface leaves something to be desired though ) 2) If you actually needed two DIFFERENT editors you hopefully were looking at two DIFFERENT types of files. In this case you are context switching between two different types of data who hopefully have completely different menus. ( execpt for the APPLE, FILE, and EDIT menus, there goes that CONSISANTCY again, Mac Write and Mac Paint have for the most part different menus and operation ( those probably aren't the best examples but you get the idea :-). To sum it all up multitasking means that can have more that one task runnig at the same time ( more than one doing work FOR you ), but you can only work WITH one application at a time. So it looks SERIAL because people THINK serial. We can only do low level tasks like see, hear, taste, and smell in parallel; I guess that's what separates the humans from the computers who think SERIALLY just like we do, only they're better at faking it. P.S. Apple I hope you keep this in mind while you are rewriting the MAC OS. We need enhanced MultiF not UNIX. We already got UNIX. :-) P.P.S. And yes the Mac interface isn't THE absolute best interface, but at least its tries. Lyman S. Taylor lyman@ames-aurora.arpa NASA Ames Research Center or more verbose ...{uunet,hplabs,hao,ihnp4,decwrl,allegra,tektronix}!ames!aurora!lyman