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From: sho@maxwell.physics.purdue.edu (Sho Kuwamoto)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Xerox sues Apple!!!
Message-ID: <2940@pur-phy>
Date: 21 Dec 89 17:48:36 GMT
References: <33269@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <10673@encore.Encore.COM> <2676@aecom.yu.edu> <994@biar.UUCP> <1328@key.COM>
Sender: news@pur-phy
Reply-To: sho@maxwell.physics.purdue.edu.UUCP (Sho Kuwamoto)
Organization: Purdue Univ. Physics Dept., W. Lafayette, IN
Lines: 35

In article <1328@key.COM> jsp@penguin.key.COM (James Preston) writes:
>Tell me that you knew immediately--without reading any
>documention and without any help from other mac users and without having
>seen any usage of any similar program before--that the little tipping can 
>with the stuff pouring out of it was used to fill an area with a pattern.
>Tell me that replacing that cute little picture with the words "fill area" 
>wouldn't be more straightforward.  (This is probably not even the best
>example of "undecipherable icon whose meaning could be better conveyed
>with a couple of words", but it's all I can think of right now.)

a) it makes internationalization harder when something like that
   is put into a program.

b) it doesn't really matter too much whether or not you can tell what
   it does *before* you use it, as long as you can tell what it did
   after use.  When you have a program like MacPaint which has a 
   palette of tools, the program feels different than, say, a drawing
   program which uses a crosshair cursor all the time with a series
   of text menus to search through.   

c) once you know what all the tools do, it can be easier to distinguish
   between different icons than different blocks of a "couple of words."

Besides, if they used words, it wouldn't look cutesy enough...
The situation is getting a little better.  There are lots of icons
which don't neccessarily make sense at first.  That's life.  What's
important is that for some people, it's easier to distinguish, say,
icons for different types of documents than, say, filename extensions.
Why do I say it's getting better?   In the new finder, you will be
able to get help on anything on the desktop.  They should have come up
with this a long time ago.

-Sho
--
sho@physics.purdue.edu