Organization [djo0] [arf1]

[Dan Odom]

>From the brain of Andreas Arff came:
> 
> I am afraid that my first answer to you in over a month must be a critical
> one C:}.

That's fine; most people are critical of me :-)

[Stuff deleted]
> 
> Very good idea. I had thought of making moose available to the lower layers
> of the people (ie. non programmers C:} ). That would mean a standard
> interface, or at least standard functions for each interface item.
> As I have understod the UI filosofy there will be a GUI and a TUI. Of
> course you could build a GUI in a TUI if we made the graphics
> initialization commands public (as I suppose we'll do). But I don't think
> there should be 13 different GUIs, each with a different object structure.
> What we could do; Make some sort of dynamic gadget library, so you could
> add (or even change some of the existing) gadgets.

(TUI: Terrible user interface?  Torrid user interface?  Tumbling
underclothes from Ireland?)  Ich habe keine Ahnung was ein 'TUI' ist.
(I hope I got that right; anybody want to correct my German?)

I like the idea of a dynamic gadget library.  (I'll call them 'widgets'
in the future since that's the term I'm used to)

> What I think is important is to have a single GUI with a common UI, to
> simplifie the users life. Another question; is everybody prepared to put
> down the work needed to get a good UI? I think if we make 13 GUIs we'd
> have 13 bad GUIs, but if we made 1 (base) GUI we'd have 1 good gui!

I see what you're saying, but I don't want to make the UI part of the
system.  The Unix concept of a seperate shell is a good one, even
if it does make the user's life a little more difficult.  Transition
from sh to tcsh only took me about two weeks, so it's not too bad.

> The point of developing a GUI is not to make it entertaining; but to make it
> easy to work with. I'd rather prefer a GUI with quite a high learning
> threshold that has hundreds of shortcuts everywhere, than a true point and
> click GUI as mac and next.

Agreed!  I don't like having to take my hands off the keyboard all the time.

> If we wait with it til moose is finished it won't become an integrated part
> of the OS and that is pretty dumb I belive. Then we will have another windows
> (but with a lot more easy memory management from the programmers point of
> view).

Hmmm...  I don't want to force a UI on the user.  Keeping the shell
seperate from the kernel is good; that way, if you hate the supplied
one you can write your own.

-- 
Dan Odom
danodom@matt.ksu.ksu.edu -- Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS

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