::scr saving

[Chris Devers]

On Wed, 20 Feb 2002, celia romaniuk wrote:

> I thought it was interesting that you wanted to know *how* it worked -
> because you have an expectation about the way it *should* work.

Yeah, exactly -- I was trying to figure out where the "save button" was,
because I was so used to it being necessary on every other computer I've
ever used. Understanding that it wasn't necessary here because you don't
have to write state out to a physical media of some kind helped it make
more sense -- and also explained why "launching" apps is so *fast*. 

Broadly, this seems like a big psychological hindrance to me. The more
people get used to the typical WIMP interface, with all it's subtle
features like save dialogs, the more people could be put off by
potentially better ways of doing things that maybe weren't feasible when
the WIMP interface was conceived, but could be easily done now if only we
weren't carrying around so much conceptual baggage. 

The Palm Pilot -- and for that matter my Nokia phone -- does a good job of
getting past some of these barriers, but then using a device that fits in
your hand is already a conceptual shift, and maybe using something so
different from a traditional PC is enough of a catalyst to open users up
to new paradigms. I can't think of any significant jumps beyond the old
assumptions on any desktop OS that I've worked with, be it Mac9/X,
Windows3.1-XP, *nix/X-windows, or BeOS. Contradictions gladly accepted.



--
Chris Devers

"Okay, Gene... so, -1 x -1 should equal what?" "A South American!"    
[....] "no human can understand the Timecube" and Gene responded
 without missing a beat "Yeah.  I'm not human."