Is the Jet Age of Computers Revolutionizing User Interface Design?

[FredGarvin]

I also like FF's search engines tool bar. I have EBay, Wiki, Amazon, Merriam-Webster and a few others. Just type in the word and you automatically get sent to the site and the search is complete in one command. Plus more are being made every day. I like that FF allows people to write things for it third party.

EDIT: I just added a window split add on. It is really cool. Now I have multiple browser windows inside my main FF window. Each one can have tabs too. The only limit is memory. Pretty cool.

 

[caslav.ilic]

I must admit. I am slowly becoming a tech junkie. [...] It seems like computers are making another big jump in terms of user interface. Everything is now so clean, and user friendly. I am really impressed by what's being put out now. Very high quality.

And what do you take into comparison, to say that you're impressed and judge it to be of very high quality?

Without reaching for broader audience, I, for one, am appalled at how the predominant concepts of end-user computing today affect engineering spirit, working against efficient, creative, and enjoyable professional utilization of computing resources.

Regardless, "junky" is probably a better term than you would have expected ;) Could also try out Mac, apparently that one's a regular soma.

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Chusslove Illich (Часлав Илић)

 

[Mk]

That would be great if I could convince the PC to talk to the Mac network. The Macs have no problem, but the PC gets stubborn.

I think that's the last bastion of the argument of PCs being more compatible. Sad, really.

 

[Cyrus]

And what do you take into comparison, to say that you're impressed and judge it to be of very high quality?

Without reaching for broader audience, I, for one, am appalled at how the predominant concepts of end-user computing today affect engineering spirit, working against efficient, creative, and enjoyable professional utilization of computing resources.

Regardless, "junky" is probably a better term than you would have expected ;) Could also try out Mac, apparently that one's a regular soma.

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Chusslove Illich (Часлав Илић)

Eh? Sorry I don't like green screen MSDOS that went away in the 80's. I don't really know what you mean by that.

 

[caslav.ilic]

Eh? Sorry I don't like green screen MSDOS that went away in the 80's. I don't really know what you mean by that.

My question was: since you seem rather satisfied with the way things are now, and gave some examples of your daily use-cases too, what do you compare it with to draw conclusion of a "jet age"? So your answer is to the MS-DOS screens that went away in the 80's.

The "screens of the eighties", that is to say the paradigm that this phrase usually stands for as a metaphor, did not actually went away. It is just indiscernible on contemporary Windows and Mac desktops, as used by today's typical fresh outta school engineers. However, rest assured that the real jet age, as it has progressed, and as it exists today, is directly reliant on the "screens of the eighties" to make any further advancements.

A (recent) example that made me personally painfully aware of the wrong direction the engineers are educated for computer use, was very simple: I was involved in a ~9 man-month effort, which, in my opinion should have been a mere 1 (one) man-month job. The software choices that were available all lacked where it counted, with glitzy graphical interfaces, but little and woefully underdocumented "screens of the eighties" stuff needed to cut the effort 10-fold; the people involved (senior undergrads, grads, MechEng/CompEng mixture) were finding the situation an expected drudgery (indeed, at least a user-friendly one!), not making much thought of the huge inefficiency of the process, never having being exposed to "screens of the eighties" thinking. So to say, the software and people were matched appropriately, the usuall vicious circle.

It was really I who was an aberration in that chain :) Certainly for the better part, rather than in the "jet age" software, the efficient 1 man-month effort would have been spent in the "screens of the eighties", i.e. in a capable shell, text editor, and file browser, making good use of interpreter- and compiler-like tools. It would have been creative, near zero drudgery, and thus quite enjoyable. However, I had no "mandate" to spend time on making this happen, and anyway had little wish to wrestle with support drones of the "jet age" software, pulling out the details they left out of the manuals, and dealing with their ill-designed "screens of the eighties" features (necessarily such, having little customer demand...)

And I won't even start griping about spreedsheet :) I would just reiterate Dijkstra's famous statement with Cobol substituted for Exell...

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Chusslove Illich (Часлав Илић)

 

[Cyrus]

What were you trying to do that was so difficult? Excel is pretty easy to use... You can use it with any standard VB editor.

 

[Integral]

I haven't seen anyone with scooters around here, so that's not really an issue. I'm not sure what they do about motorcycles around here. I don't see many of them, but it's not like there's a place to put a hangtag, so they might get away with parking wherever they want.

I am feeling pretty luckv after reading that. They just started a new policy at my work, we just went to a 1 yr password, up from 90 days. Of course we need 12 characters, Upper case, lower case, numeric, special characters, and does not appear in a dictionary.

The one I hate is SAP, not sure how long the password lasts but when the time comes you are given no warning. You log on and get a message, change your password, NOW. I need some time to come up with a good password, at least the corporate site has a count down telling how many days are left till you have to change. I am currently locked out of sap, couldn't remember my password, It takes a phone call to India to get it reset, nothing against Indians, but i speak American, not heavily accented British. (Please, no offence intended)

 

[chroot]

Now if I could only figure out a way to get Macs and PCs to synchronize files so they all have the most current version of whatever I'm working on, I'd be thrilled...but not counting on that one.

The best ways to manage versioning in a heterogenous environment are systems like CVS and SVN. Look into SmartCVS and SmartSVN as front-ends. You basically can commit an updated file from anywhere, and then have those changes automatically migrated to other computers before you begin working on the files there. They were written with program source-code in mind, but they will work with any kind of files. The downside? You need to run a server that will be visible to every computer involved.

You can also spend $10/month to get some cheap webspace, accessible from anywhere by FTP. Then you can use any of a number of different programs to easily move files back and forth from that shared space.

Even more simply, you might be able to get by with a small USB flash drive. They should work just fine for moving files back and forth between computers with different operating systems. Just make sure you keep frequent backup copies on more reliable storage.

If you have an iPod, you might even want to consider just using part of its capacity as an external, portable hard drive.

- Warren

 

[caslav.ilic]

What were you trying to do that was so difficult? Excel is pretty easy to use... [...]

"Difficult" and "easy" are too fuzzy terms ;)

Engineering R&D.

You come up with an idea, which may or may not work. You have to examine it, which will take some effort. The amount of effort depends on the applicable tools that you have mastered. In a given time frame, with one set of tools you'll be able to check out more ideas, with another set less.

Furthermore, the tools will have feedback on your ideas. You will semi-unconsciously cast aside ideas that would require too much effort to examine. Any repetition during the effort increases this negative feedback. And the bigger the effort needed, the more people involved, the more susceptible to Brooks' law.

Thus, engineers need to choose their tools not by how easy to use they appear to be at first sight, but by how they can facilitate throughput of ideas through the examination chain, which further boosts the breath and depth of ideas.

Regarding computing tools, the notion of "user-friendliness" as it is widely taken for granted today, is exceedingly poor at conducting the flow of engineering ideas. Excel (now I spelled it properly :) is the flagship of poorness; spreadsheets may be appropriate for something, but engineering computation it ain't.

Few simple test questions, for any senior engineering student: Can you wrap a loop around the computation that you have just built up, and a loop around it, and a loop around it, ad infinitum? Do you have an idea why you may need that capability? Can you make use of a dozen machines idling away on the campus during the off hours? Do you have an idea what you would use them for? If answer to any of these questions is no, then you are being held back by poor tools.

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Chusslove Illich (Часлав Илић)

 

[Cyrus]

Well, that's why you bring out the big guns and run matlab.

Excel is good for doing simple things. I would use excel for presentations, not matlab, because the graphs are pure eye candy! There are uses for it.

Another big gun is EES, Engineering Equation Sovler.