At a loss for words.

A little more info on Xerox, because no-one ever seems to get it right.

They developed the graphical interface for their Star workstations with the purpose of making the operating system, file management, networking and email transparent to the operator. Their development environment was called Mesa, which was a lower level interface but graphical none the less. It had an incredible set of development tools for its day, and some smart people at Xerox thought it would make the basis for a great CAD program. They developed Expert, which had three modules - an intuitive 2D drafting program that had intelligent menus - a schematic capture program, and a PCB layout program. All three worked together as a single package in the same environment. If you wanted the Star interface, you had to reboot. We used it for tech pubs.

Versatec, the plotter division of Xerox, was given the task of selling Expert into the engineering world, and they had some success, but not much. Then EIS took it over and underbudgeted it. They tried to kill it off, but the EDGE user group heard about it and there was open warfare between Xerox customers and EIS to keep Expert going. I know this because I led it. But by then Xerox's name in computing was mud, even if their 6085 workstation and their upgrade of Star, now called Viewpoint, was slicker than anything Apple or Msoft could come up with in 1987. All of it, including the operating system, networking, graphical interface and applications took up less than 20 MB!

Xerox had killer software in the 80's. Their management was too busy playing internal politics to notice, and all of it went down the drain. Too bad.

Paul, I remember we three Amigos brought up the point of changing the UI in 2001, but our criticism (mostly your criticism) fell on deaf ears. Even though you pointed out that the UI changes between 2000 and 2001 presented a disadvantage in one way, the message obviously didn't sink in (even tho' they pricked up their ears at some of what you said). I wish you luck getting the point across better this time. I suggest maybe trying different ears. There are a few like minds at the company now, you know. Biasotti is probably one (hint, hint).

'Sporky'

T>

I'm all for it.

This brings up an interesting question. After we've been using software in our jobs for some time, we all become expert in certain areas, but we can be complete novices in many other areas. In the best of all possible user interfaces we could pick and choose how information is presented for each function or tool bar.

I certainly wouldn't mind if they would put some work into fixing what we have right now. I would rather have the existing interface work better than get a major redesign of it right now.

I'm not sure how to respond to this. I've seen this type of approach work well (context sensitive mouse picks, for example) and I've also seen it done in ways I disliked. (I-deas moved menu buttons around depending on how often you picked them. Sometimes it worked out OK, and other times it just led to frustrating searches every time you hit a function.)

This is a very good point for any kind of scheme that moves stuff around. You want to be able to take your interface preferences/knowledge easily along when you switch computers.

Those of us who are hoping to take part in SWW focus groups should be taking notes and thinking hard about it.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

I disagree. I have a hard time working now without the handy rubber ball in my left palm. Not only can I rotate the model, but it is very fast to navigate the feature manager.

But I would agree that a Spaceball does not make up for slow rebuilds. That time is reserved for trips to the water fountain.

neil wrote:

ok I give in guys...committees! ...engineers!....newsgroups! really I shouldn't keep throwing up ideas about it anyway because I am not a SW subs customer anymore so what transpires doesn't affect me... good luck with the meeting TOP. neil

You have my vote. Maybe it's "stylish", but since when do engineers have time for "stylish" in our tools? Gimme a nice dense FlexGrid. I really like how it's used in VB and ACAD. In ACAD it's also a handy selection filter tool.