Text 5767, 57 rader
Skriven 2005-07-08 23:46:08 av Don Hills (1:379/45)
   Kommentar till text 5762 av Rich (1:379/45)
Ärende: Re: Productivity
========================
From: dmhills@attglobal.net (Don Hills)

In article <42ce3d79@w3.nls.net>, "Rich" <@> wrote:

> ... My point is that this satisfaction from
>responsiveness is distinct from the time (limited or not) spent on a
>task.  I believe this is one reason people desire and enjoy ever faster
>computers.

They desire and enjoy computers that are responsive enough to not get in their
way when they want to get something done. For traditional business use, they
already have them.

I appreciate the difference between responsiveness and overall time. I had
formal training in user interface design and implementation and several years
of putting it into practice. To give an example that Tony can appreciate, IBM
made threading easy and simple in OS/2 programming so as to encourage
programmers to use separate threads for processing and user input. A well
written OS/2 app will always be responsive to user input even if the main loop
is busy or hung. Trouble was, too many programmers took the Windows approach of
the period and did user input in the main loop, leaving users hanging if the
app wasn't responding.

For a real-world example, compare the IBM Web Explorer (in Warp 3) with the
Netscape browser of the time (v2.02) which was a port from the Windows code
base. The IBM browser was always responsive, even when waiting for a page to
load. The Netscape one left you staring at the clock until it completed or
timed out. Even if the Netscape browser had been faster (it wasn't), I'd have
used the IBM one because it was a much more pleasant experience.

Getting back to my mail and news on my 486, it takes noticeably longer than my
desktop Pentium 733 to perform heavy lifting such as downloading and processing
the mail and expiring old posts etc. But when it comes to the actual UI such as
selecting posts, moving through mail items, scrolling and paging text etc, it's
instant. I can scroll through posts at 20 per second, which is much faster than
I can read them <g>. This is partly because it's a text mode (VIO) app instead
of a GUI app, but since this is the way God intended mail and news to be read
<g> it's not a problem. It also helps that IBM put a lot of time and effort
into developing readable fonts for use on character mode display devices and
carried this over into OS/2. Every time I open a VIO window on a Windows system
I'm reminded that Microsoft... didn't.

So in summary, I'm using Yarn to do mail and news on a 486 instead of using
Thunderbird on a Pentium 733 because it's a more pleasant UI experience. It's
also almost as fast, because most of my time is spent reading and replying.
Waiting for upload/download etc is a small proportion of my time. I usually do
something else while that's happening, anyway, such as check my Webmail
accounts.

--
Don Hills    (dmhills at attglobaldotnet)     Wellington, New Zealand
"New interface closely resembles Presentation Manager,
 preparing you for the wonders of OS/2!"
    -- Microsoft advertisement on the box for Windows 2.11 for 286

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