Xref: utzoo comp.sys.mac:16731 comp.editors:176 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!cornell!batcomputer!davidra From: davidra@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (David A. Rabson) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.editors Subject: Idea for new MacIntosh Editor Message-ID: <5024@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> Date: 1 Jun 88 15:39:12 GMT Distribution: comp Organization: Theory Center, Cornell U., Ithaca NY Lines: 80 I was recently talking to an acquaintance of mine who was complaining about learning to use one of those supposedly easy-to-learn editors, Word Perfect. The problem, I soon realized, was the lack of an internal logic, an ideology of editing, or better yet, an entire ideology of the user interface. The MacIntosh has addressed this need admirably, but no one, as far as I can tell, has yet implemented an editor entirely in conformity with the MacIntosh philosophy. I would like to propose just such an editor, which I will call MacWordMasterPerfectStar. One of the more confusing aspects of using the MacIntosh for the beginner is the complexity of the hierarchical file structure. Most novices find it difficult to understand the difference between files and folders, and named icons can be intimidating. MacWordMasterPerfectStar avoids confusion by eliminating all such computereese concepts: old documents are simply left lying on the desktop at full size so the user can tell which is which. What many first-time users find most difficult to deal with on the MacIntosh (or any computer) is the keyboard. Every keyboard is slightly different from every other, and it just gets too confusing to remember. Even the letter keys are in confusing places--who ever thought of putting E next to W next to Q? MacWordMasterPerfectStar does away with the keyboard entirely: absolutely everything is controlled by the mouse. A pull-down menu includes an alphabet submenu ---------------------- | Graphic Shapes | | Special Symbols | | Alpha-------------------------------- | Numbe| select letter with mouse | --------| ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ | | abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz | |______________________________| from which every letter, upper and lower case, is available. The user points to the letter he or she wants, clicks down the mouse button to "grab" it, then moves the mouse into the page area and releases the mouse button at the point at which he wishes to place the letter. It should be noted that, unlike conventional type-setting systems, where there is only a finite number of metal letters sitting in the tray, the MacWordMasterPerfectStar "tray" of movable print is inexhaustible. A user could cover the entire page with the letter "e" and never worry about running out. An early version of MacWordMasterPerfectStar included a feature whereby the user could line up all the type on the page by clicking the mouse button twice; alpha testing, however, showed that many people had trouble understanding when to click once and when twice. We remembered how early predecessors of the MacIntosh had mice with three keys, and how, in a similar way, users could never remember which to hit when, so we went one step further and eliminated the troublesome defect of "click once" versus "click twice." All MacWordMasterPerfectStar mouse clicks are treated the same way. This meant abandoning the line-up-type feature, but after only a little practice, the user will have no difficulty at all getting the letters on the page to line up neatly and straight--all with the mouse. The final user-friendly feature we decided to implement in MacWordMasterPerfectStar was a highly simplified way of saving documents on the floppy disk. Users told us how they hated not knowing which document was on what disk and in what folder ... and so on. MacWordMasterPerfectStar eliminates all confusion by putting exactly one saved document on each disk. The user merely writes the name of the document on the disk label, and then the document is no harder to find than any conventionally-prepared piece of paper. Moreover, a single MacIntosh disk can hold the equivalent of hundreds of pages of paper but is much smaller. Finally, it should be noted that MacWordMasterPerfectStar operates quite strictly on the popular what-you-see-is-what-you-get (wysiwyg) system. Everything from the placement and rotation of letters to the screen resolution and page size is precisely duplicated when the document is sent to the printer. There are never any "hidden commands" or complicated formatting procedures to master--everything is moved by the mouse and looks the same on the printer as on the screen. For information on ordering MacWordMasterPerfectStar, write to devnull@kgbvax.peristroika.com