Re: [Bug-gnubg] Good beta release! (Suggestions)

[Jim Segrave]

On Mon 17 May 2004 (14:23 -0700), Richard Anderson wrote:
>   I notice that there has been a 
> > commendable 
> > > effort in gbg to conform to some Windows UI standards; I'd 
> > like to see 
> > > this taken further.  I realize that some of the Windows UI 
> > standards 
> > > may not be ideal, but when third party apps follow the existing 
> > > standard it flattens the user's learning curve enormously.
> > 
> > The primary target of GNU Backgammon is GNU/Hurd or 
> > GNU/Linux, so in general we should not try to conform to MS 
> > Windows UI standards unless they happen to coincide with 
> > their open source equivalent. 
> > 
> > J?rn
> >
> 
> I would hope that the primary target of GNU Backgammon is human beings and
> that political considerations would be secondary.  Good developers write
> good code, regardless of what organization they are associated with.  

But some developers - me, for one - hardly ever use Windows and when I
do, I find it to be counter-intuitive and sufficiently annoying that
I'd be unlikely to ever use it as a reference. This isn't a political
issue, per se - I don't use Windows as it's unsuited for the work I
do. I do find navigation in the file chooser to be slow, cumbersome
and generally awful, I find the treatment of the Enter key as marking
a whole form as completed instead of an entry on a form, the use of
tab to skip between fields instead of as a whitespace generator
(although I think IBM did this on 2780/3780 terminals), the list goes
on and on. I usually end up cursing loudly whenever I am forced to
spend more than a couple of minutes on a Windows box. I didpute that
the interface is intuitive, it is ubiquitous and people accept its
idiosyncratic behaviour simply because they've not seen others and
they expect computers to do weird things by their very nature.

-- 
Jim Segrave           address@hidden