eiron wrote:

] Unfortunately, I think getting people into something different
] may be quite tricky. Ripping out the Save option, for
] instance, would probably leave many people asking "How do I
] save? What's the filename?" Eliminating the File Open/Save
] dialog window would cause people to pluck their brains from
] Happy Paradigm A and force them into the
] New-But-Terribly-Uncomfortable Paradigm B. It will probably be
] a slow thing coming, if it comes at all.

You bring up a good point and one that bears repeating. The reason why the Macintosh was such a humongous paradigm shift was that it absolutely forced users to interact with the machine in a completely different way. Yes, the learning curve was steep (arguably), but it was because of the totality of changes that it was accepted.

Contrast that with evolutionary improvement, such as modifying a window or removing the Save option and I think you'll get a much stiffer resistance. I am reminded of a great graphic arts truth, which is "people read Helvetica best because people read Helvetica most." It's to say that you are most productive with what you are most familiar with. It has no room for whether it is CORRECT or even effecient. This is a common problem in any process or systems design work. Factories deal with this all the time. It's often more expensive to retrain workers to do something in a more effecient better engineered way than it is to let them crank along doing it wrong.

So when you look at the modern GUI, yes... it's woefully outdated and certainly hasn't even come close to keeping track with the times. I mean, given the massive strides in hardware power, the OS and the GUI is almost amazingly primitive relatively speaking. But I don't know if incrementally changing it will be anything other than a failure. It almost *requires* a new revolution.

RE: When good interfaces go crufty