Raskin book on UI and radical data thoughts

[Jay Nelson]

Chris Pressey wrote:
>I'm not sure what to make of Raskin's claims.

>So I guess the operative word is "locked" rather than "mode".  Is his
>position that modes, once entered, ought to be immediately canceled by
>any user action that isn't addressed by the mode?  Hard to tell.

I took it that he didn't like modes at all, but for some reason
decide to allow LEAP to violate that approach.

>So, while I'll give him due credit for the terms he's coined, and while
>he seems to have the best of intentions, I think I'm a bit nonplussed by
>Mr. Raskin's actual ideas.

I would agree, but might still want to read to hear his
arguments.  Often they spur other ideas.  I'm not willing to
pay $40 or whatever seems to be the going textbook rate now.
I just reacted to the paragraph because it hit some of the topics
I've been thinking about.

>There are basically two reasons for why data interchange is in such a
>sorry state.

Agreed.  There is no incentive on the part of software *sellers*
to make this easy.  Open source software should want compatibility
however.  Isn't XML supposed to fix all this anyway? ;-)


>I think we already have these: journalling file systems?

The user never sees it and the versioning isn't available.  Or rather,
I know my Linux recovers faster now but I have no idea how it
works.  Maybe I need to read up on the file system and see how
to expose the timestamps and versioning.

jay