First Impressions!

[H. S. Teoh]

On Sat, Dec 02, 2017 at 02:20:10AM -0800, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> My car has a bunch emoticons labeling the controls. I can't figure out
> what any of them do without reading the manual, or just pushing random
> buttons until what I want happens. One button has an icon on it that
> looks like a snowflake. What does that do? Turn on the A/C? Defrost
> the frosty windows?  Set the AWD in slippery mode? Turn on the
> Christmas lights?

The same can be argued for the icon mania started by the GUI craze in
the 90's that has now become the de facto standard.  Some icons are more
obvious than others, but nowadays GUI toolbars are full of inscrutible
icons of unclear meaning that are basically opaque unless you already
have prior knowledge of what they're supposed to represent. Thankfully
most(?) GUI programs have enough sanity left to provide tooltips with
textual labels for what each button means.  Still, it betrays the
emperor's invisible clothes of the "graphics == intuitive" mantra -- you
still have to learn the icons just like you have to learn the keywords
of a text-based UI, before you can use the software effectively.

Reminds me also of the infamous Mystery Meat navigation style of the
90's, where people would use images for navigation weblinks on their
website, that you basically don't know where they're linking to until
you click on it.

This is why I think GUIs and the whole "desktop metaphor" craze is
heading the wrong direction, and why 95% of my computer usage is via a
text terminal. There's a place for graphical interfaces, but it's gone
too far these days.

But thanks to Unicode emoticons, we can now have icons on my text
terminal too, isn't that just wonderful?! Esp. when a
missing/incompatible font causes them to show up as literal blank boxes.
The power of a standardized, universal character set, lemme tell ya!


T

-- 
Almost all proofs have bugs, but almost all theorems are true. -- Paul Pedersen