Sorry Joe, if you haven't gotten into the habit of looking at the status bar
for useful info by now, well, ... how long has the status bar been there?
"Joseph M. Newcomer" <newcomer@flounder.com> wrote in message
And anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with cognitive psychology
has heard of
something called "focus of attention", which says "People see what they
are looking at.
They do not work well when they have to look elsewhere to see what is
going on".
Fundamental GUI design says that the status bar display is a Really Bad
Idea, because it
is (a) somewhere other than where you are looking, (b) somewhere other
than where you are
looking and (c) somewhere other than where you are looking. [There are
three major factors
that sell a house: location, location, and location]
I worked to kill off at least two designs I was involved in because they
ASSUMED that the
user could watch two different sides of the screen at the same time. On
one I succeeded,
and the GUI was really quite pleasant to use. The product sold well, but
didn't survive
the Win16-toWin32 transition (the company moved on and didn't see a market
in porting the
old product). In another project several years later, they ignored me,
and the design was
not only a flop, but it was so bad nobody wanted to buy the product, and
the company
failed. [I know this because one of the programmers who worked there
later told me that
the single greatest complaint was the distirbuted-state GUI where you had
to look
EVERYWHERE to see what was going on, and nearly everyone who took the
"free trial" just
didn't buy. When asked why, they uniformly said "the GUI sucks". Well,
actually, it was
MS-DOS, and the GUI was going to be lame anyway, but no, this one REALLY
sucked, even for
an MS-DOS GUI! "We should have listened to you," was his observation]
It isn't limited to bad software design; a friend who took aerobatic
flying lessons got
into her first aircraft with variable-pitch prop. The instructor said
"It's easy. You
just keep the manifold vacuum gauge at the same position as the prop pitch
indicator [I
think those were the two indicators...] and you are golden", and her
remark was that this
was obviously easy to do because the gauges were on OPPOSITE sides of the
instrument
panel.
Why do we have a mouse cursor that changes shape with the mode? Because
THAT IS WHERE WE
ARE LOOKING! They used to display the mode in the status bar, or in a
static control, or
something like that, but it never worked. Changing the cursor shape
always works right,
because THAT IS WHERE WE ARE LOOKING.
joe
On Wed, 3 Mar 2010 08:58:28 -0800, "David Ching"
<dc@remove-this.dcsoft.com> wrote:
"Joseph M. Newcomer" <newcomer@flounder.com> wrote in message
news:efuso5d4o4g6sed51o39hvq5ef71l93op5@4ax.com...
Actually, the file menu doesn't give full information, either.
BTW, the Start Page gives the full path in the status bar at the bottom as
you mouse over the project name in the start page.
-- David
Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: newcomer@flounder.com
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm