OS/2 e-Zine - The Best OS/2 Reading Anywhere!

March 16, 2004

From The Editor

A lot of my friends and colleagues know that I don't run Microsoft Windows, so they assume I'm just one of those anti-Microsoft guys. Well, maybe yes or maybe no. The next thing they assume is that I'm running Linux, as most people do when they're not using Windows. They're quite surprised when they find out I'm using this thing called OS/2.

Well, there's many reasons I haven't switched to Linux, and technical literacy is most certainly not one of them. Useability is a big issue for me, so I was pleasantly surprised, and glad, to see a commentary griping about a major user interface foible with Linux. A surprise because this came from none other than Eric S. Raymond, one of the icons of the open-source movement, known to be quite handy around the command-line. I'm hoping this will make some of them listen.

What Mr. Raymond was commenting about was a particular portion of Linux that he found annoying. (CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System). The setup was graphical, yes, it had buttons and all sorts of friendly looking features. But easy? No, he didn't seem to think so. That's because it required all sorts of prior, very technical knowledge that he didn't think a user should have to care about.

It's more than just words

I'm sure all of you know that GUI stands for "Graphical User Interface". But there's more to a GUI than just the word-by-word definition. Just having graphics in your user interface is only part of the story. There is also the idea or the philosophy of a GUI.

When the prototypes for a GUI were first worked out (maybe it was Xerox PARC, maybe it was Apple or some other spot, you choose), those guys didn't just think "Hey, wouldn't it be cool to have some graphics instead of just the command-line"? They used graphics because it allowed them to interact with the computer in a different way. Ways which usually made things easier to do, and also opened up the possibility of a new way of working with things that were previously not possible (or exceedingly difficult) from the command line. (e.g. imagine trying to draw a bitmap using just the command-line). The graphics came along as part of the ride.

When Linux started to get serious about the desktop, they really had to address this whole GUI issue. And along came some of the best looking graphics to appear on any system. The problem was, nobody seemed to point out that the emperor had no clothes. Despite all the glitz and glam, it was really, literally, just window dressing. Sure, it was a hell of a lot prettier than twm, but it was still the same old X-Window system, and it still worked exactly the same way. A windowing system is not a GUI, even though it does have buttons and scrollbars. Your primary interaction is still through the command line.

Then came KDE and GNOME. Now we were getting somewhere, right? Not quite. It's still amazingly pretty, but the technology is still basically Windows 3.1 era. Almost. Yes, I know you think I'm a ranting lunatic right now, or at the least, a blind, stubborn OS/2'er. But hang on...I'll try to explain what I mean.

KDE and GNOME are still just shells over the command line. As is OS/2 PM + WPS. Not like Mac OS 9, where you basically can't have a command line even if you wanted to. The key difference here is that KDE and GNOME do not play well with the system underneath. Go ahead, try it. Try dragging and dropping a file to the desktop. Go to the command-line and rename it. Voila! Your desktop icon is useless. You can get the same behaviour using Windows 3.1, the desktop GUI knows almost nothing about the underlying system and the command-line system knows nothing about the GUI. Not so with OS/2. (Yes, yes, I know, the CONFIG.SYS is still not updated, but OS/2 still does a much better job than almost any other system).

It's a bad user interface because there's 2 ways of doing something, and they don't "talk" to each other when one of them does something. This is confusing and annoying for the user. Does this make it a bad GUI? Yes, because this particular GUI is meant to be an interface to your system, and it is not doing the job! And if it doesn't make your life easier, it's missing the whole point of being a GUI.

Well, I'm sure that's a contentious issue, and I'm sure many of you will disagree with me. Most of that is probably due to my convoluted writing that comes from doing this in the wee hours of the morning. And that's fine. What's important is that the next time you develop something, no matter what system you're developing for, you consider what having a GUI really means. It's more than just pretty graphics and buttons. A GUI is really about making things easier for the user.

And that's a big reason why I'm still on OS/2. It may not look as pretty as the other ones in town, but is sure works beautifully!

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Isaac Leung (P.Eng.) got a degree in Engineering Physics followed by a Master's in Electrical Engineering after which he promptly got a job as a product engineer at a company which makes high speed datacom chips. Following the dot-com meltdown, he's back at school studying biophysics and optical properties of semiconductors. He is old enough to have cut his computer teeth on Commodore 64's and first played with OS/2 1.3 EE while at a summer job with IBM. The first PC he ever owned came with Windows 95, but he soon slapped on OS/2 Warp 3 and has been Warping ever since. In between looking for a new job, he plots to take over the world.

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