Ted Nelson: Computers for Cynics

[lisarea]

An eight part series on technology design, starting here:

Computers for Cynics 0 - The Myth of Technology ...

I haven't watched them all yet, but I thought I'd make a thrad to alert everyone anyway.

[BrotherMan]

I watched ten seconds before I was nearly overcome with the desire to smear my fingers on his glasses.

[ceptimus]

I'm enjoying the series.

I have to agree with his comments about cut-and-paste (specifically in word processors) being a poor imitation of real cut and paste done with scissors and, well, paste. Imagine a word processor where you could highlight different snippets of text using different colours - or maybe you don't need colours because the snippets would be on different pieces of 'paper' that you could just drag around. Then you could drag the pieces around to get them in the order you want, type in the odd new word or change a word here and there. The difference between that and 'computer cut and paste' is that you can see all the snippets all the time - they don't disappear off, one at a time, to some invisible 'clipboard' while you're moving them.

[lisarea]

I have been watching it in bits, and that's one of the things that really stood out for me too. There's a really weird and really ingrained notion that the standard desktop metaphor is somehow some kind of objectively correct technical requirement or something, but so much of it is made up of weird historical artifacts that nobody ever bothered to correct or improve on. The only way to get people to accept changes to that metaphor seems to be to do it on a device other than a general purpose computer.

I'm having a hard time watching it now, because I am nearly overcome with the compulsion to swat Bort away from Ted Nelson's glasses, because WHAT KIND OF A MONSTER WOULD DO SUCH A TERRIBLE THING TO ANOTHER PERSON?

[BrotherMan]

[ImGod]

Good points in there but I wish he'd stop with the lip smacking. Bugs the weird in me.

I learned from this that software is like movies; i.e. Battefield Earth is to movies what Microsoft Word is to software.

I've developed things for people in the past and had to battle some of the issues. Balancing programmers who don't understand budget and managers who don't understand useful features (like the back button).

I once took apart a portion of a program's design process and reworked it from the ground up in my spare time. It ended up saving me about 3 weeks per project doing repeatitive boring stuff when customizing the software for different locations. Plus, it was easier to debug and learn. It was always done the cumbersome slow way because the first guy did it that way and wrote a manual.

It's harder to argue a rewrite versus a tweek when there's already a manual. Budget inefficiencies are also easily hidden in written procedures. The cynic in me tells me someone is doing it wrong and I should fix it. I'm inherently lazy and will work very hard in spurts to make sure I can do things quickly and be done with them. Freeing up my nights and weekends while getting more work done in much less time. The key is slowly let people know that your working more efficiently so they don't pile on too much more shit too fast.

[Naffanya]

I'm new here , nice thread!

[lisarea]

Yeah, I am annoyed a little by that, and certain types of mannerisms and affects sometimes, too; but at some point I realized that if I could only watch talks by people who are suave and expert speakers, I could never watch a talk about technology again.

A lot of the time, it's hard for people who are really really used to seeing a certain model understand that there could be other ways to look at a problem or complete a task. And that applies to developers, too, often moreso than users. In fact, sometimes, developers have a weirdly hostile view of users, to the point that they actively fight changes that would make their products more usable or functional and argue with usability testing results; and all too often, the usability designers don't really have the authority to do much about it. Ultimately, the development process starts with a whole bunch of foregone conclusions that should be neither foregone nor concluded.

[SR71]

It is nice!