Thank you for the below article. More and more burdens ought to be shifted
to the tools, not to the users.

I have been accused of laziness when I complain of the difficulties of
learning how to use new programs, tools and systems. The fact is that some
people are more patient or have a greater aptitude for computers and the
like. Still, others have the advantages of being able to point and click
on icons, to use their intuition, or to rely on a good memory.

On the other hand, I have heard other voices with my complaint that
computers are not meeting us half way. It is important to applaud
solutions that put the burden on the tools, and to criticize the opposite.
I refuse to think of myself as the one who is lazy and inept, and the
software designer as the person who is some kind of genius who is always
right.

Peter Seymour

On Thu, 3 Dec 1998, bud kennedy wrote:

> this is a little blerb from a newsletter called "The Rapidly Changing Face of
> Computing."  http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc
>
>
>           Bud Kennedy
>
> * Scan It Again, Sam --
>
>         [Image] Scanners have become so common and so inexpensive these
>         days that they're generally nothing to write home about. Even
>         small handheld scanners can do a good job (assuming you can
>         work around their cable's limitations and you can carefully
>         align the several scans it takes to capture a full sheet of
>         paper.) But that's about to change, because HP's new $699
>         CapShare 910 (http://www.capshare.hp.com) dispenses with the
>         wire (it will hold about 50 pages before sending them on to
>         your PC via its infra red or serial port). And, most
>         interesting to me, this monochrome scanner accommodates its
>         human user, rather than the other way around.
>
>         Let's say you're going to scan a standard page. Instead of
>         (trying) to make sure that each stripe of the page you scan is
>         parallel to the last one and just barely overlaps it, you just
>         roll the CapShare around over the page in any random fashion!
>         So long as you roll it over EVERY portion, regardless of when
>         or in what direction, when you finish, the CapShare will
>         instantly reconstitute the entire image -- seamlessly!
>
>         The scanner did a fine job, but what REALLY impressed me was
>         HP's use of processing power to do the difficult tasks of
>         matching up the pieces of an image -- so that we humans didn't
>         have to. Instead of coming up with a user interface that did a
>         better job of cajoling us to "scan between the lines," they
>         used processing power and "smarts" to make the "lines"
>         irrelevant.
>
>         As Moore's Law continues to make ever-more processing power
>         ever-less expensive, there are tremendous opportunities to put
>         it to use, as HP as done here, to put the "complexity burden"
>         on the appliance and not on the user. I wouldn't be at all
>         surprised to find that such innovative "user friendly" features
>         make, or break, future computing appliances.
>
>
> Bud Kennedy
> email: [log in to unmask]
>
>
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>


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