[IxDA Discuss] RE : hows this for a simple interface?

[Alain D. M. G. Vaillancourt]

The linked blog entry tells us absolutely nothing.  It is pefectly
useless.  There is so much about CAD interfaces that goes on several
other pieces of hardware that this kind of "news" is a joke.

I ran an  internal CAD shop for several years, and I had one of my
employees spending a good deal of his time continuously customizing
Autocad for the others.  In the many CAD places where you have the
staff to do this (or the funds to contract it out in a regular fashion)
CAD interfaces are not complex or simple, they're just tailored to a
particular user and a particular set of tasks, by project and by yearly
software/hardware upgrade. 

I've seen such customized interfaces where you had a clean sheet like
this blog shows.  Sometimes there wasn't even a pop-up menu because all
the frequent commands had been put on the digitizing tablet, sometimes
you had a two screen setup with one huge screen showing nothing but the
clean sheet and with another smaller screen showing the contextual
commands in addition to permanent menus.

The only CAD people I met who took a software package right out of the
box without customizing the interface where computer-semi-illiterate
architects who treated their machines like big Xerox copiers.

Alain Vaillancourt

--- David Malouf <dave.ixd at gmail.com> a écrit :

>
http://www.evanyares.com/the-cad-industry/2007/1/3/in-praise-of-simplicity.html
> 
> The above link takes you to a blog entry and in it a screenshot of a
> CAD interface. CAD interfaces are infamous for being incredibly
> complex. This takes it to the other extreme.
> 
> Personally, I think there is something missing here. Communication
> layer.
> When I deal with paper and pencil (the inspiration here), there is a
> long history of use and well my schooling in it. Think about it. We
> are taught from a very young age how to work with paper and pencil.
> It
> is not something we figure out overnight. Not at all.
> 
> But I'm assuming there is a lot more functionality here which implies
> a greater abstraction for the user to figure out.
> 
> Of course, I can't use it, so I guess I have to just critique and
> wait.
> 
> What do others think?
> 
> -- dave
> 
> -- 
> David Malouf
> http://synapticburn.com/
> http://ixda.org/
> http://motorola.com/
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