MORE's Look & "Feel"

< Next Message | Back to archived message list | Previous Message >

Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 76

Posted by brad
1999-08-10 10:23:34

>>The touch and feel of MORE is special, quick, swift…
>>Other outliners however are slick, sticky intransparent…

There was something special about how we used to talk about how MORE “felt,” and everybody on the team paid attention to it. I remember Doug paying lots of attention to that in the outliner. It’s hard to tune software to feel “just right” (the Goldilocks stage of development). It’s especially hard to make the software feel consistent on a wide range of systems: to have the UI feel right even on the slower target machines, while still taking advantage of the performance potential at the high end.

A bit of “feeling software” trivia: the procedure that makes the little “tink” noise when some limit is reached in MORE, such as hitting the down arrow when there’s nowhere to go, was called “ouch.” It sounded better back then, in my opinion. The same sound played through the new sound manager seems to last longer.

Software in general felt different back then, and not enough attention is paid to that area these days. Way too much attention is paid to how the “chrome” or “skin” looks; that says more about what sells than how good the software is. It’s valuable to look back and see what software lasts the longest, and why…

—Brad

Back to archived message list