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Re: Cocoa et al as HCI usability problem
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Re: Cocoa et al as HCI usability problem


  • Subject: Re: Cocoa et al as HCI usability problem
  • From: Jens Alfke <email@hidden>
  • Date: Sun, 18 May 2008 18:34:21 -0700


On 18 May '08, at 6:15 PM, Julius Guzy wrote:

I do not think it naive of me to raise serious questions regarding usability given that i have made huge and increasingly successful efforts to get into this system so I can do some heavy duty programming.
…
Well if it were doing as good a job as you think it is then I for one would not have lived through the nightmare of the last five or six months struggle.

If you want to talk about this in terms of HCI usability, then you need to play by those rules and _not_ describe the problem anecdotally, just in terms of your own experience. Typically when this happens, it's a programmer designing a user interface according to his own preferences, which are often very different from those of a mainstream computer user.


In this case it sounds like the opposite — you seem to be finding Cocoa a lot more difficult to learn than most do. It definitely shouldn't take months of struggle. (CoreAudio or Security, maybe. Not AppKit.)

I don't know why that would be, and I don't mean it as a value judgment. Different people have different learning styles. Maybe the docs aren't matching yours. As others have pointed out, it would be good to have more details on what you think the docs are missing.

One thing that does seem to apply to a number of other people asking questions on this forum is a seeming lack of ability to experiment and figure out answers oneself. Writing code is engineering, but debugging it and figuring out how an API works is more like a science — and understanding how to experiment, and draw conclusions from evidence, are vital skills.

—Jens

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References: 
 >Cocoa et al as HCI usability problem (From: Julius Guzy <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Cocoa et al as HCI usability problem (From: Jens Alfke <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Cocoa et al as HCI usability problem (From: Julius Guzy <email@hidden>)

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