Re: WO Builder, Marketing etc...
Re: WO Builder, Marketing etc...
- Subject: Re: WO Builder, Marketing etc...
- From: Thomas <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2006 16:29:26 +1000
Mike,
thanks for your well-considered and detailed contribution. It makes
me feel a lot more positive about the whole "Oh my gawd we all have
to use eclipse now" thing.
I'd just like to expand a little on the code-completion vs. drag-and-
link thing. Please excuse me if it's a bit woolly, because I'm
exploring my own reasons why I strongly prefer the latter.
Being a visual person, I like being able to see the whole picture.
Code completion for me is a bit like squashing the bottom part of a
WOBuilder window down into a single line, with the added problem of
having to hit a special key to see the options for the next bit. Code
completion is modal, where your options are determined by where your
insertion point is sitting. Drag and link is only modal when you are
actually dragging the thing you have chosen. The rest of the time the
bottom area is one map and the top area is another map and they only
change when you tell them to.
Very often I add a handful of components to a page, then use drag &
link to connect them to methods. Much of the time they are all
getting links from the same entity but different methods (many levels
down from the left), which are a permanently visible list. Each link
takes click-drag-unclick-move-click, which for me is very quick and
intuitive. It would be nice if the list of bindings popped up without
having to unclick, but even as it is it works well for me.
Whereas with code completion I'd have to type (at least the start of)
the things before each dot for every link I made. And for me, typing
characters comes much harder than clicking on an item in a list.
As an example of how strong this bias is for me, very often I have a
problem where I'm holding down the mouse over a popup list, looking
(using the text part of my brain) for the item I want, and not
finding it-- because the spatial correlation and pattern mapping part
of my brain has already moved the mouse over the item I want, thereby
making it unrecognisable because it's white on colour instead of
black on white.
There is no right way. I have seen text-oriented people working, and
I find it amazing what they can do. But for people like me, something
better than WOBuilder would be wonderful. I'd be more than happy to
contribute to discussion about how it would work from a user
interface perspective.
Regards
Thomas
On 13/08/2006, at 12:40, Mike Schrag wrote:
I think you have a lot of great points, Thomas, and to be clear, my
comments about a WOB replacement are meant to be "if we're going to
do it, let's do it better". I see a great value for a tool that
works the way WOB COULD work. I personally think it has a lot of
problems as a dynamic component builder as it currently stands, but
I think there are many techniques that could be applied to making
an app like this even better.
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