Re: How do... YOU... do... "IT"?

"Jonathan L Cunningham" <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:438329a1.9844856@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> On Mon, 21 Nov 2005 23:32:52 -0600, "Patricia C. Wrede"
> <pwrede6492@xxxxxxx> wrote:

>>You seem to be making the assumption that no one who has not actually
>>*looked at* your program can possibly judge for themselves whether or not
>>it
>>will be useful to them. Now, having looked at it, I can see why you have
>>so
>>much difficulty in explaining exactly what it does and how it might be
>>useful; and I can also understand why you'd really, really want people to
>>look at the actual program. It is rather difficult to describe, and I
>>don't
>>think I've seen anything quite like it before.
>
> That's actually the first time I've been tempted to look at it: that
> someone who has actually looked at a fair number (lots?) of such
> things has said she's never seen anything quite like it before!
>
> Nothing Sudden Disruptions said made me feel it was something I'd
> never seen before: I still doubt that it would be useful to me - for
> all the sorts of varied reasons people have patiently explained, and
> then some - but now I'm mildly curious.
>
> Any chance of a one sentence summary of what's different about it? :-)

It's not *what* it does; it's *how* it does it. Everything from
text-processor on up lets you cut-and-paste; this allows you to *see* the
cut words moving around, which makes it a bit easier to try them out in a
few different places before nailing them back down. It will also let you
clip, say, the left half of a paragraph -- however-many lines down and
however-many characters over. Of course, this mostly gets you garbage
fragments of sentences if you do it, but I could see it being very useful to
move one column out of three or four, which is a bit tough in a
word-processor unless you've done a bunch of formatting up-front instead of
just using tabs. I believe it does similar interesting stuff with
formatting, but I haven't figured that out yet. A lot of "what's different"
seems to be worldview, though I don't think I mean that the way the
programmer-author seems to in his documentation.

It seems designed to use with the mouse -- all that dragging stuff around --
but it also seems to have keyboard shortcuts for just about everything,
which I find both unusual in this sort of program and highly admirable (as
it means the programmer was trying to think about and accomodate people who
don't like using mice). I don't find it terribly intuitive, but then it was
obvious fairly quickly that I don't think like this anyway. It's complex,
but just about anything that has a fair amount of power or more than a few
features is complex to learn.

> It's the nearest thing to a writer's planning tool that I might use
> instead of "Outline mode" in a word processor: but it's not quite
> good enough: lacks a few features I'd consider essential. Despite
> being a wonderful tool as far as my friend is concerned. And an
> interesting detail is that we both agree on what the missing features
> are. To him, it's a minor feature that would be desirable, but is
> not crucial: to me, it's one of a number of fatal flaws.

Now *I'm* curious -- what are your missing essential features? (And what
program was *that*? As long as I'm experimenting...)

Patricia C. Wrede




.

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