Re: Cocoa et al as HCI usability problem

FROM : Hamish Allan
DATE : Thu May 22 22:11:28 2008

On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 7:40 PM, Andy Lee <<email_removed>> wrote:

> Thanks for the clarification.  I agree there is a sort of psychological
> hurdle that has to be overcome: one has to accept that Cocoa will require
> learning a lot of fundamentals, and learning to think differently about some
> things (like the dangers of dynamic messaging).  But I think it's best if we
> make that hurdle as easy to overcome as possible, instead of assuming it's
> at exactly the right height now.


Absolutely!

> I don't want to see a lot of crappy apps, period, even if they're written by
> people who *do* take the time.  But how much time *is* "the time"?  Do I
> only trust programmers who take six months to become productive?  Two
> months?  Forty-seven days?


Well, "the time" is not an absolute time, and "the time to understand
the whole picture" is not a reflection of a person's capability, but
their inclination. Obviously, the smaller the cognitive load of the
introductory material, the better, but the main problem seems to be
getting people to read it in the first place.

(Indeed, it may actually be a historical accident that I myself am not
one of those people: I learned Cocoa from a book (Garfinkel and
Mahoney) when I was away from my Mac for a week, so I read the whole
thing from cover to cover before I had a chance to try to get ahead of
myself. And of course we didn't have to force ourselves not to try to
run with bindings and core data before we could walk with data sources
because bindings didn't exist.)

> I have no fear of the market
> being flooded by programmers who didn't do their Cocoa homework.  For one
> thing, their apps will either crash all the time or leak memory like a
> sieve.


I hope you're right. That picture sounds a bit like the situation with
another operating system :)

Hamish