Hewson on MS Word revision

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jan 12, 2013 at 08:06 AM

Dr Andus wrote:
>In contrast, on my iPod Touch it’s at least 3, sometimes 4 or more
>clicks/swipes (depending on what screen/app I was on when I last closed
>it). Why does it have to be this way? Oh why?....

Development is no longer guided by the engineer, but by the consumer. There’s a massive difference in overall processing power between the Palm and the iPod, but the vast part of the additional power is used for the graphics, multitouch interface etc. Much effort has been put in making the modern machines work ‘intuitively’ (swipes, magnify etc.) and the tools have been rebuilt so that nobody will ever need to read a Friendly Manual again. On the way, we may have actually lost quite a lot of functionality—as evidenced by this forum’s overall preference for installed software vs. cloud webware.

It took me a very long time to switch from WordPerfect 5.1 and Paradox for DOS to its Microsoft counterparts for Windows. I frankly never saw the point. Especially since I’m still looking for minimal interface software, like the dark screen text editors recently discussed here—similar to the screen layout I have for Brainstorm (bright letters over dark screen).

In brief, overall hardware and software development has not been driven by existing users but by the efforts to further expand the market. A relatively recent example was the OLPC concept (a cheap lightweight machine that anyone on earth can own and use), which led to netbooks, and now to tablets.

Let’s face it: we have been privileged specialists and we are privileged no more. We can only hope that, as in the case of David Hewson which started this discussion, that we will be happy with what the market delivers to us.