Tuesday Dec 05, 2006
Tuesday Dec 05, 2006
Travelling from Sun office to Sun office, the only things really important to me as a user are that I can:
o Read and send emails
o Access & update my calendar
o Work on my StarOffice files
o Get access to a browser
As a user, I want this without pain, without time delays, and with full system reliability. In fact, as a user I should have no worries about any of these things at all.
With Solaris, I know and trust the OS. It's quality is a given. It works. And with the Sun hardware we have in our offices, reliability is never something to worry about.
However, travelling, as I am doing right now, I have learned one aspect of the system is more important than I have ever appreciated before: The user interface!
In my home office, I run Solaris 10 on a mighty fast little Sun SPARC desktop system. When I upgraded, I (kicking and screaming at the time) decided to go with Gnome as my user interface. And, after a short time, I realised I really liked it! Go figure!
Prior to this, I was very happily living with OpenWindows on the same box with an older OS. I skipped CDE all together, a user interface some people love. I tried it for one day, hated it, and raced back to OpenWin.
Today, I arrived at our Menlo Park California office and was kindly offered use of the office (and system) of a colleague who is also travelling. The system offered is running an older OS and CDE is the only user interface available. Ugh.
Trying to drive a user interface I simply never understood has turned out to be more painful than I had expected. So what? Who cares? It's just a user interface! Get over it! Right? WRONG!
When all else is great... When the hardware is fast and reliable and the operating system is providing everything that is needed, the importance of the user interface moves up the stack of what is important to this user. I never really got that... Until this week.
The cool part is that I know lots of others at Sun get it, too. The user interface, from installation to everyday use, is critical.
Kimberley,
If you move between offices you need Sun Ray. Like the UI you won't know until you try it.
Sun Ray @ home is calling you.
Posted by Chris Gerhard on December 06, 2006 at 02:34 AM EST #