Wednesday March 28, 2007 Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness
Wednesday March 28, 2007 User Interface muscle memory is a bit of a problem. What do I mean by this? Your average OS/400 user is used to context-sensitive help being available through the "F4" key. Your average Windows user is used to it being available through "F1". Your average Sun Workstation user is used to it being available through a key labeled "Help". :)
There are, of course, all kinds of variations on this. Windows 2000 - XP - Aero. OpenLook - CDE - Gnome - KDE. sh - ksh - csh - bash. I won't even bring up editors.
Don MacAskill touched on this in, as it relates to OpenSolaris, in his blog on The Enterprise Linux Problem. I admit there are differences, but the solutions are anything but obvious. Whatever works for one person, may cut off or alienate things others are looking for or have grown to expect.
The good news, at least in OpenSolaris land, is that the community (and Sun) have bridged a lot of the simple gaps over the years (i.e. add /usr/sfw/bin to your path if it's not already there!) and other projects like the OpenSolaris GNU Communities /usr/gnu project should help to address some of the UI muscle memory problems. It definitely won't address everything, but the it's not a strict engineering problem-- Sun cannot address this in a vaccum and you can't do a marketing study to get the right answer. If there are UI differences you'd like to see, then please join (or at least rant to) us over at opensolaris.org
Thursday March 15, 2007 Solaris + AMP/Cool Stack proposed to move to OpenSolaris
The proposal has just come out over on OpenSolaris discuss, but the good news is Cool Stack, the basis for Sun's Solaris + AMP offering (more commonly known as SAMP), is moving to a new home.
There was nothing wrong with the existing community/site/project, but it's clear that the project there has a lot more in common with things going on over at OpenSolaris. I hope it'll lead to the consumers and users working together to build up the best practices. I have some experience with Cool Stack already from customer projects, and it's definitely been a good starting point for these projects, but it has grown beyond the CoolThreads platforms and there's room for some of the other users of this software and packaging projects to join in.
You'll find the official announcement over here, and I'm sure the project will be set up soon on OpenSolaris.org.
