On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 02:27:35PM +0200, Matthias Urlichs wrote: > Hi, > > On Wed, 30 Apr 2003 08:38:30 +0000, Emile van Bergen wrote: > > people tend to have a lot larger memory for words than for images and > > unpronounceable hieroglyphs (icons, and -- shudder -- tool bars). > > Not to nitpick, but people, and indeed entire cultures, for which this > isn't true -- because written words and symbols are essentially the same > thing to them -- _do_ exist. (And did, historically. Ancient Egypt comes > to mind. If you believe kooks^wpeople like Mr. EvDaeniken, they even had > [alien visitors with] computers. ;-)
Umm, but that would make them "pronoucable hieroglyphs", ie, they have an common wellknown meaning. For me, most of the icons used in modern windowings are mystifying. I only recently worked out the oddly shaped white thing on the KDE toolbar was supposed to represent a sea shell, presumably as a kind of joke. Maybe that's intuitive to some people but to me it just looks wierd. On the other hand if it simply had the letters "bash" or just "sh" it's meaning would have been immediatly apparent. Admittedly, some are better than others. In Word, the alignment buttons, bold, underline, etc. Cut/copy/paste you just learn to recognise. I'd have to agree, GUIs usually involve just as much learning as a command line, it's just a different type. -- Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> http://svana.org/kleptog/ > "the West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or > religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. > Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do." > - Samuel P. Huntington
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