[15087] in Athena Bugs
Re: weirdo /usr/bin/login on quickstations?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson)
Thu Apr 17 11:35:47 1997
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 1997 11:35:39 -0400
To: Craig Fields <cfields@MIT.EDU>
Cc: quickcomments@MIT.EDU, bugs@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: "[15086] in Athena Bugs"
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
| What Mike said. Yeah, that's a hack. Seems like a strange one too
| unless login.bak is also a hack.
Yeah. Clearly my judgement is was thrown by the poor typing conditions.
But I'm still surprised this would be done on the first day of deployment.
And the mod time was June or July or something. This makes me suspect
a systematic problem w/ the qs deployment procedure :-)
| > 2. The warning that tells you "you have two minutes" should
| > have a timestamp on it.
|
| Errr... Why? There's a timer running in the corner, unless that has
| also been hacked.
That's a bogus argument, IMHO. Along similar lines one could argue
that the timer in the bottom corner obviates the need for specifying
any time whatsoever in the pop-up window.
If it's nonobvious to me that the qs has a 10-minute limit (or perhaps
because someone else has changed the limit :-)), and I'm not paying attention
when the pop-up arrives and plants itself in the center of the screen,
then it may not be clear to me at what time the pop-up window arrived
and thus from what point I have two minutes left.
Fundamentally I think that a UI that causes asynchronous notifications
that specifies relative time to the exclusion of reference time is
poor, especially if those notifications don't grab the pointer (which
they shouldn't). OTOH, I recognize that Dash is guility of this as
well, but I don't think that's a good excuse.
--jhawk
(venturing off into tenuous ground as a UI commentator)
