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I found it interesting that in an HN discussion about how to auto-update comments Alan Kay said, "How about a little model of time in a GUI?"[1] It ties into wh
by firasd 9y ago
I found it interesting that in an HN discussion about how to auto-update comments Alan Kay said, "How about a little model of time in a GUI?"[1] It ties into when he said of smartphone apps, "It's painful to see people using billions of devices that have forgot that undo is a good idea." [2]
It made me think about how things like Redux (or even just Google Drive revision history) where you can 'time travel' through state can be more important for UI than we realize sometimes.
1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940472
2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6JC_W9F8-g&t=40m30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6JC_W9F8-g&t=40m30s
- cma 9y agoIt is painful that most desktop apps never even got branching undo/redo.
- sytse 9y agoI find it interesting that Google Docs also doeen't have branching undo. There is no way to revert a commit, you can only go back in time. And there is no blame. I loved the article by the way. The future of writing should be version controlled Juniper notebooks. Next step for GitLab is to build a cloud IDE to bring that closer.
- bostonvaulter2 9y agoGoogle Docs has blame by looking at the history of changes in the file, although I will admit that it is not the most obvious.
- sytse 9y agoThey have a commit history. But if I want to see who last changed a certain line I have to go through the history until I see the change. I would love something like https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blame/master/CONTRIBUTING.md https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blame/master/CONTRIB...
- jcelerier 9y agoMost non-technical people I know have trouble with "simple" undo-redo and copy-paste ; this would only make it harder for them.
- jfoutz 9y agoToys vs tools. I want paying my electric bill to by trivial. If I'm doing real work, I want all the power software can give me. I can forgive my retired grandmother for not getting copy and paste. A professional however, should constantly strive to improve their mastery of their tools.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoExactly. Toys vs. tools. Or, as AK put in the interview: "Well, a saying I made up at PARC was, “Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.” They’ve got simple things being simple and they have complex things being impossible, so that’s wrong."
- zmix 9y agoSo what? It shouldn't be too difficult to implement three states of userspace and have it be selected upon login: - Novice - Advanced - Expert 'Novice' gives you simple 'undo'. 'Advanced' gives you 'undo' with history. And 'Expert' gives you branching. For example... For file-managers this could be made so, that the novice gets something like the Finder or WindowsExplorer. Basically a file-browser, that handles its pane contents as a document. 'Advanced' gives you tabs, rearrangable layouts (dual-pane) and some more configuration. 'Expert' gives you fully configurable menus and toolbars, integrated with the hosts generic scripting host. Etc.
- jstimpfle 9y agoI'd heard vim does, but when the situation came where I needed it, it turned out I'm fine with just moving back in time.
- taeric 9y agoThe "undo tree" in Emacs is a thing of beauty and really helps with interacting with the undo state. https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/UndoTree https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/UndoTree I certainly agree I can get by without it. It does seem like daily I will pull up the tree, though, to walk up and down the history to make sure I understand what the last thing I did was.
- fiddlerwoaroof 9y agoI've used vim + emacs's undo tree quite a bit. It's really nice to be able to make a bunch of explorative changes to the code base, undo them, make another set of changes and then use the undo tree to recover interesting bits from another branch.