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Ah yes, that outline/tree code editor was one of the worst ideas I ever had. I'd gotten hooked on some of Dave Winer's stuff - ThinkTank and GrandView - and th

Ah yes, that outline/tree code editor was one of the worst ideas I ever had. I'd gotten hooked on some of Dave Winer's stuff - ThinkTank and GrandView - and thought everything should be an outliner. Be grateful that you and the world were spared at least some of this: at first I thought that even expressions should be done in outline form. We punted on that and left them in text form. After 2-3 years I left Gupta to work for Cooper Software on Ruby (no relation to the programming language). This was originally going to be a user-programmable shell for Windows 3.0, but Microsoft decided to go a more conventional route with Program Manager and File Manager, and turned Ruby into the "Visual" part of Visual Basic. So you can blame me for the worst parts of both SQLWindows and Visual Basic!

CWuestefeld 5y ago
As much as the management decision to use SQLWindows bugged me, I was rather fond of its outline-based UI. As it happens, around this time I had also attended a usergroup presentation demoing a beta test of OS/2 Warp. It incorporated a file manager with an outline metaphor. This inspired me to "invent" an outline-based UI for our own product that, a couple years later, turned out to be exactly what Microsoft did in Windows 95 for their File Explorer, except that I'd also included a type-ahead search at the top of the outline pane to search for nodes matching the input (there were quite a lot of nodes). Our management rejected my idea, though. Instead, their favored UI metaphor was tabs and pages, which was quite popular at the time. The thing is, such was the complexity of the data we were collecting (lots of outline nodes, as I mentioned) that this metaphor led to major tabs across the top of the window, minor tabs down the right side. Then they originally had a third row of sub-minor tabs across the bottom until someone realized that this broke the metaphor in the physical world - how could the metaphorical notebook be bound? So the sub-minor tabs were switched to be pages within the sub-tabs, using left and right arrow buttons to flip from one page to the next. I still maintain that the tabbed design was an unwieldy mess, and the outline-based one that I proposed, with the search on top, was vastly more usable.
zabzonk 5y ago
> So you can blame me for the worst parts of both SQLWindows and Visual Basic! Something to be proud of :-) Actually, I didn't dislike SQLWindows _that_ much, because I knew how to write C & C++ code for Windows, so I could program round its little foibles. But it was tough to teach!

CWuestefeld 5y ago

As much as the management decision to use SQLWindows bugged me, I was rather fond of its outline-based UI. As it happens, around this time I had also attended a usergroup presentation demoing a beta test of OS/2 Warp. It incorporated a file manager with an outline metaphor. This inspired me to "invent" an outline-based UI for our own product that, a couple years later, turned out to be exactly what Microsoft did in Windows 95 for their File Explorer, except that I'd also included a type-ahead search at the top of the outline pane to search for nodes matching the input (there were quite a lot of nodes). Our management rejected my idea, though. Instead, their favored UI metaphor was tabs and pages, which was quite popular at the time. The thing is, such was the complexity of the data we were collecting (lots of outline nodes, as I mentioned) that this metaphor led to major tabs across the top of the window, minor tabs down the right side. Then they originally had a third row of sub-minor tabs across the bottom until someone realized that this broke the metaphor in the physical world - how could the metaphorical notebook be bound? So the sub-minor tabs were switched to be pages within the sub-tabs, using left and right arrow buttons to flip from one page to the next. I still maintain that the tabbed design was an unwieldy mess, and the outline-based one that I proposed, with the search on top, was vastly more usable.

zabzonk 5y ago

> So you can blame me for the worst parts of both SQLWindows and Visual Basic! Something to be proud of :-) Actually, I didn't dislike SQLWindows _that_ much, because I knew how to write C & C++ code for Windows, so I could program round its little foibles. But it was tough to teach!