User Feedback :: A TWM for Open DSL
After tinkering on my own I got it running. Thanks for the post though.
I must say that I was pretty lost once the interface came up. Took me 15 minutes just to figure out how to shut it down. Ion may be efficient, but only after climbing the learning curve. I had printed out both the FAQ and the Getting Started document, but I guess I was just tooo new for even those to help.
I think I'll give it another shot once I read a little more. I do like minimalist interfaces. It would have been great if they had had a guide to take you through an example session. (e.g. starting, using and closing common apps, doing some common stuff like moving the tiles around, etc.).
Docs are typically ripped out of DSL extensions. I left a few in Ion because I knew it would be a whole new world for some users.
There is more documentation available at
http://iki.fi/tuomov/ion/
Yes, docs in .dsl's make them more fat, so they get removed.
It's a two-edged sword.
On one side, we get a (in many cases) MUCH smaller app, for example, the tinyirc.dsl I made. It is, right now, about 12k.
With docs, it was about 180k. (yes, its still small, but it's over 10 times bigger).
On the other side, this makes .dsl's a lot less friendly to newbs who don't really know what they're doing.
-J.P.
I was lucky I got to play with Ion all put together for me, and everything pre-configured. The setup I played with was very intuitive and even had mouse support going...
Oberon was one of the first operation systems I've used and perhaps that spoiled me and made some of Ion's conventions seem more natural and intuitive -- but I think mostly from what I've read it's how much care someone puts into the configuration.
I wish Ion wasn't such a Hacker/Programmer's GUI and were a little more in the Linux mainstream, as I think it offer as big a jump in interface efficacy as the addition of the GUI to the command line interface... And I'm sure if more took the trouble to try it out or offer it as an option in their Linux distro we'd see all kinds of improvements...
Couldn't DSL's documentation be gzipped and scripted to extrace and open in a default editor or browser to save space?
Or if the ion2.dsl was pre-configured for the main apps included in the DSL distro. So you don't have to remember the paths and exact names to everything to get a program to start up.
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