Laptop running slow

I know this is a sudden shift from the general to the specific, but it serves to show how a bias created by television can influence other behaviors. The basic message of television is “Let me do it for you — you cannot do it alone, I am essential. Your experience is shaped by my ideas, your own ideas have no value at all. You cannot possibly detect humor, that is beyond the scope of your small brain, so I will signal the presence of humor by laughing for you. Laugh with me, think with me, become me.”

The inevitable result is that computer programs are esteemed to the degree that they are like television. For example, a really awful program like Microsoft’s Front Page receives high ratings, even though the program actively represses individual creativity and the user is reduced to following a single behavioral pattern built into the program by its designers. It is instructive to submit a pre-existing HTML document to Front Page, which then proceeds to erase any tags it doesn’t recognize as its own. No error messages, no dialogue, all tags it doesn’t know about are simply eaten. Most people I have talked to finally realize it is easier to stop using Front Page than to try to exercise any personal control over its behavior.

By contrast, consider Arachnophilia, my Web page workshop. I am using Arachnophilia only to make a point, and I am not trying to sell you my program, as you will discover if you visit the page. Arachnophilia is a good example of open software design — a design the user can change in the field to meet requirements the programmer (me) cannot possibly think of himself, including new requirements that do not exist at the time of development. By the way, Arachnophilia is a descendant of my classic best-seller “Apple Writer,” an early word processor for the Apple II that also was field-extendable by way of a macro language (in an era when macro languages were virtually unheard of).

But, and as usual, I digress. My goal in writing Arachnophilia was to replace its immediate predecessor WebThing, which could be programmed by the user only to a small extent (one special toolbar, 32 custom commands). But while distributing WebThing I noticed people were asking for features and HTML tags I couldn’t possibly fit into the framework of any finite-sized computer program. So I made sure the new design included a way for users to add any number of additional commands and tags. The user can even create new toolbars, then fill them with commands. This feature is especially important in HTML development, because HTML is itself rapidly changing, and it is easier to add tags to an existing program than to create a new version of that program every time a raft of new tags appears.

After I finished Arachnophilia I expected an end to the flood of e-mail asking for new tags. After all, it would now take less time for a user to add a new tag than to write and ask me to do it. But, to my surprise, the volume of e-mail increased!

After a while I realized what the problems were. The first problem was that people didn’t expect to be able to change the behavior of the program, because virtually no Windows programs let you do this. The second problem was no one bothered to read the help screens. Basically if my program could be made to produce a result, immediately, without any study or insight, then it was useful, and any capabilities behind that external appearance might as well not exist. Yes, just like television.

I personally think computer programs should be evaluated on criteria that are not presently thought important (because the average user is happy thinking of his computer as though it were a toaster — press the button, wait for smoke). The most important missing question is: how easy is it to add a behavior to the program the designer didn’t think of? If this question were to be regarded as important, most Windows programs would fail. The next question would be: how much does the program learn from the user?

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