Criticism
User interfaces based on the WIMP style are good at abstracting workspaces, documents, and their actions. Their analogous paradigm to documents as paper sheets or folders, makes WIMP interfaces easy to introduce to novice users. Furthermore their basic representations as rectangular regions on a 2D flat screen make them a good fit for system programmers. Generality makes them very suitable for multitasking work environments. This explains why the paradigm has been prevalent for more than 20 years, both giving rise to and benefiting from commercial widget toolkits that support this style. However, several human–computer interaction researchers consider this a sign of stagnation in user interface design as the path of least resistance forces developers to follow a particular way of interaction. WIMP is not well suited to some applications, they argue, and the lack of technical support increases difficulty for the development of interfaces not based on the WIMP style. This includes application that require devices that provide continuous input signals, show 3D models, or portray an interaction that has no defined standard widget. Andries van Dam calls these interfaces post-WIMP GUIs.
Some circles use the term as a pejorative, to indicate someone cannot perform useful work without a graphical environment, who relies too heavily on GUIs. This assumes of course that CLI tools of equal or greater functionality are available.
Read more about this topic: WIMP (computing)
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)