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:
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)