"William Sommerwerck" writes:

"Frank Stearns" wrote in message
nacquisition...

Wow! Someone who has heard of FM!!

FrameMaker (not to be confused with PageMaker) was originally created for some
OS other than Windows.

Right... Several UNIX platforms -- Sun, NeXT, SCO, HP (among others), and Mac.
Windows was added at FM4, 1993-ish, IIRC. (I knew the guy who led the port to
Windows. Good fellow, very savvy engineer. I jokingly asked him if he felt the need
for a stay at a mental health spa after that effort. He nodded vigorously.)

I used it for a while about 15 years ago, in its first
Windows incarnation. It had the most-poorly designed dialog boxes for any
piece of software I have ever used.

Not sure what you were seeing. The UI was fairly consistent among the various
platforms, though because of the underlying dictates of the windows UI resources
sometimes things were a bit squirrely.

At least back then, they chose system resources rather than create their own so as
to reflect each user's general tweaks to the UI. These days, they have a custom
windowing system, which I don't like because (a) it reflects none of my general
windows tweaks and (b) they don't provide much in the way of appearance tweaks in
their custom system! (Re-inventing the wheel and making it square...)

In general FM dialogs could get confusing because they are very dense -- lots of
stuff you can do. While a little off-putting at first, once you got used to this
you appreciate having so much power close at hand.

Contrast to Interleaf (competitor of the day) when most things were 3-4 menu pulls
down with few or no keyboard shortcuts, and lots of clicking through "single
purpose" dialogs -- THAT was crazy-making if you wanted any speed with the UI.


I hope it's gotten better.

Yes and no; YMMV. While the new UIs since FM9 are more "contemporary," many of us
who have used FM for 20+ years don't like the new UI dictates (I still use 10 year
old FM7 for most of my daily doc needs, as do many folks). As with many applications
these days, some UI designers think they know best and force you into something
that's far less efficient.

It's unsettling how often UI folks don't actually use the product they're working on
-- they just do what seems pretty with little understanding of the work flows.

Last fall, at Adobe's invitation, I spent 90 minutes on the phone with the new UI
guy for FM pleading with him to keep certain UI needs and standards in mind. Mostly,
doc professionals were sick of "cute" and just wanted the damn UI to not get in
their way. I think he got the message, and I was not the only one making the same
complaints. We shall see what comes along...

Frank
Mobile Audio
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