Re: The minibuffer vs. Dialog Boxes (Re: Making XEmacs be more up-to-date)

[Michael Toomim <toomim@cs.berkeley.edu>]

Brady Montz wrote:
> Yes, can't have clippy. I much prefer a passive approach where
> everything is unobtrusively at your fingertips over clippy's obtrusive
> sticking fingers in your eyeball.

I just want to point out that the "software agent" approach (which is the HCI 
research term for what clippy is an instantiation of) is already quite 
ubiquitous in the XEmacs interface.

For instance, if I type M-x some-command-with-a-keybinding, XEmacs will say 
"Hey, you could do that faster by just using C-x M-foo S-bar C-M-S-xfoobar". 
This is just the same as the way clippy tells you shortcuts for doing 
repetitive tasks, and it's really very useful.

Software agents are a great idea... clippy is just a little too obtrusive and 
has way too much personality (nobody like's a microsoft personality).

I say, don't stray away from UI ideas because they are "like clippy".  You can 
have UI features that are remarkably similar to clippy, and remain great features.