RE: Importance of the UI...

["Fred Ridder" <docudoc@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Frame does have the revision marking capabilities you mention--if
you add a plug-in.  It was always part of the FrameMaker philospohy
to leave a lot of the more specialized features and capabilities to
third-party developers, whom they supported (if not encouraged)
via the FDK.  The advantage of this approach is that you don't
have the code bloat and potential reliability issues built into the
core application as you do with Word.  And it meant that there
was always the possibilkity of a better mousetrap.  This is a model
that has worked extremely well for applications like PhotoShop
where there are dozens of developers who offer filters and other
add-on tools for the basic app.  But FrameMaker's installed base
never quite reached critical mass, and the incentive for lots of
developers to write add-ons for a niche-market application was
never quite there.

My opinions only; I don't speak for Intel.
Fred Ridder
Intel
Parsippany, NJ

> From: David Crowe <David.Crowe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: framers@xxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Importance of the UI...
> Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 14:58:44 -0600
>
> I hate to stretch this discussion out more, but I thought of one more 
> really important aspect of the Frame UI, and it has nothing to do with me 
> ... it is a lot harder to sell the use of Frame to others when the user 
> interface looks old-fashioned and has genuine difficulties. Consequently, 
> projects get done in Word, because that's always the default. And often I'm 
> stuck with this because people refuse the Frame 'learning curve'.
>
> An example, Word's revision tracking system has all kinds of problems, but 
> it's simple to use and works acceptably well most of the time. Why couldn't 
> Frame simple assign a conditional text to the categories of "new text", 
> "deleted text", "reformatted text" etc. Then someone could turn on revision 
> tracking and have the conditional text applied automatically.
>
> This would be great for other work too. I'll often be applying one group of 
> changes and could change the default conditional text types to what I need 
> at the moment. Novices, however, would have it set up to a reasonable 
> default.
>
> - David Crowe
>
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