TechCrunch UK review nails our love of the command line
Imran Ali's review of Stikkit on TechCrunch UK nails our interest in "contributing to the renaissance of the command line." A basic assumption on which Stikkit is built is that text is powerful. It's more intuitive and efficient to type "Meet with Bob Miller at 3pm on Tue" than to tab between fields and click around selecting items from drop-down menus. And the easier we make it for you to jot details down, the more likely it will be that those details end up where they need to be -- in your calendar or to-do list, for example.
The problem with the command line is that its free-flow nature can leave new users disoriented. "What can I type into this thing?" We hope, with Stikkit, that a few minutes of playing around will solve that problem. As we refine the interface -- as well as how Stikkit "thinks" -- during the beta, using Stikkit will become more and more obvious. But we've also heard from many of you that more templates and examples in our documentation would help. They're on their way -- we'll post a note in the forums once they're ready.
The problem with the command line is that its free-flow nature can leave new users disoriented. "What can I type into this thing?" We hope, with Stikkit, that a few minutes of playing around will solve that problem. As we refine the interface -- as well as how Stikkit "thinks" -- during the beta, using Stikkit will become more and more obvious. But we've also heard from many of you that more templates and examples in our documentation would help. They're on their way -- we'll post a note in the forums once they're ready.
posted by Asha #
4 Comments:
A good commandline features tab-completion (bash_completion and zsh offer great examples on where this can go); text editors and IDEs offer similar forms of completion and snippets; TextMate's model is particularly interesting. Of course all these have their own learning curves.
Another thought: Isn't your argument mainly a push for keyboard driven navigation? And isn't in this view the command line a collection of slightly longer keyboard shortcuts (to make them easier to remember), with the tab-completion the built-in way to move towards short keyboard shortcuts again?
I must say that after five days I am already seriously addicted to Stikkit, and the command-line (or just plain-text) character of it is a huge part of that. My one (small) frustration is that it's currently hard to navigate among stikkits in the same category (events, peeps) or with the same tag. If you implement simple navigation you'll really have something amazing: a web-based cross between a CLI and a HyperCard stack. Freaky.
Hi Ayjay,
I'm glad to hear you're enjoying our CLI... sshhh, let's not tell those who don't know they're using a CLI yet ;-).
Your remark about a good navigational interface is an important one. We are actually working hard on a couple of different views that should go a long way to improving what you see now.
A question for you: do you find that you use the "tags: a b c" links between individual stikkits or in the right-hand column in all the list views?
Best,
Rael
Very interesting question, Rael -- I hadn't thought about that, but in point of fact I rarely use the tag-links in the list views -- it seems that I'm almost always selecting the tab view from an individual stikkit. The one exception is when I *know* I'm going to look at several stikkits with a particular tag: in that case I command-click from the list view to open them in tabs.
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