alt Hacker News> “If I want to ‘refresh’ the inbox shouldn’t I press F5? Nope, that will lock the app and require your password to unlock it,” went one of the many complaints collected on Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood’s blog. “How do I send an email? CTRL+ENTER? Of course not! ALT+1, naturally.”
I don't know if I want to fault Lotus for that. As someone who juggles between Windows, Mac and Linux on a daily basis, using wrong keyboard shortcuts is something that happens regularly. For most users who only use a single platform, that's even less of a problem -- you only need to learn it once.
This is how I feel about the article in general -- I am not convinced by its arguments. Many of the design decisions make sense to me even today, and are more of a necessary limitation than anything else. I don't see how "at most 8 windows" is any worse than Windows' 256 character limit -- 8 windows are plenty at the time, and you need to decide to stop optimizing for someone who regularly has 20 open windows for no reason and focus on something else. Handling more windows can come later.
This article just reads weird to me.
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As a user of Notes in the mid-late 90s, I found it suuuper annoying. Also, do you want a horizontal scroll bar when the content is too wide for the window? No problem, just turn on the option in the menu. (And then it will be there all the time, whether it's needed or not.)
I was administering a small Domino server and using Notes for email. I think it was the worst thing I worked on at the time.
It was an era when Windows had near total Desktop market share in businesses - and Notes violated all Windows UI conventions. Enter MS Office (pre-ribbon) and LN was toast.
MSFT was so dominant back then that Gates had to rescue Apple to keep up the appearance of a fair market!
Nobody cares perhaps, but F5 as a refresh key came in the mid 80s (I was told it was a $1m of usability consulting). The midrange AS/400 got [CUA](https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/3.1.0?topic=actions-default-...) first. There were many more F1 for help, F12 for go-back-a-page, F3 for big-exit of app. Green screen stuff (3270 and 5250 where two common wire/frame protocols). The same keys made the jump to some windows apps. One by one they got whittled away until F5 for refresh was left. For that one it wasn't just Windows - as browser rollout took it wider. Has it gone yet? I'm on a Chromebook and it doesn't have F keys so I can't see for myself.
> For most users who only use a single platform
Also depends if your "platform" extends beyond just the OS. If platform includes IDE/editor/terminal, then a lot of users are juggling multiple keyboard schemes from different eras (ctrl-C has entered the chat).
The larger point - which they made poorly - seems to be that Notes made a lot of decisions that probably were fine alone. However nothing stands alone, and everybody else made a different decision.
Some of the different decisions everybody made were for good reason. I know Apple and [later] Microsoft spent a large amount of money on human factors engineers doing real experiments to figure out what worked. I have never seen evidence that Lotus spent the money to see what was a good idea - they just made it work.