jmtd → log → geek → A Thought on GUIs

Reading some stuff about Abiword on their tour page inspired me a bit with respect to Graphical User Interfaces.

Make sure your document contains none of those nasty spelling errors by using AbiWord's built-in spelling checker.

Emphasis mine there. Why 'built-in'? Why is that a selling point? Wouldn't using an existing, tried and tested spell checker be more attractive?

What if a GUI building tool (or language or whatever) was powerful enough to supply all the GUI functionality you need (e.g. glade isn't enough - you need to 'animate' the UI with code in that case) but explicitly prevented you from re-inventing the wheel like this?

It's like GUIs are the anti-thesis of the UNIX design philosophy 'do one thing and do it well'. Or maybe, GUIs should 'tie together a set of related tools and tie them together well'. GUIs are a form of advanced pipe-operator in that respect. Or at least should be.

There was an article on /. about a next-gen UI building tool that I didn't look into closely, but I think it echoed similar sentiments.