August 21, 2000
Untitled
About to be rebranded as the ominous sounding Interarchy, the perpetually useful, feature-pumped, and pronunciation-impaired FTP client Anarchie appears to have succumbed to the latest software personality disorder trend, namely skins. Oh, but they’re not really skins, they’re wands. And wands are apparently better than skins because:
“Wands can provide both added features as well as changing the application’s appearance. A wand is just another window, but that window doesn’t have to be rectangular, it can be circular or any shape you want, it doesn’t have to have a title bar or anything like that. It is a roll-your-own hyperlinked window.”
Functionally, this sounds like a really solid way to customize your own toolset out of the vast assortment of googaws and whatsits packed into the new Interarchy framework. Having direct access to all of the functions within the application via a syntax that works like a regular URI not only makes sense, but is incredibly powerful too. But having unlimited user control over the interface to accommodate this flexibility feels like a cop-out on behalf of the developers, doesn’t it? Couldn’t the framework of the application include some standard GUI bits for the user to specify like preferences, rather than letting the inmates completely run the asylum? Can you imagine trying to handle technical support for a product that you wrote, but that has had a completely foreign, user-specific interface slapped onto it? Now that I think about it, this do-it-yourself hyperlink junk drawer concept is starting to sound and awful lot like Cyberdog riding on top of Apple’s OpenDoc component-based software architecture.
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