On Thu, Jul 21, 2005 at 11:43:38PM -0400, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 22, 2005 at 11:12:10AM +0900, Curt Sampson wrote:
> > On Thu, 21 Jul 2005, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> > 
> > My thought on the matter is, first, create a user interface which as
> > transparently as possible models what's going on inside.
> 
> This is what GPG does.  I think that it is a reasonable user interface
> for cryptographers, and an extremely poor one for those who need a good
> user interface the most: those who do not, in fact, understand the
> mechanics of what they are doing.

Let me weaken that statement somewhat:  "this is what GPG seems to have
once tried to do, with a number of horrible shortcuts bolted on now that
have evolved to -- poorly -- cover some of the common use cases with
defaults."

I do believe that a simple user interface with sane defaults, for the
vast majority of users, is just as important as an extremely detailed
and low-level one for experts.  In fact, it seems to me that experts
may very well often just end up calling into the OpenPGP library
instead of invoking _any_ of the executables.

Thor