Re: [Fresco-devel] UI design

Hunger, you were really expecting me to reply, didn't
you?

Anyway, some quotes I think are wrong:

> Microsoft and Apple don’t want to make their users 
> go through any retraining, at all, for fear of 
> losing market share. So rather than make their 
> interfaces less crufty, they concentrate on making 
> everything look pretty.

Wrong. I believe Office from Microsoft have the best
user interface in their category, with an exception of
Gobe Productive. Which brings me to my point, the
reason why people are whining over the new
subscription policy is that in every Office release,
retraining is a must. That's why companies aren't too
entuistic to get the latest version of Office, they
only do when they have a reason (most of the time,
features).

The same goes for each version of Windows (as my
newspaper puts it (after translation) "It is hard to
write instructions to do something for Windows unless
you tell us the version, cause each version Microsoft
just have to change the location to these settings,
albeit more logical). But overall, I think the author
is right in this area. Just not with Microsoft and
Apple. :-)

> they concentrate on copying whatever Microsoft and 
> Apple are doing, cruft and all. 

No, sometimes they copy Be, Amiga, NeXT, etc.

> We have the technology. So why do we still make 
> people save each of their documents, at least once, 
> manually? Cruft.

IIRC, Microsoft tried this idea in a early alpha of
Office 97 (aka Office 9), but was too slow. I think
this is a very good idea. Considering the technology
(especially in terms of hard disk) we have.

> We have the technology. So why do we still punish 
> people by including “Quit” or “Exit” menu items in 
> programs? Cruft.

I like Palm's idea, closing the app, yet when the app
is opened again, most of the time you start back where
you left off. To close a app, just tap on the home
icon on the grafiti area.

Unfortunately, this can't happen for normall desktop
apps. Did you notice if the OS unloads automatically
apps like Photoshop and Dreamweaver when all the
windows are closed - how slow it would be? and it
doesn't leave the user a option of opening or making a
new document.

Second problem is that if you instead leave the app
open (no Quit menu option), just how much of memory in
the end the user would have to take? And then the
easiest resort for the average Joe is to reboot.

[i]We have the technology. So why do we still make
people use filepickers at all? Cruft.[/i]

if I had KOffice open, then writing a document, I
realize I needed some information from a spreadsheet.
I have now two option, click on the folder icon,
otherwise known as Open, and select the file, or waste
more time by opening Konqueror and locating the file.

As for consistency, deleting, moving, etc. files in a
file dialog for Windows is consistent with the Finder.
Saving is a bit different. (Besides, just say I'm
typing in KOffice, how do I save the file without a
file dialog? Drag a page of my document to a window of
Konqueror? But what happens if that only saves a page?
What happens if I wanted a page but it saves the whole
document?)

Notice the author here didn't present a clear
altenative.

[i]What if a human renames a document in the file
manager, and later on tries to open it from that menu
of recently-opened documents? He gets an error message
complaining that the file could not be found.[/i]

This is a Windows problem, not a UI or traditional
technical one. No need to kill the UI. Macs for
example change the aliases to suit the new file path.
Notice you don't have the same problem on mac OS 9?
(never tried this on Mac OS X though).

The same goes for moving the document.

[i]What happens if he opens a file in a word
processor, then renames it to a more sensible name in
the file manager, and then saves it (automatically or
otherwise) in the word processor?[/i]

On both Windows and Mac, he would get a error stating
that because the document is open, it cannot be rename
(or deleted, or moved).

[i]We have the technology. So why does Windows still
suffer from all these problems? Cruft.[/i]

You mentioned how Macs and Linux have the technology.
Apparently, NTFS don't. So it isn't cruft. You
wouldn't have these problems when WinFS comes out with
Longhorn.

[i]GNU/Linux applications are arguably worse, because
they could be avoiding all these problems (by using
inodes), but their programmers so far have been too
lazy.[/i]

No, rather how about compatiblity with other versions
of UNIX like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, etc.?

Ahh, I got bored. maybe later. He has some good ideas
though.


--- Tobias Hunger <[email protected]> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Hi there!
> 
> Just found an article about GUI design and cruft
> building up, obfuscating the 
> user experience:
> 
> http://mpt.phrasewise.com/stories/storyReader$374
> 
> I liked it... Maybe we should add some links to
> texts like these to the new 
> website? At some point we will need to consider such
> nasty "implementation 
> details", it would be nice to have some texts on the
> subject at hand.
> 
> - -- 
> Gruss,
> Tobias
> 
> -
>
------------------------------------------------------------
> Tobias Hunger           The box said: 'Windows 95 or
> better'
> [email protected]                      So I
> installed Linux.
> -
>
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> =VSPU
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> 
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>
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