GUIs for Everyone 675
An anonymous submitter writes: "A former Microsoft and Creative Labs interface designer has an interesting diatribe on the approach of Linux GUIs on the desktop. Thomas Krul has three Microsoft patents for human factors research into digital interfaces and graphic software functionality. Probably most known for the interface work he had done on Softimage DS and its web site. Though not a technical read, it does provide an interesting note on the approach for Linux on the desktop." And headless_ringmaster notes that Jef Raskin, the guy who designed the first Macintosh and author of The Humane Interface, has a SourceForge project putting his ideas into action.
Let's see: Xerox = Apple = Microsoft (Score:4, Informative)
sPh
Re:Serious Question... (Score:2, Informative)
Enlightenment [enlightenment.org] granted it is currently a window manager, it has quite a lot of style. The new e-17 looks promising though.
Linux usability studies? (Score:3, Informative)
First, are there application or user experience standards for KDE, Gnome, X, or command line apps? I know that there are a few de-facto standards on the command line, but is anything codified (especially for gui)?
Second, how many open source projects have done a usability study to see if your aunt, cousin, grandmother, or neighbor can easily use your cool new application or tool without significant assistance?
Formal usability studies are expensive and time consuming, but they do work.
Then again, if you are building a car in your garage, do you just care about yourself, or do you spend the extra week to make an adjustable seat so that it is comfortable for other drivers?
If you want me to move back to using linux as my main desktop machine, you need to make it much easier to install and configure the OS, the desktop, and all of the applications. Linux may be powerful, but I don't necessarily want the power to cut my leg off if I don't spend an hour reading the docs before I attempt to compile and install a new program.
Re:Why columns? (Score:2, Informative)
If the lines are significantly wider than that amount, then it leads to more eye motion and greater strain. TeX and its derivatives and siblings have the right idea; if you've ever used it, you'll note that by default it creates narrow columns.
Or consider the newspapers that you have pointed out yourself. The column width was not implemented due to some limitation of early printing machines. Pages were printed all at once; why do you think they made columns the width they did? The WSJ could easily change to having two columns per page, but that would make it more difficult to read, so they continue to stick with six -- not out of tradition or an inherent limitation, but because that is the "friendly" thing to do.
Err, no. (Score:3, Informative)
- I used to derive pleasure when using my Apple, Amiga and sgi because they had a unique personality through various touches and tools that made the interface more cognicent of my existence.
- Windows completely lacks that interface. It's dumb and arrogant. It's heartless and ultimately disposable
Emphasis mine.I have to disagree here, the Windows interface DOES have style, and it is continuously evolving. Windows 98 was a large leap ahead in terms of interface design over Windows 95, and Windows 2000 was at least an equally large leap over Windows 98.
It is the little things that count. Unfortunately most of them are not enabled by default.
Being able to open a DOS box to any directory by simply right clicking on it and selecting "Open Prompt Here."
Being able to open any file with any application, and have a list of commonly used applications used to open that particular type of file listed automatically for the user. Sweet.
Almost everybody knows of Alt-Tab to shift through running applications, but did you know of Shift-Alt-Tab to reverse shift through the list of running applications?
Backspace goes back a page in IE, but guess what shift-backspace does? Yup, it goes forward a page. Amused the heck out of me when I realized that somebody at Microsoft had taken the time to make the user interface that consistent. Shift is the universal reverse modifier key in Windows (or at least it is in those applications that follow the UI specs, which unfortunately a good deal of the parts of Office do not. *sighs* Makes MS look bad that, ick. )
Control-Z is undo. Shift-Control-Z is redo. (before shift was made The Big Reverse Key many programs had Control-Y as the redo key. Unfortunately some applications are still hardwired to only support hotkeys consisting of only two keystrokes.)
Control-Tab cycles through the list of view panes in the currently running program, Shift-Control-Tab reverse cycles through the list of view panes in the currently running program.
See, consistency.
In Windows 2000, the Location Bar in the upper portion of Explorer View panes is actually semi-intelligent. It has a REALLLLY nice auto-complete setup that actually first selects the most commonly gone to files and directories, and then if you do not select one of those, it narrows down the list using frequency of access sorting based upon how many times you have entered that item in the Location Bar. Reaaaaly handy and saves me a lot of time, on a properly setup Windows 2000 system is is capable to access any of literally thousands upon thousands of files with just a few keystrokes! Sweet.
You can select which hotkey you want to use for Auto-Complete in DOS boxs, and can even choose at which level the Auto-Complete works at. Files, Directories, Files and Directories, there are even more options but I do not have the complete list of them sitting in front of me right now.
Of course if a person wishes they can completely
ditch explorer.exe for their UI and plug in whatever shell that they want too. In fact there is a very healthy and active software market out there for alternative shells for Windows. Heck back in Windows 9x for awhile I even ditched the GUI thing all together and just used command.com. Sweet. I think 4DOS released a 32bit version of their shell, so if you wanted a CLI for Windows that was darn nearly infinitely customizable, there you go.
Microsoft is successful in the UI biz because their UI is consistent all around, easy to use, and does not do unexpected things. Exactly the opposite of the reasons that people hate the Office UI so much, ick.
Of course all this is a rather moot point with XP, which tries way to hard to do shit for the user, even if it can be disabled, I don't even want an OS on my machine that has that sort of crud compiled into it.
(which is of course where the advantages of Open Source Software come into play.
WindowMaker (Score:2, Informative)
Sorry to chime in like some flame bait. But I've been using KDE, Gnome, and Windows for a while (5+ years on each?).
WindowMaker has a pleasant appearance, lightweight, and not like Windows. I can't say this for the others listed. It's much better on the eyes than fvwm, twm, or the other strict WM's
I think that the answer is more something like WindowMaker than KDE. KDE reminds me too much of windows, not only in their desktop, but in their binding KDE-based applications into the KDE menu bar at the bottom. I don't use Kwrite or Kmail - but there they are. I don't like that. It doesn't allow me to stick to a reduced interface with only what I want visible to be visible.
WindowMaker is based on NEXT and that's a darn nice and different interface. Personally, it's either that or something similar that will supercede Windows. Not the Windows-Like interface that we keep pathetically copying.
The only thing I would add to the likes of Windowmaker is the ability to use the background as some kind of application window. Maybe like a ActiveDesktop - but limited to the current system, not web-centric.
Re:"I don't like change" (Score:1, Informative)
Personally, I've had enough of my KDE becoming Windows, only with little usefull apps for my demographic (Soundforge, Reason, Cubase VST 32 etc).
If Linux came out with an open source GUI standard we'd be years ahead of Microsoft instead of infighting between various iterations doing the same thing differently.
Re:Two words... (Score:1, Informative)
I have had a very little bit development experience with Microsoft Agents tech. I had to help put together a proposal involving agents for a client's web site. I admit that I'm not certain if Bob was the exact same thing or not - I think the Agents tech was the 2nd generation.
Personally, I love the idea of blending AI - type behaviours into an OS; the big problem is teaching the computer user to teach, trust and cooperate with the software agent. One possible solution is to set the agent (or bot - A.L.I.C.E. could do a lot of this easily) to 'lurk' mode and just watch for patterns of behaviour... then at some point, if the user engages the bot in some chitchat, the bot could explicitly ask if the user would like to delegate some tasks to the bot, and suggest ones the bot noticed and could handle.
So, yeah, I like to poke fun at Bob, but I also know that some exciting possibilities are in store as well - if we can figure out how to overcome some rather significant HCI challenges.
Re:OpenDoc (Score:1, Informative)
And actually, the same concepts used to develop OpenDoc were at the core of the Xerox Star GUI from the 1980s. However, the concept worked more naturally in the Star GUI because it had no pull down menu system like the Mac. Everything, I mean all the functionality, was in contextual menus.
The modal interface didn't work on the Mac because users had been trained for years to rely on a pull-down menu system that would be guaranteed to remain static during the whole time they were editing a particular document. Mac users are not accustomed to having their menus change on the fly, and they rely on muscle memory to make the MacOS menu system work efficiently. Those who were trained on the Star GUI didn't have a pull-down menu system to contend with, and they were used to seeing contextual menus that were different depending on where or when they clicked. The document centric model fit naturally into the Star GUI but not into the MacOS GUI which was originally designed around an application centric model.