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Sorry, seeing "very easy and extremely non-technical" associated with Lotus Notes kind of set me off...

The interface.

Need I say more?

Cheers,
Ben

It is amazing how many developers, including those of Aqua, neglect these basic principles in favor of pretty new designs that are ultimately more difficult to use than the previous - see, for example, their review of EntryPoint, the replacement for PointCast.

Give me my old Mac any day ... just without crashing so damn much.

sulli

It is amazing how many developers, including those of Aqua, neglect these basic principles in favor of pretty new designs that are ultimately more difficult to use than the previous - see, for example, their review of EntryPoint, the replacement for PointCast.

Give me my old Mac any day ... just without crashing so damn much.

sulli

It is amazing how many developers, including those of Aqua, neglect these basic principles in favor of pretty new designs that are ultimately more difficult to use than the previous - see, for example, their review of EntryPoint, the replacement for PointCast.

Give me my old Mac any day ... just without crashing so damn much.

sulli

People do not want software that is "easy to use." People want software that looks good. Compare pine and Lotus Notes (as an email client). Which one looks better? Lotus Notes. Which one is easier to use? Pine, by far. But the good-looking one wins.

So don't try and tell me that Microsoft has made software that is easy to use. Visit iarchitect and you can see plenty of counterexamples which prove that a pretty GUI does not deliver an easy-to-use interface. (They have a whole section devoted to that colossal pile of dung known as Lotus Notes.) I don't believe that there is such a software that is "easy enough for the average person to use." I think that there is some psychological phenomenon which turns many people into morons whenever they get near a computer. Read Computer Stupidities for some excellent examples.

Until a computer is developed that completely understands human speech, no software can be "easy to use." And when I say "completely understands," I mean a computer than understands jokes, puns, idioms, and mispronunciations with a 99.999% accuracy; one that can really guess what the user "meant to say." Remember, the true test of fluency in a langauge is when you can understand jokes in that language.

I'm not creative enough to be a UI hacker (though I've read the Human Interface Guidelines from Apple and used several different types of GUI/CLIs, and I have a built-in aesthetic of what seems "right" about an interface)

Sounds like you'd make an excellent UI hacker; that built-in aesthetic is essential for building good UIs. Creativity in UI design is not always a good thing. See the Interface Hall of Shame if you don't believe me.

29? You're way too young to be bitter and disenchanted. Don't let those hordes of 22-year-old millionaire dot-commies try to persuade you otherwise. I was once in very nearly your position, except that I did finish school (with a History degree, which is not much more useful than having not graduated). Did my time in tech support and took a bunch of classes, and was able to hang up my headset for good and go into development when I was, well, 29. Making that transition was greatly facilitated by finding a position that combined my support and development skills, supporting a commercial API library. This is more or less the standard route from support into development, at least in my experience.

And the advantage of getting older is that people pay less attention to the Education section of your resume (which belongs at the bottom, incidentally).

Well, while I think that the article you link to has quite a few good points to make, those points deal exclusively with Apple hardware (specifically the RISC based PowerPC CPUs).

Here is a more relevant article about the shortcomings of the Aqua interface, and another article about the improvements that Apple should be making.

Both of the previous articles were written by Bruce 'Tog' Tognazzini, who founded the Apple Human Interface Group, so his opinion should count for something.

Another article, that is slightly less relevant, dissects the UI of the new QuickTime player. It isn't kind.

I hope that these references are of use to anyone reviewing the UI changes that Apple is incorporating into Aqua and it's software, so as to avoid making the same mistakes WRT Linux GUI design.
--

Of the screenshots posted, I found the ones of the new QuickTime player particularly encouraging. The current incarnation of the QT player is an affront to UI design principles, and has been rightly pilloried and excoriated. The screenshots of the new QT player seem to address the bulk of the criticisms made; perhaps it's a testament to my cynicism that I am encouraged by a company that seems to have listened for a change.

Coupled with the changes to the Dock, I am now more hopeful that the final version of MacOS X will also take into account the critiques of the previous preview that have appeared on the web.

> Even KDE and gnome don't give you either the interface consistency or the attention to detail of the Mac cerca 1990. For all their technical bells and whistles, KDE and Gnome are still ugly, clumsy, and poorly designed.
This looks like flamebait. In my brother's uni, all student-accessible computers are Macintoshes, and I get lots of complaint from him about the poor GUI of Mac, and their stupid 1-button mouse, etc. Talking about user consistency, have you take a look at latest Quick Time's interface: it broke lots of standard for application interface, misuse widgets, and is now on the Interface Hall of Shame!

>> Linux *started* with at least the functionality of a late-80's user interface as soon as X compiled on it.
> Hmm... system wide, consistent cut and paste? A decent graphical file browser? Consistent keyboard shortcuts for common commands? multiple monitor support?
Multiple monitor support in 80's interface? in Win3.1? Ah! And for the "decent graphical file browser" stuff, existing ones on other platform weren't much handy at all.

> The fact is that most people don't have the time or the interest to learn the Unix CLI. Doing so is no small undertaking-- it takes days to become even basically functional, and months to master all its nuances. I can sit down in front of a Mac app I've never seen before, and start using effectively almost immediately. I can do that because Apple has worked hard to ensure that developers follow certain conventions in interface design, so that new apps work the same as my old ones. CLI's expect you to memorize an entirely new set of flags and options with every command.
I came to Linux with DOS experience, and didn't even need to learn basic command. The "entirely new set of flags of option" is what GNU long option fought. A brief look at `apps --help` is generally sufficient.
Moreover, Learning Unix CLI's subtle nuances is useful only for shell script porgrammers. Other just need to know the ls, cd, rm, cp, mv, mkdir and rmdir command.

> As for cutting and pasting, I'll take real cut-and-paste with a real clipboard any day. The standard X cut and paste is a nasty hack that should have died 10 years ago. I shouldn't have to worry about accidentally highlighting text before I've had time to paste copied text to its destination. And if Unix had a standard keyboard shortcut for "paste" you wouldn't lose more than a quarter-second in pasting.
That's why desktop environment like KDE and GNOME do have their own clipboard. And they do have standard keyboard shortcut: in KDE, Ctrl-X/C/V for cutting/copying/pasting. Only statically-linked motif apps like Netscape don't follow this scheme (use Alt instead of Ctrl). But Netscape is crap anyway, long live Konqueror.

> And forget it if you're planning on working with images, souds, video, spreadsheets, or even formatted text-- those are just too frivolous for our manly command line interface and our handy dandy middle-button paste.
if you want to display them while you're in runlevel 3, yes. But CLI's asset is it allow things complicated, boring and repetitive to be done by a script. Piping, extracting, redirecting output to input after modified it automatically by a Perl script. You can make pretty impressive stuff done this way, and it was how CLI was intended to be used. Of course, most things are easier to do with a GUI, but how can you ask for a GUI image viewer to display all images on a particuliar partition without some CLI tricks. I think all users use CLI in a terminal windows, and switch to it only when they need to.

Of course, some things may looks complicated to do with these tools. But these are things that are far more complicated to do in a Mac or Windows environment without these tools. If you don't like them, or don't know how to handle them, you can live without. There are these "ugly, clumsy and poorly designed" KDE and GNOME for user-friendly graphical computing. If only MacOS and Windows 98 were as "ugly, clumsy and poorly designed", they would be more useful.

I agree.

If anyone's interested in the theory behind usability, I recommend this book on Human Computer Interaction as an introduction.

Also, here are some web-sites I found useful:

- Cooper design
Excellent collection of articles, case studies and, for students who want bullet-point summaries for ease of recall, a nice list of HCI design axioms. See in particular http://www.cooper.com/design/ where there is a series of articles, including one entitled "The myth of metaphor". Cooper is also the author of two excellent books on interface design.

- Ask Tog Design
Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini developed the first version of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines in 1978, moved to Sun, and is currently lead designer at Healtheon. He has published two excellent books on interface and software design and at this web site, he answers questions and discusses interface issues with wit and insight.

- Jacob Nielsen's website
Nielsen produces a bi-weekly column on web usability and has also just published a book called Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity which is getting rave reviews. He is widely regarded as a leader in the field of web site design and usability testing.

- Interface Hall of Shame
An excellent collection of scathing but accurate reviews of user interface disasters of one sort or another. The ultimate depressing experience for any interface designer must be to end up here.

- HCI Reading List
If you want an exhaustive list of HCI reading materials, this is a good place to look. It is reasonably up-to-date (Feb 98) and has useful comments on the majority of textbooks in this area.

- University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab
The Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland conducts research on advanced user interfaces and their development processes. They study areas such as new approaches to information visualization, interfaces for digital libraries, multimedia resources for learning communities, zooming user interfaces (ZUIs), technology design methods with and for children, and instruments for evaluating user interface technologies. The director is Ben Schneiderman, author of the book "Designing the user interface".

Instead of copying interfaces, we should be using resources and studies about what makes for good human/computer interaction. There are several excellent books on the subject, and the above website is a pretty good start, too (look at the hall of fame part).

Just my two cents. On the other hand, I have the luxery of creating applications for internal use that are all quite unique. I'd be hard pressed to say I wouldn't copy someone elses interface if they asked me to write an email client. However, I'd start by looking at how "my users" actually use email and what they want instead of assuming they want what MS says they want.

----------

Visit the Interface hall of shame

Other than that, ditto on the consititency argument. Then make it easy to customize for the power users. One of my Linux gripes is that in my .Xresources file, if I want to make all scrollbars wider, there are about 5 different widget sets for which I have to specify settings - if I want them all consistent.

winamp has a good many themes that do not mess with functionality

Winamp, which popularized this whole app theming thing, is an excellent example of an application where themes, while they may not help functionality, certainly don't hurt it. It's a simple app, with a few buttons and an information display area. Most people who cannot program their VCR can use it to play tapes. They also don't have a problem using the CD player, and that's really all Winamp is, so making the buttons look like brushed aluminum doesn't really slow most users down.

Additionally, Winamp is a parasitic application -- meaning that it usually runs alongside other applications, and the user rarely runs Winamp exclusively. The user spends little time working with Winamp itself, they're busy using their main applications, with Winamp playing in the background.

What's needed is to spend more time working on the basic usability of applications and widgets. Go read (as mentioned before) the Interface Hall of Shame. Read AskTog's rant about the differences in how Windows and the Mac handle cascading menus.

Lemme tell you about my little improvement to widget usability. I'm working on an application that works as a Win32 Appbar (like the Start menu). It can be docked to any edge, and can be auto-hidden, staying out of the way until the user moves the mouse over the edge the appbar is docked to.

When I first started testing it, I set the appbar properties to auto-hide and stuck it at the top of the screen (my Start bar, like most people's, is at the bottom). This sounds fine, but turned out to be a major irratant -- every time my mouse pointer hit the top of the screen (like, say, when I was going for a menu), the damn appbar would drop down! I'd then have to move the mouse pointer down, wait for the window to retract, then, slowly, move back up to the menu (without moving too high!), then make my selection.

A simple timer, with a user-defined delay, solves this problem. When the mouse moves to the appbar's edge, a timer is started. If, when the timer expires, the mouse is still on the edge, the appbar will show itself. If the user clicks on the top edge (indicating they want to see the appbar immediately), the appbar will show without waiting for the timer.

That's the kind of work UI designers should be doing.

Alan Cooper once said that the web has set user interface design back 15 years. I agree. Instead of ensuring that your applications can be themed by every 31337 h4x0r with a warez copy of Photoshop, make the interface work better.

I don't really see how skins affect the interface really. The different widgets and components are specified by the underlying application.

Obviously for some users it will be confusing if the widgets all look different in different applications, but as has been said before, you don't have to use skins if you don't want to.

I think the real challenge is to get developers to stick to HCI Design principles: this is where many of the real mistakes get made. To see what I'm talking about check out the interface hall of shame.

If the above is not a link this time either, I guess /. has a bug.

HOORAY FOR SKINS!!! SKINS GOOD FOR LINUX!!!

...because they'll bring to Windows the same UI fragmentation and confusion that X has always had.

Skins themselves are not necessarily a bad thing. Global, desktop-wide skins where all apps are automatically customised to have a certain look, are clearly a Good Thing. Separate skins for every application causes nothing but pain. As the UI hall of shame repeatedly tries to get us to notice, no application is so important that it justifies having its own, completely different, style of UI. That includes Mozilla. Unfortunately, the desirable default state of "use whatever the current style settings for Windows or GTK or whatever I'm running on" is not easily codable.

James Sherman wrote:

Now even microsoft break their own UI guidelines (Have you noticed the way the latest office bypasses MDI?).

and though I agree with everthing he says, I still commend Microsoft for moving away from MDI. I just wish they'd done it by having a global option for MDI-or-separate-windows, rather than just stopping using it. MDI is, IMHO, not a suitable interface for anything at all.

One good use of skins and customisation in general, though, is to cut down on useless clutter. When you've got toolbars and toolbars full of crap put there by marketing people, as advertising space and to show the range of bloatware features available, it's great to be able to get rid of it.

i think this site was posted as a quickie a while back, but i'll post it here since it applies to this story:

http://www.iarchitect.com/mshame.htm

this site is loaded with examples of poor UI design. they do a good job explaining exactly whats wrong with each example; its actually quite educational. its mostly windows and mac stuff, but i think i remember one or two examples from linux apps...

--Siva

Keyboard not found.

b) the type of users you are writing for
What is the target audience of your software:
Bussiness type users or hackers/nerds: there is quite a difference in what they want and use.

"are ignoring visual and interface standards that users have come to rely on"
What standards, those in Windows, where every program defines it's own standards?

For a very good site on GUI design and common errors therein, look here br

...don't confuse being better than X with being good. Don't confuse the fact that you are already familiar with it to being easy to use for those who are not. I love X, but from a useability standpoint it's the bottom of the pile, and only that fact, and the fact that many of us got used to MSWin before we switched to linux (even a bad UI seems good once you get used to it) could possibly make MSWin look like a good UI.

The Interface Hall of Shame

I think that a patent period of 6 to 9 months is too short for some SW patents (e.g. a revolutionary new algorithm for multimedia compression).

Really? Then you're happy that you're not able to watch Sorenson encoded video on Linux? Even though it's rapidly becoming the encoding alrgorithm of choice for high-quality video on the internet? And that, except for a potential (maybe, maybe not) port of Apple's closed-source, horrendously buggy, resource-hogging, pop-up-ad-spewing Interface Hall of Shame member Quicktime 4, you never will??

Yeah, let's hear it for long software patents. After all, Linux users won't mind having to wait 17 years to watch the new Mission Impossible 2 trailer. (Caution!! 17.9 MB download!! And no Linux users allowed until the year 2015!!!)

It's also being about easy to learn. Some things just shouldn't be made intuitive for the sake of it, eg. would you want a user to have to use a photocopier icon to copy files? This would obviously be very annoying. And some people mentioned the dragging files to a bin. Well, that's probably intuitive. But is it good? In the Mac, you have to drag disks to the trash to eject them. But users say they don't want to delete the disk! And in windows, how many of you actually do the drag and drop? The delete key is much more convenient.

Sometimes, it's ok as long as it is easy to learn, and once you have been shown once, it is easy and painless to do it again, even hundreds of times. Like Ctrl-Alt-Del. It's not intuitive. But once someone is shown once, they will be using it every day afterwards without giving it much thought.

Here's a fun UI site http://www.iarchitect.com/mshame.htm

That is entirely up to the developers. As someone on their way to releasing a GPL'ed music program for Linux, the last thing I want is to make the interface suck. There will be copious reminders to the effect that if you want something changed or have a feature/interface suggestion TO PLEASE MAIL THE AUTHOR. Just because the users in my case won't be programmers doesn't mean they can't contribute meaningfully to a project. I think many people are scared that if they can't program, they can't help an OSS project. This is not true: there's nothing more motivating to a developer than receiving lots of e-mails that say "great program but it would be nice if I could use the function keys to switch between windows."

For applications there are plenty of strategies to improve UIs:

• Make sure you've read and digested sites such as the Interface Hall of Shame. Yes it's funny, but there's a ton of wisdom in here that I certainly hadn't thought about regarding intuitiveness.
• If you're using Gnome, consider using libglade to make your UI a runtime loadable XML spec
• Allow users to customise anything they want - keys, layout, functions, look and feel
• Stick to the way your window manager/environment of choice does things
• Seperate your back-end completely from your front end. That way someone with more time and inclination can write a spiffy UI, leaving you to concentrate on the fun stuff.
• If possible, try and make sure command line options are there for advanced users. Don't assume everyone will want to point and click.

This site is good for a laugh:

http://www.iarchitect.com/mshame.htm

There exists such a site devoted to the topic

The Interface Hall Of Shame

Perhaps not as technical as you may like, but certainly pointing out bad choices in UI design.

The knobs are awesome, click on a knob, move a mouse, seems pretty simple to me. No, that's not my point. It is simple. It's also stupid. You can't click on a point on a knob and have it move to that value, as you can with a slider or something else. My point was that the sonique interface enforces physical limitations where they aren't needed. I suggest reading up on interface design at a sight like this one.

I think this is a misconception many people have. Although it is normally true (example: Lotus Notes, it's not necessarily true.

I think there's two types of "intuitiveness." One's the classic example, the pretty GUIs Apple makes. When you want to do something, you think what action would accompany that result. Like dragging a file into a trashcan to delete it. (But dragging a disk into the trash to eject it?) But the other type is even better - an interface that's sorta strange at first, but when you use you realize how intuitive it is.

Let's take one of your examples, vi. (Disclaimer - I personally use vim and use the Dvorak keyboard layout, so it's a little different). Yes, for a newbie this editor is pretty hard to use. But after becoming accustomed to it, it becomes very clear why the creator made it that way, it's very intuitive. All the commands are available without moving your hands from the typing position; no fumbling around with the mouse or over to the arrow-buttons.

What about regular expressions? Those don't look so "easy to use" when you first see them. But I'd like to see a "find" dialog box in a GUI that can do that.

So you see my point. Don't come to the conclusion that interfaces are "evil" or even "difficult" because they're a little daunting at first. They're also intuitive, just on a different level.

UI-wise, Apple has never pulled the rug under users and developers.

Well, that is of course overlooking their QuickTime 4.0 movie player! Incidentally hailed as one of the worst designs for a program by UI experts worldwide.

Their video editing studio, (the name of which escapes me at the moment.) was also extremely lacking in the common sense dept. and deviated greatly from their past pattern.

So go ahead, trust Apple. Latest trends do not serve you a good feeling on a plate though. They have consistently placed eye-candy over useability with their newest software.

Not a Good Thing

Just a couple of notes that I can see as problems from looking at this screenshot:

1. Window buttons are specified merely by location and color. This is completely unintuitive. What does a green button do?

2. There seems to be a complete lack of window framing. This is not a good thing. This is the biggest issue that I have with NeXt and the MacOS. They insist on placing controllers at corners of the window, leaving the rest of the window frame non-functional at best.

You should be able to raise, lower, iconify, move, resize, and access a window-operation menu from all sides of the window. There is no need to make the user travel 500+ pixels just to seek a too-small button for window ops.

3. Transparency is nice...but what is it doing? In other words, what functionality is it adding? To me the slight view of what is under the menu is a bit distracting, and keep in mind this is a controlled screenshot setup. You get a computer with normal usage and you have windows and text all over the place, such a transparent menu would get additionally garbled. I am not a big fan of adding lots of glitz to distract from a lack of functionality. MetaCreations' interfaces are a good example of this. They have some of the worst interfaces, but very glitzy.

4. I can't quite tell what is at the bottom of the screen, but it looks somewhat like a NeXtish wharf? If this is the case, what is the point of multiple sized icons? Why are they so big? This is wasting an awefull lot of screen space, and I have a feeling, underneath, alot of RAM to handle those huge 24bpp icons.

5. Look closely at the scrollbar. Bad tiling effect, wouldn't a simple pixel stretch be a much better solution than a graphic block that tiles? It would be much more memory efficient and accurate.

6. As long as you can make that toolbar on the finder text only, or small buttons that is fine. Huge buttons are a mistake otherwise.

7. It is too bad that it doesn't look like they are going to be using the root-menu concept. This is much more efficient than having to travel all the way to the corner of your screen to access launcher menus. Also I am a bit dissapointed to see that they are sticking with the 'seperated-menu' idea that has been apart of the MacOS for so long. It is completely innefficient to have a menu bar way up in the corner, expecially if it is for a small little app in the lower right of your screen. The argument for this is screen space? Well if that is such an issue incorporate multiple desktops. There is no reason to travel thousands of pixels to access a un-hotkeyed menu function (bad concept in itself).

All in all, it looks snazzy, that doesn't make it good, just snazzy. I'd like to see how it performs on anything less than a blue/white. If it can't even work decently, well, then...that -is- why people are switching to Linux. Modern misconception "Create fancy looking real world metaphore interfaces to make a good UI" Bad mistake, a computer is a computer, not a hand held walkman or DVD viewer. The volume control does not need to be a little spinny thing that is impossible to determine what the current volume setting is at. It looks like they fixed that with this newer version at least. But the concept remains true, you cannot replace efficiency and functionality with jazzy graphics. Of course I can't really say much until I've actually used it. Maybe it is efficient to use, but from what I see: I see the same old mistakes, and some new ones, being done.

Click here for a good page on the Dos and Don'ts of user interfaces.

OnTopic: I just had a call (I'm doing helpdesk work as we speak, for a major research university, at an hourly rate that can only be described as "crazy money") wherein the user was having trouble connecting to our Ph server. The solution I eventually entered into the db was: "enter the hostname exactly as the tech read it to you". 10 minutes on the call just to find out that she really was having trouble with Ph. Which is what I asked her first. Then another 5 minutes of testing and talking her through checking her Eudora settings. Then she reads out the (incorrect) hostname she has in the prefs, as opposed to the correct one I've already given her.

I'm diagnosing this one as a case of hearing what you expect to hear (she had our ph server as a 4th level hostname rather than the third-level that it actually is. *sigh*

I'm not a microsoft detractor(well sometimes, but I bash everything when I'm grumpy) but they do make some good points.

This website should be your bible if you design major gui's(they also have a hall of fame)

An in-depth review

In-depth: Uncommon file dialogs

Artifical Intelligence?

So, is it a floppy or a CD?

Just assume it knows what you want

'Problem' where none has occured

Single tabs are not OK

Improperly grouped tabs

There's a lot more good stuff on the site, but this is the excerpt from the Product Index for Win95. There's one for NT too, if it interests you.

An in-depth review

In-depth: Uncommon file dialogs

Artifical Intelligence?

So, is it a floppy or a CD?

Just assume it knows what you want

'Problem' where none has occured

Single tabs are not OK

Improperly grouped tabs

There's a lot more good stuff on the site, but this is the excerpt from the Product Index for Win95. There's one for NT too, if it interests you.

An in-depth review

In-depth: Uncommon file dialogs

Artifical Intelligence?

So, is it a floppy or a CD?

Just assume it knows what you want

'Problem' where none has occured

Single tabs are not OK

Improperly grouped tabs

There's a lot more good stuff on the site, but this is the excerpt from the Product Index for Win95. There's one for NT too, if it interests you.

An in-depth review

In-depth: Uncommon file dialogs

Artifical Intelligence?

So, is it a floppy or a CD?

Just assume it knows what you want

'Problem' where none has occured

Single tabs are not OK

Improperly grouped tabs

There's a lot more good stuff on the site, but this is the excerpt from the Product Index for Win95. There's one for NT too, if it interests you.

An in-depth review

In-depth: Uncommon file dialogs

Artifical Intelligence?

So, is it a floppy or a CD?

Just assume it knows what you want

'Problem' where none has occured

Single tabs are not OK

Improperly grouped tabs

There's a lot more good stuff on the site, but this is the excerpt from the Product Index for Win95. There's one for NT too, if it interests you.

An in-depth review

In-depth: Uncommon file dialogs

Artifical Intelligence?

So, is it a floppy or a CD?

Just assume it knows what you want

'Problem' where none has occured

Single tabs are not OK

Improperly grouped tabs

There's a lot more good stuff on the site, but this is the excerpt from the Product Index for Win95. There's one for NT too, if it interests you.

An in-depth review

In-depth: Uncommon file dialogs

Artifical Intelligence?

So, is it a floppy or a CD?

Just assume it knows what you want

'Problem' where none has occured

Single tabs are not OK

Improperly grouped tabs

There's a lot more good stuff on the site, but this is the excerpt from the Product Index for Win95. There's one for NT too, if it interests you.

An in-depth review

In-depth: Uncommon file dialogs

Artifical Intelligence?

So, is it a floppy or a CD?

Just assume it knows what you want

'Problem' where none has occured

Single tabs are not OK

Improperly grouped tabs

There's a lot more good stuff on the site, but this is the excerpt from the Product Index for Win95. There's one for NT too, if it interests you.

So yes, this is a great development. All nice and good and such. Nice to see an enterprise tool ported to Linux.

But, frankly, Domino? Notes?

Considering that every single last implementation of it in any environment that I've seen from corporate center to university campus has Sucked because of low speed, inefficency, and an incredibly poor user interface (see http://www.iarchitect.com/lotus.htm for a small review of Notes and how poor it is)...

Yes, enterprise tools are cool, shows some real strength behind Linux. But this particular enterprise tool has a rather deservedly poor reputation :)
Do we really want this attached to Linux?


"lotus notes: it's not just a mail program, it's a complete denial of service attack in one box"



"I don't believe that there is one, single, perfect spiritual way and, in realizing that, obviously you become a lot more open."

As another reader pointed out, Lotus has some issues to resolve. Now, if anybody has ever had to use keyboard shortcuts for Netscape and thought the same shortcuts work under linux... ah, well. And Netscape is actually somewhat compliant to the "windowish" way of doing things... after reading this critique.. I wouldn't be suprised if Lotus threw foot pedals under each user's machine and had them "play" their computer like an organ to do something simple like send an e-mail!
--

Rather than attempt to describe the Lotus Notes client, here's a link for our enjoyment.

Here's a good link about the great Quicktime user interface.

A huge number of posts here say that
1) Disappearing UI stuff is a cool idea
2) It's debatable whether a touch sensor is really needed to make the UI enhancements mentioned.

Am I the only one that doesn't get it? Why would you want your toolbars, menus, icons etc. to disappear? It sounds very annoying, as well as confusing for newbies.

If you think automatically disappearing UI elements is a neat idea, and you use Win9x/WinNT regularly, try setting your taskbar to "AutoHide", and see if you still like the idea. I tried it for a while. I thought it would be great to get a little extra on-screen real estate. I've since changed my mind. It was always popping up when I didn't want it. It was slow, because I had to move the mouse to the bottom of the screen to pop the taskbar up, then I had to read the taskbar, then choose which item I wanted. When it's visible all the time, I can just move to the button I want directly, and it's much faster.

That's the whole point of a toolbar, it's supposed to be a FAST shortcut to a menu item. If it's invisible, selecting an item will take longer, and the purpose is defeated.

I'd turn off those pop-up tooltips things, too, if I knew how. They're always popping up and obscuring the control I'm really after.

Years ago, I worked as a Macintosh computer lab assistant. There were plenty of users who couldn't handle a mouse with ONE button, and NO strange self-disappearing UI features. I've seen plenty of intelligent folks (like me, sometimes) who still don't know when to double click and when to single click. I know otherwise graceful and coordinated people who have to try several times to complete a single double click successfully. My point is that if we need to change things about the accepted norms for GUIs at this point, I think we need to make them simpler and more consistent, not more complicated and more confusing.

To anyone who is interested in such matters, I'd reccomend the recently-slashdot-mentioned User Interface Hall Of Shame. Among the "Rules Of Thumb" for good UI design is "Make new-user features visible and accessible." Making things disappear clearly violates that one.

As I've responded before, let the Interface Hall of Shame disuade you of the opinion that Windows, MS apps on Windows, or third party apps on Windows are consistant in their user interface. That being said, it is difficult for any OS to enforce consistancy of third party apps.

LOL, another site that fears the /. effect.

So why aren't you predicting the death of Quicktime 4 while you're at it? The interface for it is so bad, it got itself a whole column in the Interface Hall of Shame

Here you are:
http://www.iarchitect.com/mshame.htm

This should be required reading for all software developers.

The sections devoted to Win95 are:
Common File Dialogs
Explorer
Find Applet

Here you are:
http://www.iarchitect.com/mshame.htm

This should be required reading for all software developers.

The sections devoted to Win95 are:
Common File Dialogs
Explorer
Find Applet

Here you are:
http://www.iarchitect.com/mshame.htm

This should be required reading for all software developers.

The sections devoted to Win95 are:
Common File Dialogs
Explorer
Find Applet