Slashdot Mirror
Vote:Best Designed Interface in a Graphical App
The GUI has revolutionized the desktop. It made computers accessible to the masses, and even today it keeps getting cooler. Our nominees areeach carving out new territory in the realm of the graphical
user interface. You can Vote for the best
interface between The GIMP, Mozilla, XMMS and Enlightenment.
Moonlight 3D
These guys should have been nominated.
Just the very presence of smargle frep is superior.
After all these years, I still admire xv's layout, especially the colour editor.
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by kuro5hin
For a long time now, those who want to use and improve the slashdot code have been wondering, and waiting, and hoping for the much promised 0.4 tarball. Many of them have in fact become quite irate about the lag between code releases, the lack of a CVS server, and the overall appearance that the slashdot gang doesn't practice what it preaches ("release early, release often"). How would you respond to these criticisms, and do you intend to change the development practices in any way in the future?
CmdrTaco:
I get a nice flamey email about once a week from some ass who calls me a hypocrite and slams me for not getting out a new release. My usual response is to tell them that I delay the release by 24 hours each time someone asks me when a new Slash tarball will be out.
Seriously, there are only 3 people who really know how much work a source release for this is: CowboyNeal, Patrick and Me. And the three of us have been working on a lot of stuff. As I write this, we are bugfixing and documenting and preparing for a source release. There is a private CVS server that one day soon will be publicly read only.
This isn't like other projects: it has been custom fit to our hardware and to our needs. It doesn't have install scripts or help or even comments in the code. We're just too busy to play tech support helping dozens of people compile mod_perl and tune Apache. We've decided to squash the bugs and make a clean release rather than rush it.
It's really easy for someone to complain that I didn't release a new version of the source code every week. Its also easy to forget that in the last 6 months we've doubled in traffic and we've had to optimize our code and hardware to handle that. A new source release is secondary: Our job is running Slashdot. We want to release new versions of Slash, but it is a definite second priority to keeping Slashdot moving.
Finally, it's coming soon. It'll be out when its finished. And if you ask me again I'll postpone it again.
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I have to agree. In fact, ALL the nominations here are appalling and totally unresearched.
:-( They're making us linux users look like we can't design software.
GIMP : If gimp had a good UI people wouldn't still be booting windows to use photoshop. GIMP's UI has been slated by every HCI expert I've met. The menus are HUGE and completely oblivious to context. It's written in GTK for a start, which is not exactly what anyone would call "resonsive". "no".
Enlightenment: Cor, that's complete.. Half of the features (like being able to design borders) can't be reached via its own UI. Glitches in mouse event detection, default themes with tiny menus, tiny buttons, tiny borders. I've tried downloading other peoples themes but most of them are bugged or "flicker" in an ugly way when I move the mouse over things. Features that just don't make sense to a new user (like the the way the dragbar is implemented - I never found the Amiga OS equivalent this fiddly so what have they got so wrong?). You have to go to the main MENU to disable the pager (why can't you have a context-sensitive menu on the pager itself? that's what the right button is for guys). Inobvious drag handles connected to widgets. bleurgh. enlightenment is very pretty to look at but it's a fucking abortion to use.
Mozilla: How anyone can vote for something that is still too bugged to use I don't know. Did you guys actually go through repeatedly restarting it just to try out the user interface? From what I could make out it was still rather confusing. There's a "my panels" directory structure type thing which has been placed in the same contextual area as the main page. wtf? If I'm viewing a website the "my panels" section has absolutely no relevance. KFM has a nice interface - it's like netscape/mozilla in some respects but doesn't need 5 megs of resident ram just to click a button, which again makes it responsive.
XMMS: It's been said already - it's winamp. Although this one would have to get my vote here cause it's the only one that's actually obvious in its usage. Well done guys (the winamp guys, that is.. XMMS haven't done anything for the UI).
some suggestions :
WindowMaker. Clean, complete, simple, responsive, big chunky buttons, intuitive UI, and it can be made to look just as georgeous as everything else here.
KMail. The most functionality I've seen in a graphical mailer (with the possible exception of "agent" for win32, but that's commercial). The filter configuration page is excellent.
Corelpackage (or whatever its called) - the package tool for corel linux. (is this opensourced?) it's a very well thought out front-end to apt. Makes it very clear to the user exactly what is going on.
KDevelop. Ok, so it's a blatent copy of Visual Studio, but it's INTUITIVE. Could do with being able to split the "edit" window into more than one box, but apart from that it's come on nicely. KDebug is excellent too.
Pan (a gtk newsreader). Forgiven for using gtk, it's got two modes of viewing (paned and paneled) and is a doddle to use.
dargh.. ANYTHING but those four
The GIMP is a nice application, don't get me wrong, but the UI stinks. It has severe usability problems. Tear off/persistent menus would go a long way towards fixing this problem. Aver tried to repeat an operation several times in the GIMP, when it's buried three levels down in the menus? Major PITA. How 'bout some of the redo-last functionality from Photoshop? Come on, hiding everything behind several menu layers (in a pop-up menu at that) is not good UI design.
I chose to abstain simply because all of the interfaces suck.
Asking people to choose the best designed interface in a unix app is a bit like asking which festering wound hurts least.
And yes, I use (and like) unix. I just think that the app UIs in general have serious shortcomings.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
I haven't been using this app recently (due to a firewall, ouch!), but I remember it being a wonderful application to use, as well as customize.
I'll try to refrain from putting up a whiny post, but I'm not that enthused by the selections.
I suppose I'm not too threatening, presently, but wait till I start Nautilus
XMMS is a total copy of WinAmp's UI. It even says it in XMMS's readme.
It is a great UI, but i'm not voting for something stolen (ok, more like borrowed), even if it is taken from a Windoze app.
BTW: Wine now runs Winamp perfectly, and even some of its plugins work...
Mozilla is from Netscape. XMMS is designed to look like Winamp. Isn't Enlightenment supposed to look like some other OS or something? And then there's The GIMP, which is just ugly. It's not really a GUI, just a bunch of buttons bunched together.
Enlightenment is damn Godly! I $#!+canned KDE when I saw Gnome running on Enlightenment. Sweet!
--AROS is an Open Source AmigaOS clone, and source compatible with AmigaOS! Try the x86 build at http://www.aros.org