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The GNOME-Microsoft Connection
ejbst25 writes: "I haven't seen it mentioned ... but check out this IBM site about GNOME and MS similiarities if you haven't seen it." There's no secret that for good or for ill, "acts like Microsoft" is the standard by which many desktops are judged. The GNOME project, derided by some as "too idealistic," is notably pragmatic on this point: "I didn't know much about spreadsheets, I just copied every single thing from [Microsoft] Excel," says Miguel of the look of the spreadsheet he's added to GNOME. It's a well-written article, and includes a list of handy links at the bottom if you're interested in programming GNOME aps. It raises the question, though, how long till GNOME or another open-source desktop is the recognized leader?
I am suprised to see there isn't much talk about Eazel. (www.eazel.com)
I don't understand why people ask for a revolution from Linux in the desktop environment.
Why couldn't Linux, for a start, "just" be the best (ultimately) at what it does. And then we'd try to revolutionize things.
Unix has this too.
They're called 'shared libraries'.
The balance is not within slashdot. It's between slashdot and the content free corporate "marketing" dross emanating from companies like MS. We need to get balance somewhere.
Damn, is that you, Fluffy? Pretty funny stuff.
If you want a good, consistent, extensible object model, you really need to take a long hard look at OS/2's WPS.
Stop wasting time trying to emulate the windoze way. It's broken. Take a look at IBM's paper on interface design. It's quite insightful, and is not OS/2 specific.
Not too sure what you mean by that... I'm doing my latest project in gtk and I don't even run Gnome, I'm a KDE kinda guy. You CAN code using gtk and have it run under anything as long as the gtk libs are there, which is typically not a problem.
Dude, I hear you but you really should re-think your point here. Standards for omponentized software are important because they allow development to unfold at a higher degree of abstraction. If I can think in terms of method calls, i.e. operations on objects, instead of exchanging character streams -- well then my code more closely resembles my model. There's just no need to function at such a low level, piping text around and hand-parsing it using yacc or whatever. Remember, with XML you get the parser, and if you work with the DOM, you get a whole OO representation of the document, whereas with yacc, you still have to write grammars, and then build your trees by hand. I'm all for being skeptical about 'innovation', but not to the point of conservatism. I guess there's always someone saying 'why do we need C? Assembly language works great for me!'. Speaking of which, with Java you're missing the point that folks are really productive developing in Java for basically two reasons: its wonderful library support, and its OO syntax. The cross-platform bit is mostly marketing, and of secodary importance anyway. I believe the fact that a typical example/exercise in a first Java course is a multi-threaded clinet/server chat system (GUI and all) demonstrates this -- the equivalent C code is hardly trivial.
Problem is, I don't see much new useful functionality in what you describe at user level (It's arguable at programmer level).
As an example embedding one object in another (eg. spreadsheet in wordprocessor document or wordprocessor document in a web browser) I think is a waste of time because the act of embedding causes all the functionality of the embedded object's creator program to be lost (eg. spreadsheet scrollbars or wordprocessor view scaling) and also gives multiple incompatible interfaces to the same object. By all means have hot links but don't pretend embedding one object in another necessarily improves the functionality or the user interface. It just makes both messier.
I'm not saying productive object models (for the user) won't happen in future but the current MS implementation isn't it.
What people want is irrelevant. They're just too small a piece of the commercial software world.
Corporations will want to pay the 500 $, because it makes them able to deal with one, wel defined, company. Even if it is an illusion that they can sue M$ if something goes awry.
UI? There is heck of a lot more to functional desktop than UI, the whole infrastructure bellow the UI that allows DND, embedding and all that stuff needs to be created. So far GNOME project has been busy creating that infrastructure. Some of this infrastructure is similar to Windows OLE2 and COM. GNOME UI follows the same principles that Mac, Amiga, OS/2, BeOS and Windows and many others before and is hardly something that has been spesifically copied from Windows.
and enable 3 button emulation while clikc both at once peice of cake
shut up troll
I read that as "increasing the size while also increasing the distance, thus neutral under Fitt's Law". I like menus in windows, then I can tell which window I'm affecting when I use a menu.
blah blah MDI blah
Personally, I despise that stuffing windows into other windows thing. I end up with the main window taking over my whole screen and to gat at anything else I have go mining. I realise that some people MDI; fine. Why the hell can't it be made a choice? Have a checkbox for "enable MDI" somewhere. Then we can all be happier.
Same thing with the top-of-the-screen menubar... at least each desktop system could support a global option for "menu in window/menu on top edge".
I can't believe Microsoft hasn't sued him. He basically admitted he copied Excel.
Second post, woohoo!
If your hand's on the trackball, why would you want to reach for the keyboard just to copy/cut/paste?
I do a lot more selectNpaste transfers using the pointer than the keyboard. Why not have both methods available?
So who innovated this again? :)
You mean, like, make us all use black text on white backgrounds (which sears the eyes out of my head), and tie the focus to the topmost window, and fix font sizes, and generally eliminate configurability? Yeek. No Fucking Thank You. I use X so I can configure away most/all of the designer's mistakes and make it look and behave as I want/need it to behave, not how some overpaid yoho in Redmond tells me it should behave.
It's all very nice and well to go out and study hundreds or thousands of people to try to figure out what's usable. It's a Very Bad Mistake - and faulty statistics - to then assume you can make one thing that everyone will like or can use. Perhaps the "average" can be used to set defaults, but to use it to eliminate all choice is idiotic.
Apple found that testers disliked proportional scrollbars? Fine. But the Mac scrollbars I've seen irritate me almost as much as those old Athena things. Why make me suffer with them, when a choice can easily be provided? (more easily than dropping in a different Athena library? :)
Explain to me why the hell my GUI must look and behave exactly like yours? Wasn't adaptability the whole point of these computer things?
You should use the source packages for alpha software like this. Second, KDE2 doesn't look like windows at all. The default style will be B2/KDE, inspired by BeOS.
If someone was to produce a kit that made it easy to create and experiment with new UI designs then we could take advantage of all of the available volunteer manpower to perform UI experimentation and testing, and perhaps make some interesting dicsoveries.
I would like to be able to experiment with this sort of thing. For example, I read somewhere that an experiment showed that people remember angles better than they remember positions along a line. It would be interesting to experiment with menus that displayed as circles divided into pie wedges and see if they were any easier to use than the conventional version.
It would also be nice to experiment with other variations, such as displaying the more useful menu options in a different color and/or boldface to make them easier to find, or perhaps dividing a large menu into differently-colored sections.
--- Brian
Can you explain to me why the hell my GUI must look and behave exactly the same as yours? I thought adaptability was the whole point of these computer thingyjiggers. I don't care what Apple found a couple hundred or a couple thousand testers said on average, Mac scollbars look awful and menus should be in windows and black on white burns the eyes out of my head and the focus should not be tied to the topmost window and windows should not nest etc etc etc... I am not a statistical mean (and I defy you to find more than a dozen people on the planet who are). I like X because I can usually configure away the designer's blunders and get something that doesn't double my blood pressure within an hour.
About the only thing reducing configurability is going to do is piss everyone off.
Sorry for the strong language, but the argument is so endemic of mass-market one-fits-all thinking and soothing corporate logic it needs a few strong words to shake off its hypnotic effect.
Notepad in Win2000 does. As well as Ctr+F, Ctrl+H and Ctrl+A.
May I suggest that you look at Oberon? (www.oberon.ethz.ch) Oberon S3's GUI is very different from anything else. For one thing, it is modeless -- there are no modal dialogues -- and for another, the way that text is handled (cut, inserted) is unusual. A threebutton mouse is used with interclicks (e.g.: select a region of text with MR+movement, then click MM and release both MR+MM together to copy to the insertion point). Oberon is strongly typed, GC'ed, modular, and compiled, but can be almost as dynamic as CLOS, supporting reflection, metaprogramming, and dynamic dispatch (optionally). It looks like Pascal, but don't be deceived. You can even run it as the OS on X86 hardware. If you are interested, check the ethz website (address above) or mail me at srennernoSpam@mail.ru
that's every story. dillhole.
First, COM and CORBA are totally different. Second, OMG was founded in 1989. Roots of COM (IUnknown) can be traced back to 1988
Funny. Let's put this clearly, Miguel has given so many contradicting stories about how he decided to start GNOME, that I doubt he knows the truth anymore.
Let's see some of them:
a) He had wanted to do a desktop since seing a IE demo in 1995 (but IE on 1995 was just a web browser!), and KDE convinced him that it was feasible. At the time GNOME was meant to be a ActiveX clone (Linuxfocus interview, I believe)
b) After he saw KDE was good, he liked it, and then RMS convinced him that KDE was evil, so he started GNOME (but, lo and behold, he must have been convinced damn quick, because he never did even one constructive comment in the KDE mailing lists).
c) He wanted to do a distributed object network model... but he didn't, because he said "GNOME will be just like KDE, only based on free software" (old mail in GNOME mailing list) and KDE didn't have a object model (yet)
d) He liked KDE, but decided there were "serious design issues" which, sadly, he never bothered actually MENTIONING in full. (personal opinion: he made that up, or was just wrong, since he later followed KDE design on all the "mistakes" he did mention) and, because of those unknown "issues" he started GNOME. Oh, well, too bad that "just like KDE" email.
e) He was visited by the holy ghost, and comanded to enlighten the heathens, by coding the ONE TRUE INTERFACE... ok, not literally, but you should hear what he says when noone is recording it.
Chuckle.
Once again the drag to the trash disk eject excuse...yawn.
Yep the classic Mac desktop had ONE quirk.
Funny how desperate people get in trying to 'prove' that the MacOS is just as bad as other desktop garbage like Win95 and GNOME.
I won't bother to rip you on the rest of your comments...sit down and shut up dunce.
There isn't an easy way to do it OOTB, but it is possible...That is one way that NT embedded is able to work.
"Unfortunately, it is in fact expert hostile"
WTF???
You really need a clue. Just because an interface is elegant and easily learned by a new user has NOTHING to do with its use by experts.
"And, very little research have been done about merging those requerements"
WTF???
You know this how? You are just showing your ignorance of the past 15 years of interface research and technology.
"And remember - simplicity in functionality is much more important
than good-looking widgets!"
Linux would best be served by advice from someone with a clue...
You can add users remotely just fine with W2k - telnet server is included and you can run any shell you like for the telnet server.
As for rebooting remotely, I don't know the exact method off hand, but assuming you want to do it from the command line (doing it from terminal server is easy, just click), you would write a small script that requested a reference to the right COM object and called shutdownwindows with the right parameter.
COM won't load everything again - they use reference counting to see when an object can be released. If an object is already in use, it simply creates a new instance with the same code.
maybe you've never had somehting you've created your'e proud of - then you just don't know the feeling. it's like haveing a child and watching them grow up.
That's exactly how I feel about you taking the time to answer my troll. This is the greatest day of my life!!!!!
As someone who switched over to the Helix Code GNOME distribution this weekend, I have to saya that Sawmill truly rocks. Fast, clean, efficient, and it integrates soooo well with the GNOME panel.
The ONLY thing I miss from E is the pager - having little window snapshots really made pager navigation easy (GNOME guys take note - the pager doesn't belong in the panel!) But that's it.
If you haven't tried Helix Code's GNOME, you really need to. It's like 1000 times better than the RedHat 6.1 GNOME distribution - which in turn shows how freakin' fast GNOME is developing.
I've tried every desktop environment availible for Linux, and this one is by far the best.
GNOME... is home.
If your hand's on the trackball, why would you want to reach for the keyboard just to copy/cut/paste?
Why would you be reaching? If you have two hands (like 99%+ of the population) then while one is on the trackball or the mouse, the other can be on the keyboard. Tada, you can do two things at the same time! Keyboard shortcuts are more efficient.
So this "Miguel" knows nothing about Spreadsheets, but has "put one on" Gnome nonetheless.
That's a rather disturbing comment about the Gnome project.
As to the question- no, GNOME won't be a 'recognized leader' if that is the kind of expertise it's developers exhibit.
Sounds more like a slide-show charade all the time.
Cygwin is very clever, and makes NT nearly tolerable. Still, it only implements a large subset of unix and maps features from windows to unix. e.g. case sensitive filenames, fifos, text/binary files, ACL/permissions.
More info at cygnus.
Most people can handle different button configurations, etc, from their toasters to their microwaves. Why can't someone program their menus differently? If no one ever did anything different... baaaah baaaaah.
Well, that pretty much takes the cake as the dumbest statement that I've seen here today. Too many features? Perhaps you'd like to have your government take away some of the features of your life? Tell you that you can't breathe anymore? Why do you think some people that aren't gay lobby for homosexual marriages? They aren't using this "feature" in their lives, but it is still useful in their view. If a feature is in a product then you can bet that SOMEONE uses it, even if you think it's useless.
You can customize toolbars in Excel and in many other programs. You can get rid of the "Paperclip" in Office applications. Boo hoo there are too many features. Turn them off or don't use them, don't tell a company to get rid of them just because you don't use them or understand why anyone would. That would punish the people who DO use them.
Some people don't think Windows sucks for what they do. I haven't had Windows crash in over a month. So I'm not a power user - big deal. It's faster for what I do, and has more software available for it than Linux does. I can get free DOS compilers and what I want, just as a Linux developper would. I can get a cheap educational version of a Win32 compiler and do what I want.
I play games, program minor apps/utilities, use e-mail, ftp, usenet, etc, and Windows works like a charm. I don't think it's the end-all and be-all of OSes, but it's better than Linux in my case.
Incidentally there is plenty of freeware available for Windows. It doesn't come with source, but I'm not going to kill myself because of that fact.
Actually, "Is" is a linking verb. "Who is copying who" is right.
netscape is the problem. Netscape eats up RAM at least 20 megs on most systems.
I always giggle and shake my head when someone describes Windows as a good example of consistency or ease of use. If you want to see what those things are really all about, look at a Mac. It was good enough for MS to copy and copy badly. Why would anyone try to make a copy of a bad copy? Do you like watching fuzzy 4th generation video tapes too?
RAR!! THIS IS THE CLOWN COMING FOR YOU!!! YUMMMMMMMMMMMMM...............
Fuck, who needs the ctrl+s shortcut push alt down down down enter
No, it was flamebait. Saying that sort of thing around here, even if it is true, incites flamage.
I love this idea, except that places like Apple and Microsoft have what the Free Software community doesn't - time, money, paid testers, and hoards of employed programmers. MSFT and Apple have spent hundreds of millions of USDollars on UI design, testing, and feedback.
Though often innovative, free software lacks the sheer quantity of these resources that large commerical companies posess. Copying an established design and then expanding upon it and making it better is a pretty good philosophy, given the circumstances.
!!!
The mac interface is really horrible. Who's stupid idea was it to put the program menu's along the top of the screen? They go much better in the window's them selves. MS even though they may be evil, and their OS's crash all the time, have a better GUI than the Mac's do.
+++
NO CARRIER
%%
suck == blow
I think one thing to realize is that the "Unix" model works well for a certain set of tasks, but the "COM" model works better for other tasks, for example "Office Suite" type things.
Microsoft realized early on that trying to have your spreadsheet update data in your word processor through one-way message passing (DDE) was doomed. (Sure you can achieve the same results with Unix's gazillion wonderful text processing tools, but users don't want that - they want a word processor.)
The Gnome project is just coming to the same realization that MS did a few years back. These guys know "Unix" and they figured out where "Unix" doesn't work that well.
SLASHDOT: Open source, closed minds.
you heard it here first.
My "usability reasearch" involved connecting three monitors to a Mac IIfx, and all I did was swear at the always-on-one-monitor menu bar.
Apple obsoleted the menubar at the top of the monitor concept in 1986 when multiple monitor support came on line. Time for them to catch up to their own hardware.
besides, M$ would never admit that Linux is a competitor
Since the mouse stops when it hits the screen, you effectively make the menu items infinitely tall. They are much easier to click on quickly.
There are lots of great ideas in the Mac interface, but I still won't accept their "one mouse button is enough for everyone, and most users would be frightened by more" philosophy. Why should I have to Option-Click when I could just middle-click?
That and those microscopic arrow keys on new mac keyboards makes me want to bitch-slap all those "mac gui is perfection" freaks.
Oh great. Just great. So much for originality. Or for Open Source being better.
As a matter of fact, I have. The previous snapshots at least worked half-ass. The newest .debs (03/08/2000) don't work. The newest version also seems a hell of a lot slower.
This entire "desktop environment" quest is leading to huge problems because there's no standardization. Programs are "KDE-ized" and "GNOME-ized." Things like koffice won't run except under KDE, at least from what I've seen.
Meanwhile, there's a quest to make Linux look like Windows, run like Windows, and attract Windows users. This is done under the guise of "beating Microsoft."
What good is "beating Microsoft" if we become Microsoft in the process? It's a waste of effort if that's what we're trying to do; just pirate the software.
You mean innovations like putting the diskette in the trash to erase-uh-i mean eject it, right? Howz about that one-button mouse? No, I'm no anit-Mac zealot either, got one on my desk, well, sitting next to a half dozen pentiums, that is. A lot of the basic features of MacOS (which Win tries to emulate) were based upon what the less-techy people at Apple "thought" was the easiest to understand. Very subjective and unscientific. To coin a phrase, solutions based this approach are subject to variations in cognition-blindness. Just as some color schemes look good to some people and unreadable to others depending on their color-blindness, having the bold border around the button means Return activates to some and is completely meaningless to others.
This is just one of the many reasons I run Be and OS/2....neither looks or feels like M$/KDE/Gnome.
But what happened to SEGFAULT??
3/4 of the stories here aren't worth reading anymore. the best part of slashdot is the trolls.
too bad they killed segfault.
this "beginner's" mode has got to be the most confusing thing I have ever seen.
Many people tend to think that if we make Linux pretty enough, the average user will make the switch. The entire system is completely difficult to understand. It is at best useful as a cheap server, and as a development platform for hackers and hobbyists. Linux is for the "wannabe" system administrator. Even if tools are developed to ease system administration, there is always something that requires you to modify a flat file.
Consider run levels, mounting drives, networking, et cetera. While all of these things can be explained and learned, most people do not care. They want to edit their paper, steal some mp3s, chat with friends and go to bed. They do not want to stay up all night trying to figure out what a segmentation fault is, and why they now have a 90Mb file on their system (they probably do not even know if it is safe to delete it).
Developing a system for usability requires more than just a nice interface, it requires a nice system. Time would be better spent developing a new operating system, one that addresses overall usability.
- The new filemanager++ (Nautilus) is done by some people (Eazel) who developed the Apple OS ages ago. (Actually, anybody who was at GUADEC knows this FM really kicks as. It's as easy to use as the Mac for beginners, but can be put in 'Hacker'- (or Ettore-) mode as well.
- The groupware system (Evolution) has a GUI similar to Microsoft-LookOut for the backend it uses an API inspired by SUN's JavaMail. However, Evolution adds the nice virtual folders concept.
So, GNOME's about recognizing good ideas when you see them, having the benefit of reimplementation (avoiding mistakes) and adding cool stuff on top.Oh course, I do the exact same thing. It's especially funny because I have AfterStep set up with four 4-part desktops, and you can see on the pager in the screenshot that I have everything I' m doing in that one window. :-D
The clown is bringing Micro$oft and GNOME together in a concentrated attempt to find me. This is looking very bad for me. I already think that the clown installed KDE on my desktop to monitor my movements. I slept much better back in the command line days. Was vi really so bad? What was so wrong with batch processing? It was wonderful to get a coffee break waiting for output and walking a couple of hundred feet to pick up printouts from some guy behind a counter. The clown left me alone.
Why is there always some volatile AC that shows up in any article on GUIs to gratuitously flame Gnome advocates while at the same time humiliate KDE advocates? Is this such an emotional issue?
Spreadsheets aren't "transparently convertable" any more than you can "transparently convert" French into Japanese.
This was discussed recently on the Gnumeric and KOffice mailing lists, KOffice didn't see fit to reply last time I looked.
Even if KOffice actually BUILT a usable spreadsheet app this year (which looks unlikely) it won't interoperate with Gnumeric, because the feature set overlap isn't big enough to justify a common format.
Maybe, with twelve months of determined effort, you could invent a "standard" XML DTD for talking about spreadsheets, and MAYBE with a lot more effort you could get GNOME and KDE to both implement it. Even so, neither would choose it as their native format, because it would inevitably not match their internal structures as well as their current native XML formats.
The one light in the tunnel is XSL, which will allow them to provide a transformation which can be run independently to get to a common format of some kind.
Anyway, right now the TRUE overlap of usable applications for GNOME vs KDE is very minimal:
GNOME doesn't have a big-time vector app like Killustrator, but KDE's "ImageShop" is a PR stunt next to Gimp, then KWord kicks all kinds of AbiWord ass, but KSpread looks like a kiddy toy compared with Gnumeric...
The only way you'll get a full set of Free Software productivity apps this year is to use BOTH KOffice and GNOME office.
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Copyrights
There is no special support for COM in NT kernel. COM operates entirely in user mode.
Yes, it did.
Is it a dialog? Or is it a window?
No one knows.
I don't think these people should get in sync with some marketing timetable, nor am I saying that the KDE project should be abandoned simply because it's not gnome, and nor am I saying that arrogance (read: the confidence to follow your own path) is necessarily a bad thing. What I'm saying is this: since enlightenment and gnome a) use the same widget sets and b) were originally far more interoperable than they are now (remember rasterman belonged to RHAD labs before his "ego conflict with management") the main reason that these projects went off in separate directions is that rasterman and mandrake now think themselves rock-star coders and consider their reputations first and foremost when making decisions. Look, linux has many desktops that are far superior to anything microsoft puts out (and apple too, pending aqua). But no matter how good these desktops get, it is the lack of a unified desktop that is holding back linux's success in (gasp) the marketplace and its adoption in the home and by educational institutions. Fact.
Um. If it totally works the same as Windows -- right down to the crashes -- surely it would suck? ;-)
<grins>; <ducks>; <runs>
CTRL-C CTRL-V????
One of the things I love about my setup is I have 3 buttons....highlight and click a button...works in 90% of the apps...go spend the $25 for a nice logitech 3 button and your ctrl-c ctrl-v problem is solved.
should be who's copying WHOM. Learn some grammar.
Thank You,
Troll King
Thank You,
Troll King
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the real question is does it suck or does it blow?
OOG SAY VERB PHRASE IS "IS COPYING!!" VERB PHRASE TAKE DIRECT OBJECT!!!! OOG KNOW "WHOM" IS DIRECT OBJECT OF "WHO!!!" WHOM RIGHT, IDIOT!!! OOG BREAK HEAD FOR STUPIDITY!!
The enlightenment people, rather than helping the open source community, are so hell-bent on making themselves a name that they are trying to make their window manager into a full-featured desktop environment, and thereby are no longer stressing gnome compatibility. This may sound like a flame but I'm dead serious - the egos of rasterman and mandrake are the two things that most threaten the free software movement. If enlightenment (which still is excellent, btw) meshed nicer with gnome (duplicate pagers and background wizards lead to wierd situations) both gnome and enlightenment would be much further along. Instead, the community has to waste time developing yet another window manager (sawmill) that will play nice with gnome. These problems could be avoided. Think about it.
This post to the Darwin Development mailing list brings up that interesting fact by indicating that MSFT may own a lot of the kernel due to all those non-compete clauses signed by MSFT developers.
From what I understand, those non-compete clauses aren't legally enforceable.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
>You really think that the Linux community will ever come out with
>something original? It hasn't happened yet in the last decade, so why
>do you think it ever will? Seriously. It's called "chasing the
>tail-lights."
Maybe it's because the Linux community realizes that what UI people like yourself consider "original" is really useless garbage?
>I bring this up with miguel every chance I get. Their "inspiration"
>from MS is one of the reasons why I stay away from gnome when I can.
>It would be really cool if a group of people who KNEW about good UI
>design could get together and do something original. I would be happy
>to help with both programming and design.
Sheesh. When will you UI freaks realize that the Linux userbase isn't interested in becoming *THE DUMPING GROUND* for the half-baked ideas of UI designers. Go bother the BSD guys. But they'll most likely tell you idiots to fuck off too....
I think Miguel intended to use a OLE 'clone' all along and saw OpenParts as too complex (which was proved correct when KDE also dropped it).
/mill
As for CORBA I haven't seen any benchmarks pitting MICO and ORBit against each other. From the tests posted to gnome-component-list last week it seems to beat OmniORB handily (although I don't know much about CORBA or its pitfalls to judge for the general case).
Miguel (and Federico?) got the idea of a desktop project from that MSIE demo. He intended to join KDE, but then RMS and others pointed out it was based on a proprieraty toolkit (Qt), so he created GNOME instead.
If by "such an event" you mean the need to browse a hierarchy, there are several much better ways to do so, including Mac Finder-style navigation (opening children in a new window), tree controls (like in Windows explorer), or browsers like in NEXTSTEP/Mac OS X.
The main problem with hierarchical menus (and especially deeply nested ones like the Windows start menu) has to do with the transient nature of menus and the fact that submenus are selected by pointing rather than clicking. Especially in older versions of Windows, it was frequently difficult to navigate your mouse to the right item five menus deep, and easy to lose your place in the menu forcing you to start over. This has become somewhat less true recently since they've changed menu behavior somewhat to compensate, but at the expense of slowing down menu use in general.
As for a better solution, I like the so-called Explorer Bars that have been introduced recently. If you've got access to a Win2K box, compare how much easier it is to use the Favorites bar than the Favorites menu in IE, especially if you have a deep hierarchy. Mozilla has something like this too. I'd much rather launch programs using something like that. It wouldn't be a stretch to be able to attach these bars to the side of the screen in addition to individual windows.
We don't need uniformity across systems. I'm actually really happy with a desktop that would totally baffle just about anyone else (I use Shift-Shift and Alt-Alt for various things, e.g.); I don't want other people to switch to my weird setup, not do I want to switch to another setup.
What we do need is uniformity across applications, so that when I run anything, I get an interface I like, and when anyone else runs something, they get their interface of choice.
We need to standardize on a way of specifying key bindings, menu layouts, widgets, etc. The thing that Windows does right (but MacOS did even better and sooner) is that all of the programs behave similarly. Now, if the layer of configurability is on the other side of the application boundary, so that the *user* gets to decide how everything will be instead of the *programmer* getting (or needing) to decide, we can have the benefit of this uniformity and also have extensive customization.
We just have to convince KDE guys to use it...
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
> This is the same reason why people who use lex and yacc didn't need XML to perform things that are now touted as "innovations" (XML for them is just one of formats that can be parsed with no noticeable effort)
Creating a new language with different syntax every time you need a configuration file, or something as pithy verges on being ridiculous. And what better way of documenting a file spec, than listing (or referencing) its DTD ? XML is not let lex/yacc, and for many situations, I think (at least) it is a superior solution (in terms of allowing the programmer to do real work, not write another config parser).
> and the same reason why people who can write portable C code don't see point in Java.
Show me a 100 line C application that runs on both Solaris, Windows and Linux (on either sparc/x86), accesses data using identical schemas on either MySQL, Sybase or Oracle, dishing out HTML, and I'll show you a flying pink elephant with a smoking monkey on its head typing out A Midsummer Night's Dream.
This comment is apt:
"Perl was written in C, not because it's a portable language, but
because it's a ubiquitous language. A bare C program is about as
portable as Chuck Yeager on foot."
--- Footnote explaining the library for accessing configuration
information on page 385 of _Programming_Perl_, 2nd Edition
The Gnome developers actually agree with us about the edge issues (they have a link to Fitts' law on developer.gnome.org), and in the latest gnome-core, it's possible to make a panel's contents flush with the edge. I can now access the foot menu with an uncoordinated flick of the mouse into the lower left corner.
Sadly, not much more than the foot menu works this way yet. I believe it's actually an issue of the underlying gtk+ widgets, and that it's being worked on.
So, basically, your statement should be modified to "Gnome a little, KDE a little).
As for the lack of select-by-typing in listboxes etc., I'm with you 100%. It's such an immensely useful feature and the lack of it in gtk+ really slows me down.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
I think sengan is/was in England or thereabouts, where the day's already well underway when it's still late/early on the U.S. east coast.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
As Stated before apple got some ideas from Xerox , microsoft from apple, gnome from microsoft each product itself is different and evolved in their own kind of beast. The ideas came from more or less the same place. Now it is up to use the users to help Gnome evolve into a greater beast one that can do things like no one else can do we are getting there but we stil have a long ay to go. But remember it took microsoft years to come up with the "LOOK AND FEEL OF WINDOWS". So we need to be willing to take our time with this and learn from the ones who went ahead of us (microsoft and apple) and be willing to risk on what we do.
http://theotherside.com/dvd/
So for God's sake Timothy, and the sake of all those employed individuals operating on EST, please go to bed!
:) Me, I'm quite used to look for updates at four in the morning, but then I never have to get up early...
So, taking this to its logical conclusion, nobody should ever post an item at slashdot, as there are people in nearly every timezone visiting this site
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Have you looked at kde2 recently? You can pretty much theme it any way you want now.
-- Thrakkerzog
Microsoft is hardly a user interface leader, but Excel is an easy reference point from which to judge spreadsheet packages. Microsoft products tend to have too many features, many of which are poorly integrated. This is not good interface design. (Anyone up for half a dozen toolbars? How about a talking paperclip?) They've contributed a widget here and there, but nothing more.
:)
My only problem with stealing so many ideas from MS is that we'll end up with a product no better than MS's. It takes a long time to build a good interface - one that balances simplicity of initial use with depth and complexity of options.
This is the future challenge of Open Source software. Sure, Open Source has worked for writing kernels and servers. But how will it get along with the demands of graphical user interface and tight control of design? The democratic system that writes the code CANNOT be applied to the user interface. Good design has always been the work of one person or a very small team of people.
Linux's technical merits far outpace its usability merits. If linux is going to make its way on to desktops, it needs to be as easy to configure as windows. This does not necessarily mean limiting configurations. At minimum, it means having a centralized place accessable from the Xwin desktop where most (all?) configuration changes can be made. Once it can do that, then we can concider putting it in the homes of america.
Open Source can write great code, but can it build a rich working environment for the non-technical user?
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
At least the Visicalc spreadsheet was a an Original Idea.
How long till Red Hat or another distribution is the recognized leader?
How long till fvwm or another window manager is the recogized leader?
How long till vi or another text editor is the recognized leader?
How long till RISC or another instruction set is the recognized leader?
Seriously, though...I don't think either GNOME or KDE will ever be "The Leader." Both have significant followings, people who would never use the other just because it's the enemy in their favorite holy war. And it doesn't matter. GNOME users can still run KDE apps (provided they have the necessary libraries), and vice versa. So what's the big deal?
Maybe it's because the Linux community realizes that what UI people like yourself consider "original" is really useless garbage?
That doesn't even make sense. Originality is what it is -- it doesn't say whether any particular original idea is good or bad. If you hate originality, both good or bad, I can see why you love Linux, but if you can actually name any original ideas to have come out of the Linux community, I'm all ears. I'm talking any originality, from the internals to the servers, to the fluffiest user app. Which leads me to my second point about your post: Why would the originality have to come in the form of a UI?
Oh yeah, and what's a "UI person," and how am I one?
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
CORBA is just dandy if you're remoting objects and have to marshal data across the country over a wire. But as an IPC mechanism for processes within a single machine, it stinks.
In CORBA, EVERY BLOODY CALL TO AN OBJECT has to be routed through the ORB. This is an obscene load of processing overhead. With COM, once you have the IUnknown pointer, you make your call through a vptr, and your server routine has control. When the called routine completes its epilogue and pops a return, your code is back in control. No ORB middleman, no overhead, no nothing. Exquisite.
</rant>
There. I feel better.
Ask your doctor if getting up off your ass is right for you! -- Bill Maher
Yes, I run Win2000.
Just a few comments. First off, Microsoft, Apple, and other companies with a vested interest in UI design have sunk many dollars into R&D and testing for their UI designs, and as much as you may not like them, they *do* work for the majority of users. In fact, Microsoft (through Microsoft Press) has published several books on UI design and style. UI design is not something that is taken lightly at MSFT.
:).
Second, the component object model (COM) used by Windows makes sense -- it's a language-independent, binary-compatible specification for writing software objects that can be reused by any application that can see the interface (and by using type libraries, which are nearly always embedded in COM objects, it's possible to get the interfaces you need without having even a header file). From what I gathered from the article, that's where the major "borrowing" has occured -- in the form of GNOME's dependence upon CORBA. The ability to use other developers' objects in pretty much any, even if no source is provided, is a real God-send, and is an idea that linux (and unix in general) can benefit from.
Finally, to address the issue of "real" transparency -- if it's used properly, it can make quite a bit of difference in the user experience, from subtle things such as properly-translucent dragging icons to more garish displays like fading menus, translucent windows, and more. Personally, I think it's a Good Thing (tm) to have alpha-blending transparency in a modern UI, since it can easily enhance the effectiveness of the UI and it's rather trivial to do these days (making the assumption that everybody has video cards that can handle alpha-blending -- and those that don't should upgrade or turn off the effect).
Of course, since I've not done any research in UI design, I'm probably not qualified to comment. Then again, I'd bet dollars to donuts that neither are you (hey, that's the beauty of forums such as this -- unqualified people can comment to their heart's content without any restrictions
GNOME has the (more and more) nice control-center, where other apps may put their config stuff as well (just like Sawmill does)
Also worth mentioning is the GConf configuration library. Although not very visible to the user, it makes storing, retrieving and last, but not least monitoring configuration settings easy.
© ilmari. All rights reserved, all wrongs reversed
But I wish Miguel would spend more time on making Gnome feel as consistent and polished as KDE or Windows. My beef with Windows is not the GUI, which works well enough, and is quite consistent (except the file open dialogs, of which too many variants exist), but the unreliability of it, as well as the excessive variants on the market all at the same time.
Last time I tried Gnome, the response of scroll bars to the mouse was inconsistent, and it seemed prone to decode a lot of double-clicks I did not make. That gets old in a hurry.
KDE is much more polished as a GUI, and I could care less whether it copies Windows. The GUI, after all, is only a tool, not the end result. For any who missed that concept, reread the paragraph.
Thank God I don't have to use Gnome, but can use KDE. That freedom to choose is the best thing about Linux.
--- Bill
Okay one more time for clarity....Windowmaker is a Window manager. Gnome and KDE are environments. By that I mean they provide a common look and feel to appliations written. You can use gnome apps under kde and vice versa. KDE happens to have a default windowmanager - KWM. Gnome does not have one but it looks to be that sawmill (the one I moved from windowmaker to) is going to be the default choice.
I hope this doesn't sound too harsh. I know alot of new people are coming into linux/*bsd for the first time but I wouldn't want someone to sound foolish by basing an argument on something like this.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
TummyX, I'm a bit late but I perhaps you'll still read it. ;-)).
Thanks for the explanation concerning the user stuff, but I forgot something, I wanted to add said users _remotely_. I forgot to mention this cause in unix/linux/bsd this wouldn't matter (hehe, this proves my point somewhat even more
And while we're at it, does someone know how to reboot nt remotely from linux - and no, no ping o'death and brothas please.
I heard on good authority that a certain manager at Redhat Advanced Development Labs thinks that Microsoft is the best thing ever, their interface is wonderful and GNOME (and hence the Redhat default interface) should look and behave exactly like it.
This is probably why Redhat ship with modified kernel sources - so the OS can crash like Microsoft OS's too ;-)
Seriously though, this person may like to read Thomas McCarthy's intro to NeXTStep which has some very good information on interface design.
For example, you do not put three tiny weenie buttons on a titlebar, each performing a different operation, such that a 1-2 pixel mis-click is all the difference between maximising the application, and losing the past hours work by closing it.
Matt
Yes I agree completely. Actually, this "likeness to Windows" is one of the reasons I refuse to use KDE unless I have to (Corel, Mandrake). I prefer Gnome. Oh, and there was that idiotic license issue with KDE some time back. In my mind, the "solution" was not good enough.
-- DuckWing
from the and-fertilizer-is-just-poop dept.
lkfrggruy348 writes: "I haven't seen it mentioned ... but check out this Xerox site about Windows and Apple similiarities if you haven't seen it." There's no secret that for good or for ill, "acts like Apple" is the standard by which many desktops are judged. The Windows project, derided by some as "too innovative," is notably pragmatic on this point: "I didn't know much about spreadsheets, I just copied every single thing from [Apple]," says Bill of the look of the spreadsheet he's added to Windows. It's a well-written article, and includes a list of handy links at the bottom if you're interested in programming Windows aps. It raises the question, though, How long till Windows or another second-rate desktop is the recognized leader?
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Well, alot of it is that gnome provides some very helpful high level widgets,like toolbars and status bars and such. That, and it adds some measure of consistency to the desktop, like someone else mentioned was lacking.(Keybindings, standard dialog boxes, standard menu configurations, etc.) Overall, it's a Good Thing(TM).
See you, space cowboy...
True, but having menubars in each window allows you to access other application menus without first making the application 'active'.
With multiple workspaces, desktop space isnt at such a premium that it would be worth the sacrifice to exchange multiple clicks more to access various menus for a few more pixels desktop space.
Dude -- you just got your ass kicked (or your head broken, I suppose) by a neanderthal troll.
And he's *right*, too.
Responding to the question posed along with this article - "How long until Gnome or another Open Source desktop is the recognized leader":
.)
I don't think that such a blanket statement can really be made, as the desktop is important in both the consumer and business markets (and probably others that deserve to be distinguished from these generalized categories).
However, I'm interested in what criteria others here would use to judge such an occurance. I myself would imagine that it's just a reasonable majority - as soon as one desktop is recognized by the general public as being in more widespread use than another, I would consider it the leader.
So let me just pose this question for others to reply to: At what point would you consider a desktop as having passed that threshold? (no need to discuss if such an occurance will ever happen. .
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
So either the patent office was screwed up back in the days of Windows 3.1 and below, or they really DO accept bribes =)
(I'm really starting to wonder now). .
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
Sleep? ;)
I see that nowhere in my job description.
I'm unfortunately on Eastern Standard, too, but for people in Taipei it's early afternoon, and Islamibadians are already out n' about.
Anything that goes up late though really will be there for you to see in the morning!
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
The topic of "copying" has been one of the biggest issues with linux for me lately. It seems that simply "sopying" windows or making an Aqua Enlightenment theme is very common. Most popular GUI apps have a Windows equivalent. My major question is where, beyond performance, scalability, dependability, etc. does linux outperform or out design microsoft or apple? It seems many writers of linux GUI software simply copy, rather than "innovate" (sorry for the MS trademarked word..). Where/Who in the linux community would create a PDF/Postscript based GUI like apple? Is radical innovation really possible in an OS community designing for the masses? One solution i've dreamt about is the continuing acceptance of linux, which might spur good interface designers, (i was happy about nautilis) which could take the Desktop beyond the capabilities of people whose braun lies in their code. Look accross the internet and you can find many designer communities (www.eboy.com, www.shift.jp.org) which aren't too different than the linux one, and a possible overlap exists. Whether any of these efforts would become standardized is another topic. A unified desktop API might help, but it would need to be one which limited the programmer from the first instincts, which may or may not be the best ideas in terms of UI, but great in software engineering. So my question still remains, where does linux start to innovate versus copying? chimchim
I enjoyed the article; but I think that credit belongs where credit is due, and the author makes it seem like GNOME has been the only one copying M$ with the component model. Am I the only one who noticed that there was a working model called KOM/OpenParts in the alpha versions of KDE2?
::sighs:: I guess so. The KDE team decided that CORBA was too big and heavy to use in a lightweight desktop environment, so they scrapped it in favor of DCOP/KParts. Still, it works right now.... for me, at least. Your mileage may vary... : )
PS: Anybody else notice that he mistakenly claims that Miguel started GNOME because of IE? Doesn't that seem kind of... odd? Here I thought it was because Miguel didn't like the licensing of Qt... silly me.
I'm still stuck using OS/2 for pretty much that reason. I hate not being able to move around stuff without breaking links. Microsoft supposedly has such a great object model, why is its implementation in the shell so poor and incomplete?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Actually, it's a very smart idea developed based on usability reasearch. Putting a single menu bar at the top of the screen, as it takes advantage of Fitts' Law (the ease with which a user can acquire a target is proportional to the size of the target and inversely proportional to the distance from the target). The menu bar is at the upper edge of the screen, which makes it easy to "hit" -- just move the mouse up and you'll slam the edge of the screen as it effectively has infinite height. M$ is even moving towards this as most of their apps are now MDI (Multiple Document Interface), where there's a parent window with the menu bar and child windows whose menus appear in the menu bar when they are in focus. Check out this article at asktog.com for the full scoop on Fitts' Law.
agreed.
See my reply above. I was talking about a hypothetic free UNIX implementation. And the "ha!" part was not MS-bashing, but a tribute to the fact that any software above a few lines of code is likely to have a few bugs.
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Same with KDE. There is *nothing* stopping anyone from using Gnome apps under KDE or any other WM or desktop.
No, there is certainly nothing stopping them. But there would be something bothering them. The differing funktionality and look of the GUIs make the ultra-short learning time inherent to GUIs longer.
Example: I want all my 'Open file...' dialogs to look essentially the same. Why? Well, why should they be different? Ok, if they have differing functionality, but they should only be as different as the application requires. Which means that they should be based on the same template.
Anyway, GNOME and kde are indeed steps in the right direction. What they need to do is make sure they are 100% compatible from the users point of view. Otherwise, the whole concept becomes useless: Two (internally) consistent GUIs combined means one inconsistent GUI.
dufke
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If no one ever did anything different... baaaah baaaaah.
;-)
1. I hope your computer is more difficult to operate than your toaster. Otherwise, you have one hell of a toaster!
2. I'm certainly not saying that there should be only one desktop environment. But once the user has chosen one, it should be the same in all apps. It just makes life easier.
dufke
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Yes, COM uses DLLs (.so in unix). However, there's more to COM than just calling exported functions :). I should have made that a bit clearer sorry.
.so. Writing a simple COM engine would be pretty simple, but writing all the support interfaces, functions libraries, and designing the spec to "work" well in real life (it took COM 10 years of evolution to become to what it is today) is hard.
The who idea behind com is abstraction thru interfaces (or on reality, just a table of function pointers). Because of this level of abstraction, you can like aquire a function pointer, but it won't neccessearily point to the real function (which you can do in COM) it might point to a proxy or marshall that will send the call off over RPC to the destination object on a remote machine.
Shared Libraries have no concepts of "interfaces" or "classes", and shared libraries generally is a 'c' thing. COM also has relatively strict guidlines on datatypes (BSTR, long, short etc). So any COM aware application will be able to read a string that's passed out from any COM object written by any COM compatible language.
Yes, this sounds a lot like just a specification, and you could implement this on Unix with
I mean, I like to think of myself as having a better than average understanding of COM for someone who uses COM. But I'm sometimes suprised when I come across *yet another* Co* function that does more stuff. Some simple examples of support functions are object creation (CoCreateInstance), interface querying (QueryInterface), string allocation (Sys* functions), memory allocation (CoMem* functions), hell even some of the default implementations of DLLRegister server for registring CLASS and INTERFACE GUIDs needs a bit of thought. You need a registry to start off with (something Windows has had since win31, and Netscape have implemented for Mozilla's xpCOM).
BTW, sorry about the ugly formatting of the previous post, had HTML formatting on by default (doh).
s an example embedding one object in another (eg. spreadsheet in wordprocessor document or wordprocessor document in a web browser)
Not a waste of time if you want to add webbrowser capabilities to your application without writing your own. Not if you want to add a video clip into your powerpoint application.
And I don't see what you mean about spread sheet scrollbards & wp view scaling. They're all available. Word is after all basically an ActiveX server sitting inside a main window frame. Just cause it happens to sit inside IE inside Excel inside PowerPoint doesn't change much. With OLE, there's definitions for ActiveX documents and such, where the menus of collaborating applications are 'joined' together to make one big menu bar at the top.
Notice how when you add an excel sheet to word and you click on the sheet, the menu bars and toolbars change?
Anyway, you don't lose functionality (especially if the objects are written propertly).
One example of what I've been doing is using Media Player 6, and embedding it into my own J++ based application so I can play MP3 and WMA files from my application.
And I think activex scripting is an excellent example of how good COM can be. I'm sure a few users out there would feel quite comfortable writing ASP or Windows Scripts, it's nothing beyond JavaScript for HTML pages (in fact it's practically the same thing in a different context) which many people now days have at least tried.
I could write a 10 line script to list processes (without running pmon). I call COM objets from javascript (or perlscript) and I get REAL results back, an int when i want to know the PID etc.
BTW, I'm not sure what you mean by embedding objects doesn't include functionality!!! That's the whole point. Sure, if you embedd a mundane object that does nothing, it doesn't do anything. But most people go and embed useful things! Like in wordpad, you might want to embedd a picture....no problem, use the windows defacto standard - OLE and embed paintbrush into your wordpad document.
Usability is also very much improved (imagine doing the inserting images into a document like i described above without OLE - or basically, drag and drop of objects!). OLE is the kind of thing which allows Explorer (with it's HTML integration) to preview video files in a tiny Video Box on the left of your explorer pane (which itself is just MediaPlayer hosted), or preview other things, like HTML documents, powerpoint slides(!) and pictures.
I suppose it's really something you have to try out a lot to appreciate it. You only miss it when it's missing.
Look how bad embedding is on Unix. If I want to embed a GIMP image (not just as a bitmap, but as a GIMP object that I can touch up and redraw by double clicking on it...eg. Gimp is hosted) into my text document in KEdit, I can't do it!
Remember, for many windows applications, even Buttons and scrollbars are themselves OLE controls (not all, but many).
I believe MS's implementation is EXTREMELY productive, and has led to the easy of programming some pretty advanced stuff in windows. So many apps now have webbrowser capabilities thanks to COM (WinAMP, NeoPlanet, HTMLHelp, etc).
The ability to be able to extend explorer (the windows shell) to the extent which it's capable of could really only be done this efficiently and this reliably (for something that complicated) with something similar to COM (IMHO).
*groan*
you don't know what you're talking about.
Run it in a Window? WTF? Controls DO HAVE THEIR OWN WINDOW. But the window is embedded in another window as a control (or widget for unix guys).
There is an equivalent of pipes in Windows? ROFL wotever, windows has so many ways of IPC: COM, Pipes, Named Pipes, Sockets, MailSlots, MSMessageQueue, Window Messages, MemoryMappedFiles, ATOMs. NT is a DESIGNED os, and was not 'evolved' like unix and 'hacked' together over time. Yes it's true, unix is hacked. Unix is a powerful hack, but it's still a hack.
Don't you realise that OLE uses pipes/sockets (window messages) etc whenever appropriate, windows uses base windows IPC mechanisms to facilitate things like thread marshaling. But the point is BEING ABLE TO ACCESS THE INTERFACES of components you add.
going
IMediaPlayer->Play();
sure beats the ass of creating a socket, designing a protocol for messagening, reading, writing, reading, writing and all that crap.
You're attitude towards easy of programming and reusability is very disturbing. I presume you don't use any standard C libraries cause you always write your own. I mean, C allows you to write your own functions! And the windows system (irony!) is poorly designed so that you have to use standard c libraries to do anything!
Anyway, using libraries is NOT a flaw, it's an advantage, cross process communication is slow and blows. I suppose in C you would prefer running writing little binaries to do all sorts of functions and communicate to them with pipes rather than just importing existing C functions to do the same functions!
Just read your message again, and it's so misinformed that I have to take another go at explaining this to you.
..say a webbrowser in a new window is inappropriate. How would you feel if applets couldn't be embedded into HTML, but ran in their own window? or if images had to have their own window? Or if buttons each had their own window/frame? That's NOT the way to do things.
There is no equivalent in your Windows world because in Windows window system (irony!) is poorly developed, and users need to make shared libraries to do the work that is already done in X by window system and window manager.
Like I've already pointed out, windows has MORE inbuilt ways to IPC than Unix. Your comment about having to use shared libraries to do everything the window system and window manager already does is so absolutely totally wrong. In Windows, you can do everything you describe is done here by X (namely communication with applications, and launching apps(!!!!WTF ofcourse you can do that)). COM is not about doing stuff X does, it's about reusing stuff that a 3rd part (or you have previously) done in a binary way - but dynamically, without relinking code.
Windows offers a way of abstracting access to functions, that are dynamically loaded from DLLs. It's not about having to use DLLs to do work (which is already done), it's about using DLLs to REUSE work already done by someone else in your own project. Adding HTML support to your application by using any webbrowser that implements the IWebBrowser interface forexample. You were totally wrong when you talked about using shared libraries to do already done work. I have to stress that out. It's out REUSING work that has already been done. But it's more than that, it's about being able to have a standard way of naming functions and exporting interfaces to ANY language. That's why COM is supported in so many languages, it's broad and abstract enough to do that. There are many instances where opening up
And that's not all COM is about, OLE is only one implementation of COM. There's the side of COM which is purely about creating reusable 'objects' that are language and cross platform (not in the JVM sense). COM is a simple but exceedingly powerful mechanism that is so ubiqutous on windows now that windows applications are so 'compatible' with each other compared to applications on any other OS.
Your main statements of Windows apps not be able to launch apps, create windows or communicate between applications and having to use DLLs to redo work already done is so absolutely WRONG. I HAVE TO MAKE SURE YOU ARE CLEAR ON THAT. It's something that will be keeping me up at night to know there's someone outthere that is so misinformed.
Adding users remotely is difficult cause user manager isn't part of MMC in NT4 (it is in W2K). And there is no telnet server.
:). That's why I like W2K so much, terminal services ROCK. So fast over a 28.8k connection.
You would need to really find a telnet server and download the windows NT4 resource kit - free version can be found here
That should come with a "shutdown" tool. Incendentally, the windows API to shutdown the machine is ExitWindows and ExitWindowsEx if you're interested
Myths that keep popping up.
IE is in the kernel.
COM is in the kernel.
Office is in the kernel.
Age Of Empires 2 is in the kernel.
NTOS and GUI client are one exe.
NT is actually a fat ActiveX control running inside IE.
See, whenever you can't explain why something microsoft makes is fast and works well, you make excuses. Hey, microsoft shoved it in the kernel! microsoft makes secret calls to MakeThisFast** APIs.
COM is NOT in the kernel. It is part of the Windows Operating system. It is implemented using Win32 APIs. And can be reimplemented by anyone else (I know a 3rd year computer science student who in his project basically rewrote the basics of COM). COM is also not windows specific, it can be implemented on a variety of platforms, using what IPC and various APIs are available (ahh abstraction).
NT is made up of very small components all fitting together to make a huge OS that does a lot of stuff. NT has a kernel, it has drivers, it has cool subsystems (that's how NT can also *be* Unix, and can also *be* OS/2). NT is a very clean nice OS implementation. The GDI (graphics stuff) boots up after the kernel, then the real GUI client (i presume you mean explorer) is just a windows application (you don't even need to &*#@$# use explorer).
I guess you were joking about that last comment about NT being one exe, but with all the stupid comments i've read on this thread, I can never be sure.
Thanks,
I might well do that. I think it'd be better for my health too. The frustration with talking with idiots is getting to me.
You're such an idiot.
What has the fact that X supports windows inside windows got to do with anything I said?
It's like saying that C is useless cause there's already a programming language called ASM.
Try getting a clue.
Windows has had this since Win31 :), but yes, no doubt some other people had this before.
;).
it was called OLE back then.
Evolution of COM.
DDE -> OLE -> COM/DCOM -> OLE2/ActiveX (based on COM) -> COM+
or something like that
Yes it is something unix is struggeling to do still.
Ok,
What should I do access the DOM inside netscape as I would have if I were a javascript inside netscape?
Can I access the netscape DOM and say change the size of a table, or the background colour of a cell dynamically?
COM makes REUSING objects almost as easy as calling a class. What you're suggesting is horrific.
That's a horrible way to do it. That's not what I want at all.
I want to be able to directly access elements on an existing HTML page without resorting to hackery. I want to be able to say access an object that represents an image on the HTML page, and be able to pass that object to another application to manipulate it.
Eseentially COM standardizes everything. Standardises name mangeling (or lack of), and all sorts of mechanisms for accessing data or sharing data of all types.
The kind of thing COM does really well is make OO programming style great. The most important parts of COM is abstraction.
Writing applications as a collection of widgets or objects which expose interfaces with 'callable' methods is just so much better than using some kind of third party protoocl and hack - all different from each other ofcourse.
Like the way I'd be able to control netscape would be different form the way I'd be able to control xemacs. Ofcourse, I was talking about inprocess embedding which is something you can't do with netscape at all.
This is your problem. You never used Unix, so you can't imagine that things like this can be more efficient than masochism used in Windows. That's your loss.
ROFL. Whatever. You're the one who's never programmed in windows, or more than likely haven't really used windows. I have 2 windows boxes and 2 linux boxes here. I'm also a student, at an all Unix University.
[x]emacs is in lisp -- this is why it has more complex interface. However you have guessed wrong again -- while interface is different, running gnuclient with a command line isn't any different from running netscape -remote, except that gnuclient can wait until editing is finished (what makes sense considering the purpose of [x]emacs).
ROFL. That's not what I'm talking about. The interface is different fullstop. Command line? WTF? You're an idiot.
In-process embedding of completely different application is a blasphemy to efficient, secure and reliable software design. Only such a horribly designed system as Windows could require or benefit from such a thing in user-interface programs. Only idiocy of unprotected memory and cooperative multitasking in early versions of Windows could cause that monstrosity to be born.
Again you're so misinformed it makes me cry. Think of COM objects as more abstract C++ classes, C++ classes are OBVIOUISLY inprocess. Like I said, when you do any programming (you've tried that haven't you?) do you write thousands of little executatbles with command line options, or do you write functions and classes?
Just like COM classes, but they can dynamically be loaded at runtime.
COM offers no benefits? Would you listen to yourself. I've tried to avoid this, but I just have to say it. You're an absolute total idiot. COM is about REUSE.
You obviously have not developed any modern large scale applications. Cause what you say is so depressingly STUPID.
I stress again, YOU ARE STUPID.
I'm going to have one last go to actually make you understand things.
When I talk about interfaces, I'm talking about a COM (or CORBA) interface. Eg. A table of functions. Not user interfaces.
- COM is much faster than your command line options and piping stuff into programs. Why? Cause you COM you ARE CALLING THE FUNCTIONS directly (usually). It's not, read from a stream, parse it, process it.
- Your previous mumblings of Windows NOT supporting pipes or any other form of IPC, your suggestion that parsing input is faster than direct function calls (COM), your suggestion that parsing input from the command line is better than COM, and your suggestion that all software components should be out of process (hence, no functions, just make everything small executables with one function - main) are all signs of your unability to understand modern software design.
COM is usually inprocess (though not neccessarily). Why? Cause COM is a natural extension to C++ (and other languages). It allows you to - at runtime - create and call on any objects you might want. This is not the same as running an execuable and parsing output. That is why it is inprocess. Suggesting that windows is 'horribly' designed because component extensions (COM) or plugins (COM) are inprocess is so absolutely fucking stupid.
And only the idiocy of people like you is holding unix back from becoming a successful and modern desktop enviroment, and making it easy to reuse software. People at the GNOME and KDE projects, and modern Linux developers understand this. You do not. Part of the reason COM/CORBA/BONOBO etc was developed was that programmers got sick of reinventing wheels. We don't need 10000 button widgets, and we don't want to write another one *YET* again so you can have a button in your application. TK has some quite nice widgets, QT has some quite nice widgets, and GTK has some quite nice widgets. These widgest however have no commonality. I can't go and use the exact same METHOD/PROCESS to use QT widgets in my application, or use GTK+ widgets in my application or use TK widgests in my application, cause they all use different mechanisms (note how QT and GTK widgets are *SHOCK* inprocess).
Now imagine if all Linux developers agreed that all widgets would be put into shared libraries that export certain functions that allows applications to find out the attributes and behaviours of each of these widgest and call on them - all in the exact same way - all using the exact same function calling procedure.
Then you've got a primitive form of OLE/COM.
Now you can see it's a natural extension from writing C++ classes to draw your widgets, to writing C++ classes to draw your widgest, but putting these classes in a library so others can dynamically load them and use them too.
Then it's another natural step to put these classes in a library, and expose them in a STANDARD way with standard rules for querying available widgest in the library and creating them, and embedding them into your application.
As you can see now, your comments on that inprocess issue is really close minded.
You are a dumbass 24 hours a day.
You don't know anything about interfaces. Complex interface adds waste of resources and security and reliability problems? Uh uh, so what you are saying is that functions are a waste of resources and insecure and unreliable? That's all interfaces are, vtables of function pointers - like C++ virtual functions.
Have you even looked at COM interfaces? They demand more than what existing architectures provide? You haven't been listening at all. You're saying that the ability for an application to embed another application inside it and call that appliation's provided methods thru interfaces is SLOWER than your lovely way of passing commands thru a pipe or stdinput and parsing each 'text' command.
Yeah, sure you understand COM interfaces. Most COM applications use eraly binding, there is very little overhead, and certainly much less than 'conventional' or existing 'embedding' there is (pipes and the such - which isn't really embedding anyway).
I was also surprised at how long it was taking *nix developers to create significant component based applications especially since most of COM (at least originally) was copied from or inspired by CORBA.
No DCOM was inspired by CORBA. COM is quite different from CORBA in many ways, and was inspired by all sorts of technologies that arose from microsoft in the early 90s (VBX etc). Also, you have to remember that many things that developed from COM, but non the less are so important to windows nowdays (like OLE) are not specified in some standard way w.r.t CORBA. Microsoft has also been talking about component models and powerful scripting (ala Office) since the mid 80s.
Thanks for the complement about the text.
...to me anyway :). I think Linux is pretty hackish - especially some of the work that's being done now.
:)~.
:).
:D~~). It's a feature, it's not 'embedded' into the kernel or anything, it's just another service provided by the OS (like console and graphics services - or even like pipes, processes and sockets).
Yes, maybe hack was too harsh a word. Unix has evolved for a long time, but during that time (esp he 80s) it has been fragmented and thrown around a bit that it seems pretty hackish
The remote management capabilities of NT out of the Box is indeed bad. There are 3rd party tools - actually, Microsoft have one called SMS. And Windows 2000 has basically eliminated this flaw with the inclusion of a telnet server, terminal services, new management console and included windows scripting host & engine. I don't think any of these are 'hacks' with the exception of terminal services, which works pretty well for a hack if you ask me
I suggest you have a look at windows scripting. Adding 1000 users with a generated password isn't that difficult once you do. Note that you could 'hack' something up with an old batch file, the "net user" command and a small c program to do the rest.
NT4 does indeed have very ugly tools for user management and OS management as a whole. They were very simplistic. But there are some pretty neat command line tools (net being one), and the resource kit comes with 300 or so other ones (including a unix like adduser).
I reckon NT4 is quite hard to adminster in the enterprise without 3rd party tools, unless you went out and either learnt windows scripting, or went and learnt C++/Win32 programming
However, where NT4 is mostly used (small businesses with less than 100 people) the simple tools are 'good enuff'.
As for ActiveX and COM. ActiveX and COM should be as much a part of Windows as Perl is to Linux (side note - new version of ActivePerl for windows got released on friday with support for SOAP
Security is indeed an issue for COM, but most COM objects aren't registered to be available over the internet (eg. registered as DCOM servers). And security on COM objects by design is very good like the rest of NT. What I mean by this is very fine grain security (more so than Linux). There are definitely problems with this. Complexity of such an 'advanced' security model, and security holes through bugs.
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
No, no and no. The three things that a linux desktop needs are not simplicity, uniformity and elegance but extensibility, extensibility and extensibility. Let me do what I want how I want it. Extensibility is what made emacs the single most useful tool any computer user could want. The two things that linux is crying out for at the moment are an extensible desktop and an extensible browser. They could be the same thing for all I care but let us extend to suit ourselves!
I have to say my predjudices are quite different to yours.
Simplicity - I couldn't agree less. One of the best things about Linux is that it's so configurable. Why shouldn't I choose to have buttons in different places (or no window buttons as in my current settings). I also prefer key commands over menus, launching programs from the terminal or root menu, non-modal dialogs (curse you, Microsoft!). I want to configure my applications so that I can use them well, not how Mr. Gates (or Jobs, or de Icaza) wants me to use them. Simple does not necessarily mean easy to use.
Uniformity - this is in conflict with my comments above. However, I don't see why I can't configure my applications to behave however I want. If people want to use the default controls, thats fine (and they should be able to reset them), but it's probably not how I want to operate. Uniformity of configuration methods would be nice - a Gnome standard on these would be a big plus, as long as it is flexible enough.
Elegance - as an engineer I'm tempted to say it doesn't matter, but I guess it does to some people. Anyhow, it shouldn't be the concern of the GUI designers, as long as it's configurable there are heaps of amateur artists willing to help out (eg. themes.org).
If Gnome takes the easy, ubiquitous, simple road to acceptance it will be missing out on the opportunity to introduce really new concepts. It's good to start with a set goal like replicating currently available desktops, but experimentation and variation is where Gnome can really shine.
One must admit that Microsoft have it going on when it comes to ease-of-use and app consistency. If you want to make Linux easy-to-use, make it work like Windows.
Honestly, no. MSWin has overall superiority over Linux in that area, true, but that is saying more about how poor Linux offerings in that area are than how good MS is at it. MS seems easy to use to most people, but only because most people are used to using it.
If you want to see good GUI design, you should look at Mac (not OS X, the older Macs) or better yet at NeXT. NeXT is ancient history by computer standards now, and they still haven't been equaled.
Still, for gnome to be following MS in some ways is not all bad - particularly since they are concentrating on making work alikes for DDE and OLE and some of the "killer apps" instead of slavishly copying the horrid look and feel of MSWin like another project I sha'n't name.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
You don't have to run the Gnome desktop to run Gnome apps. Gnome is more than just a desktop environment, but an suite of libraries and applications which (hopefully) make a programmer's job easier and tries to enforce some uniformness in user-interfaces. Same with KDE. There is *nothing* stopping anyone from using Gnome apps under KDE or any other WM or desktop.
I do this constantly - using KDE and GNOME apps under WindowMaker, alongside xterms, a wine desktop, and some other X apps (netscape for instance.) I would be happier with a GNUStep version of each of course, but hey, it's free :^)
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
With the recent release of xfree86 4.0, and the proliferation of hardware accelerated 3d, maybe it's time to consider using the opengl api for a GUI system. I'm not talking about some starnge ultra 3d thing, but the opengl API's offer a lot of possibilities that don't exist in QT or GTk. This would give the opportunity to look at GUI's differently.
Many of these methods are for accessibility and speed reasons. Simply having many ways to do something is not inherently bad. Or does this mean that Perl is a bad way to get stuff done?
A good UI should give me several ways to get at things, with a single click for frequently used items, or several clicks through menus etc. for less frequently used items. Windows does this pretty will, IMHO.
Actually you are wrong.
The MacOS UI *WAS* extensivly researched and tested before it was put into use. Things like proportional scrollbars had to be removed because it confused the testers.
The "drag disk to trash to eject it" feature was an indugance of the team, who later corrected it, and had to face the wrath of the users who demanded they go back.
I agree that any GUI that tries to hide the file system organization is doomed to fail. I also agree that most (I haven't used every single one) modern GUIs try and hide or disguise the file system. However, a GUI could work with a hierarchial (?) filesystem by being designed in a way that emphasizes the structure of the filesystem and makes it easier to navigate and use (not having to remember cryptic (to a new user) commands to manage files, etc).
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
You are very correct sir (or madam).
Gnome copied M$FT copied Lotus 123 who copied Visicalc (for spread sheets at least). My Dad (yes another my dad reference, but I'm in my 30's, so this ones a little different from the norm) bought an Apple IIe around 1980 just because it had spreadsheets (thanks Visicalc). As it happens, that computer saved his company, the spreadsheet cashflows and optimistic predictions convinced the bank to loan more and even when I found a buyer for the Apple IIe (offer of $500 in 1988) he said he would never sell it because it saved the company (and my parents house). Talk about a killer app.
I say that all aplications can be copied, you just cant copy the source code without following liscenceing protocols. Reverse engineering is an entrenched software maneuver.
no sig.
As far as M$FT owning scrollbars, these were part of the origional Macintosh (public disclosure) and Xerox Parc had them before that. Prior art I would say. Drop down and expand....I dont know.
no sig.
Well folks I've just read all the way through again, and I'd like to comment on a whole bunch of the themes.
/. I get peeved. Some points:
/. need to discuss more on what the future should be. Being organized generates strength.
MS vs Linux.
This is a big messy subject, and every time it gets mentioned on
1. Every OS has some deficiencies - yes even Linux.
2. Every OS has some excellent areas - yes Windows does.
3. Interface is a religious issue - your preference depends on your level of expertise, your first OS experience, the number of OSes you've worked with, your graphic-aethetic quotient, the apps you want to use, your character, and the colour of your dog. There is little point to a this-is-better-than-that discussion unless you point at specific features of the OS and say why you think that this feature makes the OS better or worse, by comparing and contrasting with others. Knee-jerk facist zealot reaction from any sides of the divides wastes our time and saps patience.
Character assassination
It seems to me that if you don't like an OS/UI/App/whatever, then criticize it on the grounds that you can defend. The KDE, Gnome, Windows, MacOS, etc guys are doing excellent and valuable work. Criticizing the personalities involved does absolutely nothing to move debate forward.
UI design
UI design is hard. Quite possibly it is harder than program design. I know - I've done both. To get the UI right is an impossible task; you have widely divergent groups thying to use the same software. New and occasional users want simplicity, and frequent users want depth and control. It's a tight balancing act that very very few developers get right. It is much much easier to copy an existing product and improve on it than to develop something completely new. Like any art there are very few fundemental changes in reference point and lots and lots of building on the work of others. So KDE has elements of Windows. What's the problem? Depending on whether they satisfy the needs of their constintuency (like any other peice of software) KDE will survive or not. Similarly Gnome. If you think you can do better get down and do it rather than whining.
Split in the Desktop
I think that this is a very serious issue. Diversity is only a strength when it can be catered for. When the diversity means that as a developer you have to support one or other platform there's a problem. This is one of the *good* things abut the Windows platform - it is relatively easy to support an application that runs on a variety of Windows platforms because the API's (in the sense of the actual calls you make to the OS) are close enough across platforms that there is often/usually not a huge amount of work to be done in order to port. At the moment writing an app that will run on KDE and Gnome is not easy. To avoid a split that becomes a problem either one of these has to die, or they have to converge. Too soon to say what will happen - watch this space in three years time.
MS vs Linux part II
I think it is incredibly dangerous to define yourself as being in opposition to another tradition. Anyone who defines Linux as notWindows is doing us a disservice. If Linux is to succeed on any larger scale than hobbyist/hardcore users then it needs more of a philosophy than this. I see the philosphy of freedom as a very very powerful one. But this is not to say that it is freedom from Windows - it is the freedom to change what you want to change. Never forget that there are other OSes that do not allow you to change Window Managers. Also remember that these OSes are currently a *LOT* more successful than Linux if you define success as the number of computers that run the OS.
Change
For a change, Linux is at a split in the road. From this point it can either grow, or die (or stay static, but I class this as death). Problem: where does it grow into? Well it could become a server OS - you don't see Netware on the desktop that often do you? It could grow into the Unix of choice, and then stop growing. (Let's face it the command line is not going to conquer the world.) Or it could expand into the desktop market. (Or it could stay as the kit-car OS, but I hope not since this is the static future.) Factions exist that support each of these futures - it's not clear which will win out because it depends on many external factors, as well as internal ones. I really feel that
I like windows because they give me options. If my hand is already on the mouse, I like the right-corner "X". If my office toolbar occludes that corner (because ICQ stole space from my desktop AFTER logging in) I double-click on the logo box in the left corner. If I'm not already on the mouse, I use alt-F4. Though I seldom use them, I'm offended if alt-space (alt-hyphen for a subwindow)-Close or alt-File {close or exit} don't work.If the software can adapt to the user, you keep more users happy. The non-MS world wonders why more users are happy in MS, but then talk about forcing the user to do it in a limited number of ways.
I agree that there are UI issues with allowing my toolbar application to occlude my "current-window" controls. Taking those controls away would not be the answer.
Uniformity OK, I agree with this one. Is it too late? I like the look of Gnome, but have never used it more than a half hour or so at demos. The rest of the world seems to like KDE better, perhaps because of its year head start (?). Other friends seem to use their programs as direct clients of the window manager without a desktop layer (I'm out of my depth here. Please correct gently rather than flames if I've misinterpreted).
Elegance I can't define elegance either, but I know what I like. I *SAY* that I don't put much stake in sizzle rather than the steak, but it's largely the "feel" of the desktop that makes gnome look better to me than KDE in the demos.
The main thrust of this message was my objection to the point about reducing user's choices in how to do simple things. Rate it up or down on that paragraph.
One point I wanted to address is this one. It is a very valid point and a few reasons I see behind it. Pretty much you can make a GTK app look like a QT app. I know people can point out some glaring exceptions to this, but if one wanted to, it could easily be done(assuming the user would use themes that looked reasonably alike). Part of the problem is that people are using lots of different development tools. GNOME apps use GLADE to develop their user interface(well at least some developers use it) and KDE has Kdevelop. In windows there is pretty much a defacto development environment. The Visual suite. Pretty much using it you can put out consistant apps that work together. If you wanted to you could get arround it but pretty much the standard tools have helped the Windows world have their consistant apps. I don't know if this is achievable in the Linux world becuase if a tool was made that could work with any library and language I doubt that a majority of people would use it because everyone has their own favorite development tool. Some vi, some emacs while others use some of the GUI tools that are out there. Everyone is on different sides of a hexagonal fence that consistancy will most likely be a pipe dream. Is this a bad thing? For geeks, no. For people who want an easy to use solution probably. For good or ill this will probably be the reason why MS will stay in power of the desktop or a company like them.
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
I would just like to point out sometimes there is a reason for flamage. I getting sick of this whole slashdot close-minded bullshit, karma-whore sucking people.
Ok, GNU has cloned UNIX products since the begining of time, Microsoft and Apple have cloned X-features a while back, and now we're borrowing UI detail from Microsoft. Is this news?
However, you can not deny that M$ interface is (almost) entirely and (almost) consistently keyboard-only navigable, a very cool (and useful for programmers) feature (Ctrl-Esc, Up, Enter, Enter). You can always use a single Tab to navigate through *any* dialog. And I am still waiting for an X file manager with keyboard collapsible - expandable tree views. I understand that some hours of customization and configuration file editing you can achieve the same behavior with any descent window manager, but I have always been too lazy to do it :-(
If you're typing in vim, you can use Shift-V to go into Visual Line mode, and select stuff to copy. There are also key combos for block select, etc. but that's the one I use the most.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Does this mean I can stop pretending to be nice ?
I can say things like: "FreeBSD will suck until it's POSIX compatible."
Or "Gnome Sux because by default a newly opened app is not the active window"
Hey this is fun !
Perhaps we should post a story with no content just so we can have a day of fun trying to out-troll each-other !
"Semper in excretum set alta variant"
I've always thought that gnome was evil...this seems to prove it. Gnome is the spawn of a satanic microsoft cult that strives to drive up the cost of RAM so they can make larger, more memory inneffecient window managers, thusly lining their pockets by secretly becoming shareholders in tiwanese RAM manufacturers. You don't believe me? Friday i just signed the papers on a second mortgage so i could buy enought RAM to run Gnome and Star Office together.
We all know those who run Enlightenment are the children of god...and one day we will return to the holy land to run the Cyrus and BlueSteel themes in harmony. With 64Meg of God's own RAM.
Seek ye a window manager that is efficient and useth not much memory. Be not a simple Black Box user, nay, but turn not to the vice and greed of the tempestuous KDE! Instead, findeth yourself a blessed WM, and you shall call it "E". Amen!
-From the book of Torvalds 3:18
-FluX
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Your Ad Here!
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"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
App consistency? Not sure about that!
Excel is the main offender - there's bits of it which are different from everything else. For starters, Ctrl + left/right cursor doesn't do the word-skipping which everyone's used to, which is confusing. And it's missing some basic table-editing features - I have actually been known to copy a spreadsheet into Word, use Word's table facilities, and then copy it back, simply bcos Excel isn't as good as Word at handling tables!
Grab.
Well I dont know how many /.ers where at this party that IBM held at the Atlas Bar and Grill her in Boston, nor how many stayed to listen to him speak.
I was there, and I did ask a question (how does your apps comair to StarOffice? Ans: Ours are Free with the source, their is more akin to free beer).
From that I gathered from his speech was that he was (1) gathering the best ideas from other OSes and added those features into GNOME, and that (2) Easel (?) will be taking over the desktop fuctions. Easel, for those who don't know is a company founded by a bunch of the orginal MAC OS designers, which is a very good thing - a real team of experts who understand the Human Interface just about better than anyone else. (Side: I do wish that IBM would port OS/2 Work Place Shell to Linux - old favs die hard).
As for the demo? Rather neat, but nothing that anyone who has been around hasn't seen before (OpenDoc, OLE, COM).
Inspiration comes from many places, and a good idea is still a good idea (even if it is excuted half asses).
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
This whole issue was partially brought about by Gnome Office and its similiarities to MS. What people are comfortable with is what people have used....which in most cases is MS Windows and Office. Office and Windows have created what we now see as standards to what the proper Aplications should be...and where the buttons should be...everything down to the shortcut keys. Any coincidence that Starwriter's default shortcut keys are almost identical to MS Office...similiar to the fact the shortcuts for IE were made practically identical to that of Netscape.
This raises this question for me...Does the Linux community need to come up with more unique packages that develops themselves as the precedents for others? Are we stuck labeling everything as a functional free copy of a Windows program until then? That seems to be the trend.
Just looking in the last day...he posted one article at 1:22 AM and the next morning one at 8:42 AM Thats more than 8 hrs of possible sleep time...I wish I had that. don't you look at /. every night right before you go to sleep and every morning before you take a piss? ;-)
They start acting like they are supposed to. Seriously, why does ever gtk program have to be gnome only. I use gnome only because of some of their stuff. If I had more time I would remove most of the dependancies on gnome and go windowmaker only.
and that is my rant.
I for one, am using WindowMaker and prefer it A LOT over either KDE(2), Gnome and especially Ms Windows. The thing I particularly like about it, is that it is NOT anything like Windows. That's exactly the reason why I don't like KDE. It's just another copy of the same shit I've been using for years.
What's more important. Calming the masses, or making the truth heard? Let's censor the radicals, keep the populace under control. Sounds like a plan, Orwell!
-Tim
Of course all you said in this thread is correct and to the point. And yes COM/DCOM is a great implemantion of object technology that is much more suited to desktop development than anything that *nix has achieved so far (and that includes Corba).
I had a dubious pleasure to implement a class that talks to IE on Windows and to Netscrap 4 on *nix platforms. The IE bit is about 40 lines to implement the class whereas the Netscape one is well over 600! And all it does is opens a browser and sends it a URL and tells it which frame to use. The Windows implementation is inherently more robust because of the simpler, more standard way of doing things.
However, slashdot is not a place for reasonable technical discussion anymore. It's a gathering of zealots and trolls who won't listen to sensible arguments because they never had a need to talk to a web browser from their own code. Why not? Because they never wrote a single line of code and hence they know fuck all about programming.
So my plea to you TummyX is to go away and post your comments on a forum that still has developers on it not just bored high school kids. Let this forum live in its own well misinformed hype driven little world.
Damn straight. Ever wonder why Kfind is a complete replica of Find on MS? Didn't MS's "find" win an award at the Hall of Shame?
if you want to attract attention, don't resemble anything conventional
in other words, if the linux realm wishes to attract mister average joe with a GUI, the folks at Gnome, KDE, etc, should think up something as useful as the old (MacOS, Windows Explorer) but looks a helluvalot cooler and "cutting edge."
then we can run nice ads that show the world how pretty and different linux is...with an intelligent slogan like "think differently"...
read something here a while back about a 3d Xwindows environment...that will do nicely (add boisterous, spooky laugh here:)
seriously, if linux wants average users and not just serious business types, developers need more eye candy-- just look at windows 2K-- everyone loves the stupid fading drop down menus. instead of regurgitating a GUI that's been around in various reincarnations for over 10 yrs, lets push something new
"ooh, I got you all wet..." "yes, but my martini's still dry."
Are you kidding? M$ changes the windows look constantly. Let's go over it :
3D The 3D effects have changed constantly, from the original 95 always more flatter(especially in the toolbars and menu's). The latest incarnations look more like bas-relief then buttons.
Start The placement of items within the start menu has changed with every bug patch. Items have risen and fallen. The taskbar itself has changed functionality more than once, with, for example, the addition of those little buttons next to your start button to launch everything you never wanted to launch that way.
Menu functionality The latest menu's are even viruslike, really spooky. Every time you look at them something has changed in them. I'd like to punch the guy who invented that in the nose. It's easier to find a needle in a haystack then to find the ever-shifting menu items in the latest incarnation of Office.
And to make it worse, whenver they decide to change standards, and release documents stating that, they never stick to what they say themselves. Toolbars are the major example of this. M$ has never, ever, made their toolbars as their own UI docs prescribed. And they've also never made two subsequent releases of an application with the same inherent toolbar design.
IMHO, m$ need to standardize at least as much in the UI field as *nix.
I always feel ill when I hear the phrase "Limit user options", but then I have to remind myself we're not talking about long time Unix users, or people that are using Unix for its features and benefits. The target audience for the much ballyhood Linux Desktop is, for all intents and purposes, converts from MacOS and Windows. This is certainly an interesting challenge, and probably a good goal for the community. But I hope it doesn't become a primary goal. IMHO, there is more to life than catering to the end users. After all, it's been done, and done again. A more interesting challenge is interoperating with those systems. Samba and Wine for example. Projects that, rather than replace or extend user environments, work to make what environment you use less important.
And to quickly address the Gnome/Enlightenment dig.. Those two were never a good mix, and the story behind why RedHat brought them together is a long one that doesn't really belong here. The short story is making E the Gnome window manager was misguided, because a desktop environment needs a minimalistic window manager like KWin or Sawmill.
I hardly think sacrifice is necessary. Both desktops have a lot of great ideas, and both desktops have their share of bad ideas. I don't think a convergance of desktops is necessary, simply the ability to use pieces of both transparently, or at least without much effort. Then let the user decide which is more intuitive to him or her.
Interesting.. I certainly agree. Windows desktops are simply unsightly. Can't stand them. I actually get a headache after using Windows for too long (It's been suggested this is due to a poor refresh rate setting, but I'd rather believe it's Windows' fault
Not a waste of time if you want to add webbrowser capabilities to your application without writing your own. Not if you want to add a video clip into your powerpoint application.
JUST RUN IT IN THE WINDOW.
In X you can just make a window and run some program in it, talking with that program through pipes, or not talking with it at all. This is how gv and ghostview run ghostscript, this is how plugger runs shitloads of players, and this is how gnome panel (or fvwm panel, or a lot of other panels) runs applications. There is no equivalent in your Windows world because in Windows window system (irony!) is poorly developed, and users need to make shared libraries to do the work that is already done in X by window system and window manager.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Run it in a Window? WTF? Controls DO HAVE THEIR OWN WINDOW. But the window is embedded in another window as a control (or widget for unix guys).
TummyX, you don't know what I am talking about because you never seen a window manager, or plugger, or probably any other unix application. I don't think, you are intelligent enough to understand what I will explain in the following sentences, so please stop reading. For everyone else who still thinks that TummyX said something about Unix programs that is not false, explanation:
In X windows can be anywhere, even inside other windows, but a lot of applications also can be run in existing windows, being managed by other applications instead of window managers. Windows IDs are global for X servers, and have nothing to do with process contexts -- if some program wants to do everything in some window, that window is inside a window that belongs to another program, and X security does not prevent the access to the display, it just happens. This is how ghostview and gv work. If a process insists on creating its own window, other application can "capture" the window after it's created and put it inside another window that was created just to keep it there. This is how and a shitload of "panel-type" applications work. For this trivial goal there is absolutely no need to invade the context of one application with another, if the goal is just to "embed" one window in another. It was done so often and so easily, no other solution ever was necessary -- and for the slowest readers I repeat again: placing one window into another and running another program in it is NOT AN APPLICATION OF ANY OBJECT MODEL, EVEN THOUGH IT'S POSSIBLE TO MAKE A SYSTEM THAT WILL DEMAND AN "OBJECT MODEL" FOR IT. There are other, completely different cases where object models and OO interfaces are applicable, but they are much more complex, and in most of cases far beyond TummyX's level of intellect.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Creating a new language with different syntax every time you need a configuration file, or something as pithy verges on being ridiculous. And what better way of documenting a file spec, than listing (or referencing) its DTD ? XML is not let lex/yacc, and for many situations, I think (at least) it is a superior solution (in terms of allowing the programmer to do real work, not write another config parser).
DTD contains information that is already known to the programmer if he is implementing something using that model, so it's redundant for all purposes except validity checking (what is a pointless exercise in itself because no one guarantees that the data is correct after that). If XML solved a real problem -- how to describe semantics of the data as well as the structure -- it would be very valuable, but since it doesn't, in the end it's still the same programmer writing code that implements semantics. Same job minus a tiny, microscopic piece of it that non-XML programmer will spend on trivial operation of describing a structure -- however after describing a structure non-XML programmer immediately can add semantics-dependent code to his parser (and the result will be distributable and portable, as it will contain both syntax and base semantics) while XML programmer will write separate semantics-dependent code and attach it to a standard XML parser (what most likely will be too coupled with application logic and therefore won't be distributable). Same effort, more encouragements to pollute the code.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Keep it up! We've needed somebody to fill sengan's shoes for a while. I'm not sure why he posted so often so late, but it was cool to see tech news posted at midnight. Sorta like a bowl of Captain Crunch before you hit the sack (with ice cold milk--yum.)
This worries me.
I don't usually care much for the distributions fork, the BSD/Linux fork or other forks in the OSS world, but I think the GNOME/KDE one is different, it is extremely harmful. Different GNU/Linux distributions are based on the same code; BSD and Linux share the same design down to the details; but GNOME and KDE do not necesseraly even have the same paradigms. Interoperability and compatibility do not end in the toolkit level -- we see them now with the desktops' API, for example, and we will soon see them with Office suit file formats and protocols. Each day that passes adds more layers of incompatibility into the world, and the split is widening in spite of all the good efforts.
In a normal OSS world the two DE's would agree on a single design direction, or one of them would be willingly be merged into the other, but this is not pure OSS development: GNOME is funded heavily by Red Hat, and KDE by Mandrake/Corel, for example, and commercial interests are involved too. I don't mean by this that KDE/GNOME developers are more concerned with the interests of their sponsors than the community's; it's just that when your project is funded so heavily into developing all the cool stuff you always wanted, you'd be even less inclined than usual to abondon your project and help the other guy's work, for the sake of compatibility and interoperability.
I really hope I'm wrong here.
IMHO, Gnome would be better off 'lifting' ideas from OS/2 instead of Microsoft. The day I can right-click on a shortcut (shadow :)) and pull up the settings of the actual program and not the shortcut, set each window individually, and have links that know where you moved a program, I'll be a happy man
.
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
I'm using the Enlightenment that comes with Red Hat 6.1, and I think it's the best Linux user interface by far. The Enlightenment folks know how to make things pretty, and usability isn't half bad. True, I still prefer the sleekness of my SGI box, but the Linux desktop has come a long way, and I'm no longer embarassed to show it to my friends. Now I tell them, "Look how cool this looks on my new 1280x1024 ThinkPad(tm)!"
Certainly it's far more elegant than KDE, which strikes me as "more Windows than Windows". I appreciate the effort that went into KDE, but its slavish imitation of Windows scares me.
I suspect that those who prefer KDE do so mainly because it's been around longer, and early versions of Gnome were horribly crashy. The Gnome I'm using now seems pretty stable - it's still not as rock-solid as KDE, but it's not half bad, and you can usually recover from problems without rebooting.
D
----
I don't think UNIX folks will ever be weened from a command line interface. I know I feel somehow constrained if I can't start typing in commands. It just allows so much more expression and power than a GUI ever could.
That said however I know there are sometimes that a GUI is more convenient, especially when just learning an app. I know many people start out in AutoCAD using the buttons & menus but then move to the command line as they become more familiar with it.
Until GNOME & KDE apps are completely decoupled from their interface and allow plugging in scheme or perl to control them I won't be satisfied.
One interesting thing is several groups attempting to apply XML to UNIX. Somehow I am intrigued by an app that combines Bash with Windows Explorer
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
There's also other key features of COM which make building HUGE operating systems like Windows 2000 and Office possible.
:-)
This isn't a flame, but frankly I'd rather go slowly, get it right, and NOT wind up with a huge operating system like Windows 200. ***But Still*** have all the functionality. In fact, have more functionality, and more reliable by virtue of being built on a more solid, tighter base.
For me, this means one thing: build it on XML. Toss both COM *and* CORBA: both of these are first-attempt kinds of thingies. One suffers from various kinds of tumours and the other suffers from terminal bloat. Time to back up, do it over and do it right. Gnome ppl: listen up - CORBA just isn't appropriate for client-based componentization. KDE ppl: listen up too - kparts is an ok concept and DCOP is a more lightweight transport than IIOP (*grunt* *groan*) but XML-based interface definition and XML-based interapp communication is going to make both of them obsolete. What that means is... be prepared to rewrite the component/interapp layer yet again for KDE 3.
Sometimes it takes a few tries, but when you get it right, it's right. COM isn't right. Neither is CORBA. When something in an OS is not right, you're morally bound to toss it (really). XML is (((probably right))) so let's get some prototypes happening, um, yesterday.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
This should NOT be a suprise to anyone who read the Halloween documents.
There's nothing wrong with copying the best features of commercial software into a free (beer/speech) product. If you've actually bothered to read the story on ibm's site, it only quotes Miguel de Icaza saying that he simply copied Excel's best features, when he wrote gnumeric.
Microsoft itself has commented (in the aforementioned halloween docs) how open source projects tend to copy the best features of commercial products. This is not news.
--
The problem is that we are trying to hide the complexity ("you the user are too stupid to learn so we won't ever give you the chance to"), where instead we should be making the parts more clear.
The GUI could be made to be a MAP, designed from the point of viewof a traveller arriving in a big, foreign city.
The first thing a traveller does is buy a map. We should make the GUI like a map... you can see the major features at a glance, and find where to go. And it should be a fully detailed map -- maps can be very big and complex, and still make sence!
GUI has been a misleading term which has steered our thinking in one direction, ie. that little coloured buttons means 'graphical'. Think instead of MUI or "Mapping UI", which, like all maps, uses graphics to give you a good general picture with clear and easily identifyable detail.
Maps are drawn at different scales, showing continents, countries, cities, streets, and individual buildings... do we not find similar hierarchies in computing? For example, one difficulty with CLI is that boot scripts, device driver source code files, theme files and the Gimp are all just files on the disk. There is no sence of depth.. not idea that you, as a beginner, will not be interested in init scripts, and no idea what they are when you do want to know.
But windows IS UNIX. At leats with cygwin (It is UNIX certified, and it is GPLed).
SysV-init for NT. The dream for an admin.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
Of course, it goes almost without saying that even better than designing an office suite with an improved UI is something better than an office suite, period. I only lament that, if a radical new system not unlike Cyberdog were to be developed within the bazaar of the free-software world, it would take years-- perhaps decades-- for it to reach mainstream use. Hence the dilemma.
." ;-)
Regarding Tog or Nielson's help: All I intended to suggest in the way of assistance was minimal commentary, probably critiques on proposed interface designs. Of course it's assumed that whoever is doing the bulk of such designs will be well read up on the literature of the field. (So that way, the UI gurus can't just say, "All this is covered in my book . .
It's all a matter of perspective. Just imagine: the coders writing these new interfaces are probably going to be using Emacs. And of course it works fine for them, but . . . you can see how there's a wee bit of a disconnect there as far as UI design paradigms are concerned. And that's why some sage words of advice from someone outside the coding trenches (and that covers most of "the community") would be invaluable.
Additionally, the Cyberdog tale really pointed out: it would be very helpful to the development of Gnome/KDE for the top architects to actually see some of the state-of-the-art technologies out there. I mean, half the features in Gnumeric are there because Miguel happened to have a copy of Windows and Excel. If he were to have a Macintosh running Cyberdog, or a PC running OS/2, or whatever, is there any reason to believe some of the good ideas in those systems would not find their way into Gnome?
iSKUNK!
but I haven't seen much UI innovation recently
That's because you didn't go look for it.
Morphic
Native Oberon
Bricks
Merlin
Photon
There's more...
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
You're right to say that no GUI will solve the lack of an appropriate computing paradigm. You're wrong to say that it hasn't been invented yet. It has - look at Squeak, Native Oberon, Self, and many other computing systems (yes, even those that have been traditionally shunned by engineers as "mere research projects"). In particular, look at the Review subproject of Tunes. There's a lot of new stuff out there, and much of it is great. Just because it's not mainstream doesn't mean it's not better. (Just look at Lisp...)
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
But there's one thing that I would like to comment, you said:
I have two problems with this sentence. First, I don't think unix was a hack, it cleary was not designed for solving the same problems as win32. There are many things which are more hackish in nt than in unix, mostly the bluring between kernel-level, UI-level and "server"-level (IIS etc.).
The remote managment capabilites of nt-servers are _bad_ and everything microsoft has done to ease that situation was very hackish IMO. And from my experience the urge to have good benchmarks seems to have negativly affected the stability of the whole system.
In my opinion a server should have a cli which is capable of configuring the whole server, so I am able to manage it remotly through a slow link and to ease automating of tasks. For example adding 1000 users with a generated password in nt seems to need more skills than in unix/linux, at least I didn't find a way to do it. I believe it's possible, but the way to achieve this is highly non-intuive IMO.
And there's my second point, more fundamental.
Things like ActiveX, COM etc. shouldn't be seen as part of the OS. They should be OS-independant (yeah, nice dream). It also seems to have a very negative impact on the overall security if this very complicated and code intensive infrastructure is tied to every service reachable through the internet. Take a look at bugtraq/nt-bugtraq for the exploits which habe emerged in the last months (rain forest puppies posts are very informative).
(evil being subjective to my own libetarian views) Just because someone is evil doesn't mean that they can not make a good concept. Microsoft is one way of looking at it, but then again so is AT&T - anyone remember Bell? Microsoft did make Excel a standard... whooptie. To say that the entire gnome project will go the same way is quite extensive Microsoft may have good ideas, eg the libraries for IE and cross compatability makes it easier to deploy desktop shit on the win platform. Miguel de Icaza has made such a thing possible on the Linux/X11 platform. Unfortunately this never could happen under *nix because old proprietary sets of libs were just a pain, and expensive. Anyone remember motif? Microsoft has a good idea, shitty implementation (what else is new) - but this is not a new concept. Dynamically linked libraries have been around since *thinks* I can't even remember when. Don't worry, GNOME is still fighting for 'good' in the 'good vs. evil' battle.
One must admit that Microsoft have it going on when it comes to ease-of-use and app consistency. If you want to make Linux easy-to-use, make it work like Windows.
I recently installed Corel Linux on my desktop computer at work. What a charm to work with! I was raised on Slackware back in 1996 and have been using Slack and RH ever since, so just clicking on Windows Network and seeing all my servers in the point-and-click-and-poof-its-mounted interface was a relief. But all that ease-of-use comes at a price: the computer it runs on only (!!) has 32MB, and Corel makes it swap _a lot_. Just opening a telnet window and using Netscape seems painful.
Windows has an outstanding app consistency too. Always CTRL+C to copy and CTRL+V to paste. Thats just an example, but it's more than I can say for Linux.
Now if only M$ could design an easy-to-use, consistent web site. Have you browsed their website lately? Very difficult finding stuff in there!
***How long till GNOME or another open-source desktop is the recognized leader?***
***Um.. until they start being original (and good as well). If you think about it, Gnome is copied from MS is copied from Apple is copied from Xerox... each company has just added a little piece, and many of those pieces were crap****
Hmmmmm... Ths one always puzzles me... lets see.. when will Ford be recognized as a leader in the automotive industry.. when they start building something original...yeah... that old stodgy way of building cars with 4 tires and an engine in the front has to go... they need to build cars with big ballons as tires and put the engine on the roof...then invert the seats...yeah...that'll rock...
Maybe some ideas are just plain sound enough that it's okay to use them..sure you can always IMPROVE them... but why does something have to be original for it to be good... heck.. Linux is a Unix clone for petes sake.. nothing original there.. (I'm not talking about the development process... just the OS)
I would ask everyone who claims that we need something original to feel free to expound, in detail, with their ideas. It's easy to throw around these statements, how about backing them up with concrete ideas.
I have friends that have been hired by MSFT and they've described the component based architecture and the reasoning behind COM, COM+ and DCOM, and it was rather interesting. I was also surprised at how long it was taking *nix developers to create significant component based applications especially since most of COM (at least originally) was copied from or inspired by CORBA. Pity that COM predates CORBA by at least a year then... COM = OLE, or didn't you know that? Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
"It is almost complete," said the dark figure in his leather office chair.
"Soon those open source fanatics will be drawn to GNOME, and we will control them, just like we control the masses, this open source thing will cease, and once again Microsoft, in all its closed source glory, will rule the world! MUHAHAHA!"
The Balmer clenched his fist and gnashed his teeth as he thought about invading the open source community. Breaking them down and making them use Microsoft sanctioned software and user interfaces, this Linux thing was getting to be bad for business and it had to be stopped, quickly.
"With Miguel de Icaza safely under our control from that thought research project we did a while back and having him copy Microsoft style interfaces, we can begin expanding the project to other leaders in the open source community."
"Sir," one of the millitarily dressed officers spoke up, "we have confirmed Linus Torvalds is also under our control, getting him to work for a proprietary company was the test, and it was successful."
"Soon, RMS will have quite a change of philosophy and that General Public License will become the Microsoft Public License," The Balmer continued "ESR's Geeks with Guns will mysteriously transform into Wierdos with Windows, there will be no stopping us!"
Will Microsoft rule the world? More importantly what will happen to RMS's singing career? Tune in tomorrow, same world domination time, same world domination channel!
-- iCEBaLM
You're right, but these are really just niggling application-specific things. All in all, the Windows interface is pretty straightforward. As far as WIMP (Window Icon Mouse Pointer), you "ain't" going to get anything really novel. Sure, shuffle around icons and textual labels...but it's still all WIMP, whether it's Microsoft doing it or GNOME. Actually, I think that the start menu and taskbar were designed somewhat cluefully. The edges of the screen are visual hotspots that are very easy to navigate to. What would you suggest instead of a start menu? Launch folder with icons or something? That was Program Manager in 3.1. There really isn't going to be any novel in WIMP. It's been pretty much explored to death.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I bring this up with miguel every chance I get. Their "inspiration" from MS is one of the reasons why I stay away from gnome when I can. It would be really cool if a group of people who KNEW about good UI design could get together and do something original. I would be happy to help with both programming and design.
All day every day.
I used KDE as my promary environment during early 1999, becuase it gave very convenient access to applications, although WM would have done a very similar job.
Recently I have switched to Gnome for both my home and work machines, mainly for the ability to swallow a graphical pager and task list on the panel. I didn't have the real-estate for KDE's separate task list. A pop-up task list on the desktop is not bad, but I don't find it quite as convenient.
Of course give me a machine with only 16 or 32M RAM and I'll be back to WM straight away. Both the others really need 48, or the paging gets annoying.
I subscribe to the Gtk mailing list Redhat provides and I've overheard a large number of conversations to the effect of... if Swing (part of java 1.2) has a certain widget or feel Gtk will soon follow suit. It is my impression that Gtk authors seem to hold Java in very high regard. I'm not sure if this is because Java is OO or the GUI is clean/nice. Gtk GUIs may be like Windows, but they really want to be like Java/Swing.
I think it's great he posts some articles late at night. For those of us who work night shifts, or fro the overwhelming % of the planets population for whom it is not late at night.
But then it's not new !!
Shortly after going managerial for a large company, I recieved the product release schedule. Not believing my eyes, I asked my supervisor, the lead engineer, when I was supposed to sleep. He looked at me, and with a perfectly straight face, said "What, you were lucky enough to get sleep in your job description? I had to fight for over a year to get bathroom privledges! Davis, the guy with the huge pile of half empty Mountain Dew bottles in his cube, has been whizzing in his empties during compile cycles for a month! You don't even want to know why his filing cabinet is sealed with duct tape.'
.sig: Now legally binding!
I think the truth is that Windows was designed for the desktop, and Unix was designed for servers (and cli clients). Pain results when people try to cross the line, that is windows as server, and unix as gui client.
;-)
However, I'm not saying that unix can't be good on the desktop. The kernels (Linux, *BSD, solaris etc.) are a strong foundation, and it is certainly very highly possible to build a nice, functional, well-performing GUI on top of a Unix kernel. Some of the low-level graphics work might have to be done in the kernel, but it should be optional! I don't think a GUI belongs on a server. There is nothing wrong with graphical server management (like NT), but the gui should be on a client.
This is win2k's problem - it tries to combine server OS and GUI client, not just in one codebase, but in one executable (correct me if I'm wrong... are the Enterprise Server executables different, or is it just config, like in NT4?).
I have no problem with things like COM (support for it) in the kernel of the client, if it needs to be there to improve performance, and the kernel parts are kept simple enough to be kept bug-free (ha!).
Unix is not a hack, it is a good design. But most current Unix GUIs are Uglyhacks(tm). Windows is not a hack, it is a good design. But using it as a server is an Uglyhack(tm). (Maybe it could work as well, if they used some more BSD code.
dufke
PS. To the guys preparing to flame me for saying Windows is good: Drop it. You will only prove that your mind is as closed as your source is open. DS.
-
__
Comment submitted. There will be a delay before you understand what you posted.
I think we're all firmly entrenched in the Windows paradigm. We're in a 10 year rut. There may be a better method of working sitting right under our noses and no one will spot it because they're blinded by the windows.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Um.. until they start being original (and good as well). If you think about it, Gnome is copied from MS is copied from Apple is copied from Xerox... each company has just added a little piece, and many of those pieces were crap.
The GNOME desktop is great, but it seems when it is finished we will just have windows running on a more stable platform - with a couple of extra bits (I'll have to try Nautilus before passing final judgement, however).
IMHO, they really need to put some originality and creativity into the project. Some of the Linux apps out there spring to mind - LyX and Screem are the only ones I can think of at the moment.
I guess they're still trying to make Gnome a stable base at the moment. I would really like to see it turn into the hacker's GUI - configurable and extensible, but easy to use. Things like the integration of all the powerful Unix file utilities would be nice, it's a shame to have such powerful tools but have to be a hacker to use them.
OTOH, Gnome may not wish to be the "recognised leader" (and all the configurability and power in the world may not put it there). After all, a bunch of hackers is writing Gnome, any original bits are probably going to be good for them - but not necessarily for the average user. How does the Gnome team define good? Easy to learn? Easy to use? Flexible and powerful? Do they care if it's the most popular? Or if it works well?
I know which I'd prefer.
...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
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Linux promotes diversity due to its open-sourcedness. There is not and ought not to be any "standard desktop" system but, rather, a standard desktop protocol whereby any desktop system my interoperate with another. Also, to anybody who should complain about GNOME offering tools too similar to Microsoft's: what is the problem with copying features? Linux copied many of the features of UNIX, CORRECT?. All creative and new (or old) ideas are based on even older ones. Is "Computer" another word for super-calculator? of course not -- a computer can do more. I encourage such projects to do more not only by copying but adding their own unique features -- of which others may copy from. If we did not copy there would be many non-standard protocols. I certainly subscribe to the idea that if something works -- leave it; if something doesn't work -- fix it up yourself: something open source licenses promote.
To me, the whole point of GNU/Linux is that it is basically the same as all of the commercial options. It's just that we get to change stuff if we want to and that it's cheaper to obtain.
Will GNU/Linux ever come out with stuff that's different from that of it's competitors?
Maybe.
Will it copy stuff from it's competitors?
Yes.
It's easier/cheaper to let someone else design something and then design a product that works just like it. That's why PCs are so popular (and everywhere - you don't even call them IBM Clones anymore..just PCs). IBM designed an architecture and then there were copies made of it.
Welcome to Slashdot. Please do not feed the trolls.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
Hey, now that's a cool idea! To some extent, the organisation of directories creates a sense of depth (i.e. config scripts are in /etc, so if you're a beginner, you don't go there) However, that sense of depth tends to show up to experienced users, pretty much defeating the purpose.
Part of the problem, as near as I can see, is that Windows (particularly, but also *ix) creates a user's "home" in the middle of the file system. In other words, your top-down view is from the middle of the stack. It's particularly bad in Windows, where your desktop, which appears to be _above_ the file system, is actually stored in the middle of it.
But a true mapping-style interface, that has potential.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Simplicity Limit user options, eliminate fat. Don't give users 10 ways to close a window, for example. I've always been annoyed by the fact that you can close a window that many ways. Another example: On a GNOME/Enlightenment desktop; there are too many ways to launch a GUI program.
Huh? Why?
This sounds like a personal issue rather than something that has any reason behind it.
Are you also annoyed that you can choose from well over ten different ways to get to work each morning? Do the dozens of lunchtime dining options you face each day cause you to lose sleep? Is it time for a jihad against Heinz's 57 Varieties?
If you do indeed have a good argument to support your statement I'd be very interested in hearing it.
UNIX IS NOT FUCKING WINDOWS
I sure hope not... It's gonna catch a nasty cold if it is.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
- read his books, at least Tog On Interface
- THINK. What does all this mean? Why was he testing on smart, clued people who'd never seen a computer before? Is this really 'design for idiots' or is it actually 'finding what conclusions are typically drawn by an untutored user'?
- USE it.
I'd like to see more X apps use Mac/Win mouse text selection behavior, particularly Mac type drag and drop of selections with the little visual cues to what's happening. Not because this is 'like what I already know': I'm equally willing to learn other rules, but Tog-ized text selection behavior is just better thought out, and quicker to understand, due to smart assumptions about what happens when you do things.This is a way Tog can help immensely without even paying attention directly. I wonder, if the wish is for Tog to actively help out with UI, what is he expected to do? "Help make three-button X text handling more intuitive!" "Help make our Excel-type button bar more intuitive!" Sometimes the answer is "You can't."
I've personally had experience with advanced UI and seen what happens. It was a couple years ago, and I began using the now-abandoned-by-MS-pressure Apple internet suite, 'Cyberdog'. This was revolutionary in several ways- it was massively object-oriented, using OpenDoc (and many parts were released for it, too- few _containers_ tho) but what I am referring to is specifically the interface aspects of it, and what they meant.
Cyberdog let you abstract all sorts of internet resources into an iconlike object. Email addresses would, when doubleclicked, make a 'To:' email to the address, or could be dragged into text or a header field and write the required text- basically everytime you did something that seemed plausible, it did what you wanted. FTP site addresses could open on the desktop like a Finder window to a remote site, or could be dragged to browser windows etc etc. Web bookmarks, likewise- telnet never quite got debugged but tried to open a terminal window- and all of these could exist as a simple bookmark file anywhere on your HD, complete with distinctive icon- or it could be dragged into a container object, the Notebook, a yellow-lined window with a sort of tree-view structure where you could store _lots_ of these references, or indeed aliases to anything else on your HD you wanted.
The Notebook container could also be used as an object- and this is where the user interface started to become unexpectedly powerful.
You _could_ convince notebooks to hold links to other notebooks- but this isn't what I mean, it's more of a top-level organizing tool. Go back with me to the peak of Cyberdog community- people were interacting on a special Apple Usenet server where you could post binaries, including Cyberdog rich text. What that meant was this: you could drag images etc. into your message and they'd be displayed inline. You could make a rich-text stationery file to use. People developed interesting sigs with nicely crafted graphic elements. The bandwidth issue was confronted and basic guidelines evolved- all nice but relatively unimportant, until one day someone asked whether anyone had links to Cyberdog resources. No such resource existed. Within 48 hours, a huge resource had emerged from the community without effort or any significant intent to collaborate. It was a Notebook containing hundreds of K of links, and no one person had to do all the work. Here's how it happened.
Notebooks can be dragged into rich-text messages, you see. This one fact, combined with the existing behaviors of drag-and-drop and the ability to squirrel away internet links in all sorts of places with just an easy mouse drag-and-drop, created an environment where this Cyberdog resource _exploded_ into existence. One person, I forget who, answered the request by saying just "I don't have one, but here are some links" and dragging a few related links into a fresh Notebook- and dragging that onto his message and sending it out to the newsgroup. Suddenly everyone had a copy of the Notebook (see any parallels with the Linux 'many eyes make debugging shallow' concept?), and several people added what links _they_ had handy, and dragged their resulting notebooks onto their reply messages, and sent those to the newsgroup. Everyone got those, and several more people pitched in, adding still more links, and one person took all the notebooks and dragged the contents of all onto one notebook, and spent a couple minutes making a folder arrangement to organize the data a bit, and (you guessed it) posted the result to the newsgroup...
The interesting thing about this is not the scope of the resulting data- any one person could put in a few weeks of not-so-hard work and track down all that, or most of it. It's not even the fact that all this happened in days. It's the undeniable fact that all this happened _effortlessly_, it just sort of happened without anyone intending it. Parallel, OSS-like free collaboration over the Net happened _unthinkingly_ because of specific interface features of this particular software, and I was there to see it and recognize what was happening. I'll never forget that. UI can MAKE THINGS HAPPEN, even enable things that won't happen otherwise.
I'm posting this in Netscape. Bill Gates cut a deal with Jobs to endorse IE and kill the Cyberdog/OpenDoc projects. With OpenDoc killed, the companies trying to write parts for it couldn't survive and had to completely redesign their products or die- I don't know how many are left. It's said that one of the reasons OpenDoc was killed was that, despite its flaws (slow and unwieldy and beta-quality) it was a full-on attempt to entirely replace the Office Suite paradigm with a 'building blocks' object oriented paradigm- and Certain People couldn't allow that to happen. Apart from that, it _was_ different though curiously easy to understand and work with- it was always puzzling people until they 'got it', in a flash of intuition, and started to work with the new paradigm instead of against it. You were never in a mode, really- instead of being in 'PowerPoint Mode' you might be drawing a picture or writing a letter and then decide to drag in a movie or something, and suddenly your letter contained Multimedia, without your ever having to run a 'Multimedia App' per se. This freedom was hard for people to get used to- at any moment you could do whatever, and you don't _think_ in terms of that without a bit of enlightenment. What Office user would think of sending someone a chart which, when the recipient looked at it, would show current data live off the Internet- dynamic, in other words? What Outlook Express user would think of sending someone, not a note saying 'Please meet me on server XYZ' but a window containing a telnet link to that server, ready to log in from the message window?
All this existed _years_ ago. It existed in OpenDoc, in Cyberdog, it was all available to the sufficiently ingenious hacker, or indeed to Joe Average half the time (the more spectacular stuff, as always, would require a bit of effort). And it was killed, by Bill Gates and his people- because in many ways it was BETTER than Office- and, perhaps, because it was just too far ahead of its time. Sure, it still used text and radio buttons and pushbuttons and checkboxes- in fact one of the most successful OpenDoc parts ever made _was_ a button, 'Rapid-I Button', that contained its own little interface builder to help people link it to actions and events- but it was so far beyond Office that few people ever made the conceptual jump to realise, "Why couldn't I just have everything available to me all the time, but totally made up of component software so I have complete random access to whatever functionality I want, and never bother with anything I'm not actually using?"
I'd love to see a Slashdot poll on "Do you know what OpenDoc is/was?". There are some areas that are _so_ open to grow into, things which only Linux could do because only Linux is not completely run remotely by Microsoft. Damn it, Cyberdog/OpenDoc _existed_ and it was killed off because Jobs needed to cut a deal with Gates and endorse IE to start Apple's turnaround. I know it worked and am not arguing with Jobs' decision (except to loathe it forever), but it is wrong to allow Microsoft to define computing forever, wrong to allow them to shut off anything that might change the computing paradigm, and I might even suggest it is wrong to mimic them and further proliferate what they have wrought- except that what else is there? Monopoly power works.
Nothing lasts forever, and I can only echo Elvis Costello's bitter lyrics:
The whole point of a GUI is this: I start up an application I've never used before, and it works the way I expect it to; it looks familiar, little guess work, I can quickly begin using the application in the way it was intended. Keyboard, mouse, file access, printing, all the same. Mac has this, Windows has this. Linux? The user is at the mercy of the developer. The value of choice associated with the Linux desktop is a complete facade. If the app was written using the GTK, it will only interact with the Gnome desktop, Gnome File access, Gnome help browser, and it will only listen to the Gnome configuration. If it was written using QT, I'm most likely forced to interact with KDE File manager, KDE Help browser, KDE configuration etc... I have NO choice. And if it was not written in either? I'm screwed. Each new application is a whole new set of problems for the user.
It's funny that if people need a good example of an Intuitive and mouse friendly desktop, they need look no further than WindowMaker. In fact, the state of the Linux Desktop would be downright pathetic if it was not for the wonderful work coming out of the WindowMaker and GNUstep camps. (That config util is a work of art! And the file manager, sexy! Now there's the compelling reason I need to get my Mom to switch to Linux)
Perhaps if the Gnome and KDE developers had to eat their own dog food and not be allowed to use the command line for ANYTHING, we might start to see some of Linux's desktop problems solved; less theme support, and more functionality. I know that they don't, because of the little things; you can't search through list boxes, list views, and tree views by typing the first few letters of the thing you're looking for. Such a simple yet vital feature, completely overlooked. How about screen corners and edges for optimized mouse use? Hardly utilized (Gnome not at all, KDE a little) Sure, these things are trivial to implement, but that fact that these things were overlooked in the first place means that we've got a long way to go before we see a usable Linux Desktop.
...
(I don't mean to come down so hard on KDE and Gnome, they both have many great features. I just think that some basic, fundamental functionality has been overlooked. A single point of configuration for starters...)
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
Xerox invents an interface, Apple improves it, IBM and NeXT sit down and creates variants on that, Microsoft takes the IBM CUA, tosses in some NeXTisms, and spends millions of dollars on interface testing to make it easy to use.
Guess what? Nobody's set up usability testing labs for KDE or Gnome yet, and depending on people comfortable using Unix to improve a UI is insane. We don't think like J. Random Luser, and we can't afford to hire a bunch of them to usability test. And remember logic and consistency are not always optimal for UIs -- see the jargon file entry for "miswart".
So even if the result is that we add nonoptimal features, it makes sense to copy Microsoft's UI for now -- it means we won't do anything to make it harder to use than Microsoft, and will at least have an easy learning curve for people switching.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Lessse -- Close button. Double-click on control menu. Control menu + Close. Alt+F4. Alt+Space then C. Right-click on taskbar + Close. Ctrl+W. Right-click on titlebar + Close. Task Manager.
That's nine ways to close a window in Windows, and there's probably one more. I have to admit that I've used all of them at one point or another. Which is not to say that we shouldn't have "simplicity", just that when it collides with "uniformity" or "elegance", or just "logical", one of the latter choices should probably win.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
It doesn't matter if there are 100 of ways to do something. But a user shouldn't be presented all of them and all of the 4711 other features as toolbuttons and 100s of other GUI thingies. Until now, desktops has looked like rooms from the 16th cenury. Clouded with small widgets. Simplicity in look together with ortogonality in function will give a much more user-friendly user interface.
The MS user interfcae is clouded with new graphical features and toolbars. It is NOT user friendly. It is viewd as such only because of the _huge_ user base who can help newcomers learn the howto's and hownotto's. The Mac UI is very user friendly. Unfortunately, it is in fact expert hostile.
The realy hard thing is to develope a user interface that is both newbie, user, power user and expert friendly. And, very little research have been done about merging those requerements...
Happy hacking you UI hackers! And remember - simplicity in functionality is much more important than good-looking widgets!
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
Limit user options, eliminate fat.
Aaargh! No, no, no! You can eliminate fat without eliminating choice for the user! If your goal is to lose 40 pounds, you can go on a sensible diet and lose 40 pounds of fat, or you can go on a fad diet and lose 10 pounds of fat and 30 pounds of muscle.
If you look at the camera market, you'll see that most cameras are simplistic one-button affairs. But complex cameras are still available where the user has every option available. The poster seems to be advocating making professional photographers use disposable Kodak boxes.
Sure, there are dozens of ways to close a window. Just last night I had a program freeze up on me. "alt-f->x" didn't close it. So I clicked the close button. It didn't work either. So I used xkill, that worked. The point is, if there was only one way to close the window, I would have had to shut down the computer. Hardly a user-friendly approach.
Some groups just have to sacrifice for the common good.
But Linux/Unix/X/Gnome/KDE is not a collectivist utopia. There is no benevolent dictator omniscient enough to know which products get the axe and which don't. Like it or not, users and developers are individuals. And like individuals they each have their own wants, desires and goals. Your ideas are no more important than theirs.
Funny thing is, those who announce "some groups just have to sacrifice for the common good" never offer themselves up as the sacrificial lamb, which always leads me to speculate that they think themselves worthier than everyone else.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Am I the only one who thinks that "copying" some of these GUI concepts is acceptable in the case where one "construct" (for lack of a better name) is noticably better than any other?
It seems that we have a fairly efficient contruct for every type of data necessary. Radio buttons and list boxes work well when one is to chose one choice out of many, checkboxes work great for simply toggling a yes/no value, and a button is. . . well, a button. These seem to work perfectly for every situtation I can conceive.
Someone posted in a patent article a while back that IBM owns a patent on pressing a "more" button to scroll to another page of text, and Microsoft owns one on scrollbars themselves. What would we do if we were unable to use either of these? There are certainly situations in which one solution is more effective than all the rest, and this is certainly one of them. It's a good thing that those are all held as defensive patents.
It seems pretty rare that these aren't suitable for the job. The only innovative control I've seen recently is IE 5's address bar (where auto-complete drops down), but that just seems to be a logical progression from the combo box.
I've also heard many people complain that "drop down and expand to the right" type menus - like the windows start menu, which pops up and selected categories are displayed to the right - are a poor way to handle such an event (many comments in the interview with the UI guy ranted about this). Then will someone tell me what's been proposed as an alternative to such?
Maybe I'm just too closed-minded, but I haven't seen much UI innovation recently and I think the Gnome - and any other desktop for that matter - is perfectly justified in copying.
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
Thing is, though, that the GNOME and KDE people are frequently copying *bad* things from Microsoft. Something may be completely trashed at the User Interface Hall of Shame--and rightfully so--and then it shows up in a Linux desktop environment.
I know that everyone has probably heard this a thousand times by now but...
You don't have to run the Gnome desktop to run Gnome apps. Gnome is more than just a desktop environment, but an suite of libraries and applications which (hopefully) make a programmer's job easier and tries to enforce some uniformness in user-interfaces. Same with KDE. There is *nothing* stopping anyone from using Gnome apps under KDE or any other WM or desktop.
As for copying the look, feel, and functionality of Excel or Word, etc.. I think that this is a good thing. These are very full-featured programs. Plus, if we want secretaries and our parents to someday use a free-unix, we'll need for them to make a painless transition. By 'cloning' these apps we're doing a great service to the free-software community. Plus, if there's ever a Linux port of Microsoft Office (as rumored), will people want to pay $500 or use the free(beer) clone?
Rant....
In Unix COM wasn't necessary? LOL. Well maybe. Just like it's prolly not neccesary to have computers to type up letters (what are pen & paper or typewriters for?). The point is it is FASTER and more EFFICIENT to use compoenent based models like COM. With COM you're basically calling functions to do stuff for you and you're working at a 'lower' level than piping output into new processes which in turn go and do their own bloated stuff. It's MUCH slower. With COM, you can reuse components. You can export a function that dials up the internet by creating the object, aquireing the interface pointer and function pointer then calling it. With ActiveX Scripting languages or programming languages like VB/C++ATL/J++ it's easy. With Unix, you'd create a new process to that involves chat pppd etc etc...all bloated stuff. You're creating a new process, you're running applications and then parsing the output as strings into something meaningful. Why do you think Unix lacks so much of the advanced UI modularity (Controls anyone?) componentization, IPC, interapp interoperability etc that Windows had? Cause it's hard. Cause there's no standard way to do things. Explain to me how I'll be able to copy an image into a clipboard from Gimp and then paste it into XPaint. Or howabout formatted HTML from netscape and then paste it (still formatted - including images and applets) into KEdit. You can't. There's no good mechanism, and usually what mechanism there are aren't standard. Windows has standards for clipboards, for IPC, for component sharing etc. They're defacto windows standards, but that's so much better than no standards at all. With ActiveX scripting languaes, Microsoft have basically created a scripting language that acts very much like the way javascript works in browsers. You've got a COMPONENT based scripting language (you create and call objects), unlike unix where you execute programs and parse their output (ugh). Ofcourse there's 'nice' languages like Perl which offer neat packages, but then, can I use Perl packages easily from TCL? No. In Windows, I can use any ActiveX Scripting language to script, because Microsoft's technologies are all componentised and 'reuse' on each other. As an example, ASP (Active Server Pages) uses ActiveX scripting, so I can script ASP pages with VBScript, JavaScript for PerlScript (or any other activex scripting language someone might write in the future). I can also use VBScript, JavaScript and PerlScript to write scripts in HTML files, or Windows Scripting files. Different languages, same object model. The kit to both write ActiveX Scripting languages of your own, and also implement the engine in your own applications is ofcourse free. There's also other key features of COM which make building HUGE operating systems like Windows 2000 and Office possible. Abstraction through COM interfaces. Microsoft can define some interfaces you have to implement if you want to, for example, add a shell extension tha adds a new Start->Search->Process menu on the start menu. All you need to do is create a COM object that implements those interfaces and register them in the right place in the registry and explorer will find them and add the menu dynamically for you. These same 'abstraction' ideas are used for ActiveX controls, Explorer Bands etc etc etc. That's how that guy managed to create an implmentation of Mozilla that would work in applications that 'embedd' internet explorer. You just go and implement the IWebBrowser interface! Oh well, enough rant. Final word. COMponentization is GOOD and needed for any large style OS or application. Especially if it involves user interfaces or you are concerned about binary reusability (not simply running small tools and parsing output).
I know the world has become a terrible place when Microsoft's GUI "innovations" are being used as the benchmark of quality. So far, Linux window managers have forgone innovation by providing emulating a well-established conventions, it is a failed endeavor. The result usually ends up being a poor copy of a poorly thought out design.
I believe there is reason to worry if the intention is to simply (more or less) reproduce the most popular elements, not the most useful ones.
However, if the ultimate goal is be better than preexisting designs, than perhaps the GNOME team, and others should invest their time in creating their, dare is say it.....own user interface, free of implementations of legacy features.
Is the goal to copy what already exists, fully aware of the design failures, just because it's safe and well tested? Just because it is a free alternative to what is already available? Perhaps, at least, they should spend some time investigating the original inspiration and concepts behind Microsoft's GUI, or else they risk diluting whatever thought was placed into the original work. Of which Microsoft has done little of.
Don't copy it because it exists, copy it because it is a solid design.
Throwing in things without having justification or an overall idea of how it will improve the rest of the system is stupid. Giving the user choice is good, but choice is meaningless without direction. New features should be added not after deciding a programming schedule, but after careful consideration of the pros and cons with a stong emphasis on the effect it will have over the rest of the UI and if it is worth it.
For example, upon viewing the demo of Aqua the leader of the GNOME team said that "the next revision will have [real] transparency". Uhhh.....ok, but why? How will this benefit the user? Is it just a bit of useless eye candy, or does it have a purpose? Will its presence be simply for the sake of having it because someone else does too?
The key is to introduce a compatibility between the two desktops that allows them to interoperate as close to seamlessly as possible. This means:
I'm sure I'm leaving things out. Does anybody else see a need here, or am I just spouting nonsense?
Timothy!
/. all night!
Go to bed! This is not a request, mister. Because of you, I'm going to be spending the next hour reading/posting to Slashdot, instead of sleeping. I really should be sleeping. I have to hear the disappointing results of a IS meeting in the morning, and I am far better equipped to do so if I'm not up reading
So for God's sake Timothy, and the sake of all those employed individuals operating on EST, please go to bed!
.sig: Now legally binding!
I have friends that have been hired by MSFT and they've described the component based architecture and the reasoning behind COM, COM+ and DCOM, and it was rather interesting. I was also surprised at how long it was taking *nix developers to create significant component based applications especially since most of COM (at least originally) was copied from or inspired by CORBA.
I only hope more of us can put aside our religous differences and make comments like this
- The birth of GNOME happened about two and a half years ago," explains de Icaza, "when Microsoft showed me a component-based application [Internet Explorer] which, instead of a huge bloated single-component application, was a huge application bloated with small components. Unix had no component system, the project [to develop one having fallen] down until Qt appeared. But Qt needed a proprietary toolkit, so the freedom was not really there."
which indicate that instead of assuming MSFT or Sun or whoever is this week's enemy of Open Source Software is the devil and keeping away from everything and anything they do we should learn from them and use their good ideas the same way they use ours. Software development should be a massive symbiotic relationship instead of the the them vs. us mentality most OSS developers take with it. Remember a couple of them are also OSS developers as well and hack Linux in their spare time. This post to the Darwin Development mailing list brings up that interesting fact by indicating that MSFT may own a lot of the kernel due to all those non-compete clauses signed by MSFT developers.PS: Basically the message of this rambling post is that we should Open Our Minds as well as our source code.
Enough braindead thinking.
Unix is not Windows. Unix is not Windows. UNIX IS NOT FUCKING WINDOWS!
There is a vast community of people working to make MS Windows and the other 400 or so assorted MS products better every day, and they're bound together by money, the most powerful social force imaginable. We're talking MCPs, MCSEs, developers, tech support networks, curriculum resale networks, documentation constructs, EVERYTHING. Plus highly centralized news and documentation delivery machines.
Open source unix development doesn't have that same financial weight behind it. In certain areas yes, but not nearly with the same reach as the MS machine.
And wouldn't things be so much easier if we'd stop talking about the difficult-to-define Linux Community and start talking about the computing enthusiast/developer community as a whole? As in, people who use computers to know how they work and synthesize new solutions from them? As in, not end users?
A vast majority of end-users rarely discover the other button on the mouse. They will NEVER NEVER NEVER be interested in all the wondrous things that Unix can do, no matter how gracefully they are introduced into the system of software they have at their disposal.
And let's shut the fuck up about "bad interfaces". If I have to read another "Gnome has a bad rehashed interface" line or "KDE looks too much like windows" bitch, I will murder.
GNOME and KDE are NOT PROGRAMS. They are collections of programs and libraries and APIs and engines and object managers that enable certain UI niceties like toolbars, common themings, mail delivery, window management, and a BILLION different things. If you're going to complain about something, complain about 'panel' or 'kwm' or 'ghex' or 'gmc' or the stock GTK color selector or gnumeric's plugin menu or the refresh rate of some kgame. Not "It totally works the same as windows so it sucks." If it works it works.
Complain about the behavior of a particular widget, or the mechanism for installing new software, or how themes are packaged or SOMETHING. Don't just bitch to be a little zealot.
Oh and get with the times. 32MB of ram on a win32 box is painful. 32MB of ram on an X11 box is just as miserable. If you don't like 'bloated' software, then stick with console. No-ones making you choose. But unless you have a better idea of how the basic architecture of X and GTK and QT should work to be more memory-efficient or what have you, then be quiet.
This is the most unfocused filth I have ever written. It sucks but I am out of time. I hope you find it irritating.
-troll taker
OK, now we say that everybody's copying on Micro$oft... Don't forget that they've copied most their stuff from someone else. Not that there's anything wrong with that. You can't (and shouldn't) always reinvent the wheel.
This is how it goes. A invents something, B starts doing the same, as well as C... then Micro$oft copies it, then when GNOME does the same, they've been copying microsoft. That's simply because they're the ones you see the most.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
OK, lots of things come to mind here.
First of all, how long before Gnome or some other OSS interface get recognised as the 'leader in the field?' Likely never, and good riddance! Someone pointed out that OSS doesn't have the research backing to really evolve a good interface. Someone else asked why should we even consider (or hope for) a 'winner'?
More to the point, why is the open source movement, a group supposedly excited about individualism and so forth, be so hyped about winning and (implicitly) taking over the world?
Lots of other good comments have already been made, but no one has specificly addressed one that's been nagging me lately. Consider this if you will:
I'm beginning to come to the conclusion that a useful and intuitive GUI is ***impossible***.
Impossible. Not Possible. Undoable. Forget it. Wasted effort.
Why would I say such a heretical thing? A few weeks ago, I watched a cyber-illiterate couple struggle with their brand new computer, running Win98. After a few days, I realised a few things.
1) No matter how pretty the interface, the guts of the system are still files in a hereditary hierarchy. (i.e. directories, subdirectories, and eventually files)
2) The GUI can disguise, but not _change_ the fact in (1).
3) The GUI, by making the file system structure less apparent, makes understanding the computer itself HARDER, not easier!
Summary: Because of (3) (which comes from (1) and (2)), the GUI is doomed to fall vastly short of what it should be (and in many ways be a hinderance) until A WHOLE NEW DATA PARADIGM IS CREATED!
I used Windows as an example, but Unix (and company), with its similar file structure, inherently suffers the same faults with any attempt at imposing a GUI on it, as long as that GUI works to hide or minimise the inherent file structure.
In other words, Gnome, Enlighten, KDE, Windows, BeOS, CDE, and so forth all FAIL in major ways, at what they were created to do! Worse, no amount of redesign or patching will fix that failure.
So maybe it's time to quit trying to make Gnome (or whatever) the king of a crumbling castle, and rewrite computing from the ground on up. No preconceived notions, no borrowing from everyone else (which is normally the most efficient way to develop things), but something as revolutionary as the original idea at Xerox, of a graphical environment.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
What are the principles by which a desktop can be good to regular users? I'm speaking from personal prejudice only.