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Jef Raskin Talks Skins
gwernol writes "Jef Raskin, one of the original Mac design team and a distinguished figure in the world of user interface design has given an interesting
interview over on OS Opinion. He talks about the tradeoff between interface consistency and customizability, and particularly the impact of skinnable applications on usability. Interesting reading, including some harsh words for "guru UI designers" like Steve Jobs..."
well, yes. i respect mr raskin a lot too, and owe a lot of my happy computing experiences to him. that's why this article is troubling me. i pretty much disagree with most of what he said as well... I think skinning is a good thing, as long as it is based off a workable standard. take for instance kaleidoscope for os9. You could completely changed the way your windows looked, and the colors of everything you wanted, but it still stuck to the functional standards. menus and buttons were all in the same place, although they might look funky. and the best part of kaleidoscope skins is the fact that they are system wide, and work on any properly programmed app. This is an example of a skinning application that did it right.
raskin's attitude in this article does worry me tho. he is a very smart man, but i dont like the 'my way or the highway' attitude he is taking. i think freedom to customize can greatly enhance the computing experience when it is based off of what he would call a functional 'scientific' gui model. I have been reading stuff raskin said for many years about GUIs, and i have agreed with him for the most part. but i can only listen for so long before i have to say 'Put up or shut up.' Mr Raskin, please show us this gui you have in mind for all of us. Please stop talking about it endlessly and just do it. You can rag on Steve Jobs all you want... but to quote Steve, 'Real artists ship.'
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
The car analogy actualy presents us with an answer.
Power seats that remember driver position. These come in some of the higher end cars now.
Why not do this for preferences?? It is rather trivial to do with the MAC. I would like to speak of it in other terms....
Using a keychain microdrive (USB?) with about 16-32 MB of storage, you could not only provide a secure login method, but also store preference data. Any application that was "(Insert Marketing Term) aware" would store it's preferences in a registry type repository, and would be synched with the microdrive.
Moving to a new computer would be a matter of plugging in your "key", which would read your user data, log you in and apply your preferences to the "registry". A 32MB Mircodrive should have no trouble storing your Photoshop Prefs, Background images, Winamp skins, etc... Power users will want larger Microdrives.
As time evolves, The Gimp will learn to read Photoshop Prefs, etc..., But at the very least, like applications will work in like ways on different machines.
Even in standardized interfaces, there will still be "preference related items" like bookmarks, recently used files, etc. I personally would just like to have my bookmarks and preferences stored and merged between home and work. Standardized interfaces are difficult to achieve even in the corporate environment where a given OS may only have 10-20 different uses.
Raskin is full of empty criticism. For all of his chirping, he has not created this perfect interface. Perhaps it's too hard for him to get in the industry?? He has no buisness commenting on Eazel when he has nothing better to show.
Finally, he made a crack about the default "Aqua" colored background, whether the Redmond or Cupertino version is unclear. If he is talkling about that horrible off-blue that was the default for Win95, that was chosen for another reason.
Blue waves travel slower, and hence a monitor displying a blue field will have less noticable scan lines from refresh than a red field would.
Complex problems require overlooking simple solutions.
~Steve Jobs
Jason