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When Good Interfaces Go Crufty
An anonymous reader writes "A good article over at mpt on why good interfaces go crufty." A nice read before or after a visit to the Interface Hall of Shame.
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Is the interface a command line? If not, it's crufty ;-)
(getting the fscking html tags correct this time) Lest it seem like I'm picking on Microsoft, Windows is not the worst offender here. GNU/Linux applications are arguably worse, because they could be avoiding all these problems (by using inodes), but their programmers so far have been too lazy. At least Windows programmers have an excuse.
No, the hackers aren't lazy - they're just too busy trying to ape the MS windowes look and feel....
If I see something with colorful, bubbly bitmaps on the gui, I probably won't use it.
;)
That's what skinning is for! Just change the skin to something that doesn't have colorful, bubbly bitmaps!
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
On all my (own - not work) machines "C:\Program Files" does not exist. It is called "E:\WinApp". Same thing for the infamous "My Documents", it's called "Home" (Actually D:\Home\%username%). And I like it that way. ;-))
All this needs is just some tweaking in the registry and some few tricks and you never have to live with bills-insane-directory-name-choices again...
Same for the start menu, I just organize it as topics. It's not hard to do, and most people would do it if they wouldn't be afraid of breaking everything. Because, just deal with it: users are scared of "breaking their computer". I actually learned a lot by breaking my computer, but that was in the DOS days and with PCTools in my hands. I now know why my dad made backups so often
Just to keep myself honest, I force myself to do sysadmin tasks in vi. Generally I use emacs for source code. Tonight I used vi to write a small Perl program to change a bunch of URLs in a bunch of web pages to a different layout system. I've been writing a lot of PHP lately and I haven't used Perl for a couple of years. The entire project is a refresher course.
Editing Perl with vi! Talk about a cruft implosion. To make things worse, I was using a very bad version of vi that came standard with Debian potato. It doesn't indicate on the screen that you are in insert mode. Certain kinds of cursor motion break insert mode when you least expect it. It doesn't even have a line number indicator on the status bar.
Aside from all the obvious reasons I've been trying to figure out why I hate vi as much as I do. I've put up with worse and complained less. Yet somehow as much as I try to accept vi for what it is I fail miserably.
I was paying special attention to my vi misery as I permuted Perl's line noise. Here's what it comes down to. If you have N characters on a line, there are N+1 positions where you might wish to insert a new character. Yet in vi you can't actually reach all these positions without first entering insert mode: the position that appends to the end of the line is not available. This leads to the ludicrous effect that whenever you cancel insert mode, your cursor moves one character to the left (unless you are already at the beginning of the line). Oh, and you can place yourself at the end of a line when you are not in insert mode--if the line happens to be completely empty.
So there I am getting slap happy with vi (banging escape whenever I forget what mode I'm in, which is almost always) and every time I bang escape I have to watch carefully to see if my cursor skids left.
It's bad enough having two modes. But did the concept of current position also have to be different between the modes? Incredible. Just for this one reason vi constantly gives me the feeling I'm babysitting a naughty child.
On the other hand, emacs might be barroque, but I rarely spend much time thinking about my hands unless I'm trying to do something that isn't habitual. I rarely use a feature in emacs I didn't learn in the first two days. "feature freeze" in emacs is modal in its own way. One moment you are working productively, the next moment (or hour, or day) you are whittling away at one billion options you don't want. But there's the difference: emacs is modal once an hour, vi changes modes faster than you can blink, or think.
There's a general rule (apparently unknown to the anticruft crusader who launched this topic) that cruft is eliminated only when something new comes along that's ten times better. Only ten times. And vi still exists. Amazing.
Yeah. Too bad that they don't have groups and permissions for groups that allow only certian types of people to do certian things. If only...
After accidentally hitting a geocities site, I now have to *manually* close 150 pop-under/over/beside windows, each one of which pops up another 150 windows.
I want IE dead, and I want it now!
Where's my Exit menu item?
(I know, I know, it's in Mozilla. Time to switch.)
And because all the zealots who complain about Word documents being large were going to mock you after you'd used your app as a file editor on a big project and your undo history filled up the hard drive.
...in the "Interface Hall of Shame" using frames? :-)
human://billy.j.mabray/
"Every good system has a backup." -- Dale Hanchey
C:\Windows is the same in all language versions,
Really? Then why does my Win2K install have C:\WINNT, but no C:\Windows?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I'm not entirely sure I think this is a good idea. You're talking about combining automatic saving-- saving after every keystroke, or every n seconds, or whatever-- with automatic version control. The net result is that your document would include one version every few seconds as long as you work on it. It'd be easy to accumulate a document with tens of thousands of versions. How would that be useful? You could, in theory, go back in time to any point to recover your work, but how would you know which point in time was the right one?
I'm not saying it wouldn't be neat; you would basically have enough data to do an instant-replay of the entire document creation process. But it doesn't sound too practical to me.
I write in my journal