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How Configurable Should a Desktop User Interface be?
The Original Yama writes "In the world of user interface design there are two main schools of thought. The former maintains that the environment must be flexible and configurable enough to adjust to a user's needs. The latter takes the opposite perspective, arguing that many of today's user interfaces have become bloated and overloaded with features, and consequently have become difficult to maintain and use. KDE developer Mosfet shows how the KDE Project has managed to bridge the gap between the 'highly configurable' and 'less is more' camps."
http://www106.pair.com/rhp/free-software-ui.html
In fact, this news submission doesn't even include the rebuttal written by Mosfet two days ago, answering to Havoc Pennington's article, as linked above.
There is no shortage of 3rd party utilities to modify a your desktop to your liking.
http://indiestep.sourceforge.net/
i recomend this...
xao
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
Too late for that. Linux uses X-Window, which is far from achieving the start-from-scratch goals.
BEOS had something with their database file system and object-based UI (at system level). But they chickened out and settled for a JFS. (I'll omit the rest of their story.)
Another novel idea to the whole UI thing was NeXTSTEP (there after, OpenStep, thereafter, Mac OS X). I'm not talking about Carbon API here but rather Cocoa.
If you want to start from scratch, THAT is it. And if you'd rather it be on top of Linux, GNUStep is IT (aka, Cocoa for Linux, if you will).
has it been so long already, that the Great X11 Window Manager Chaos is beginning to be forgotten?
say, here's a beginner's guide sort of site for you. for the really exotic, not-even-WIMP-based ideas you'd really need a completely redesigned and rewritten application suite, which would take some little time to create, but a few of the more... exotic... WM's already out there might be good starting points. TreeWM, maybe Ion, maybe PWM, perhaps 3Dwm. or just go googling for "window manager", see how long that'll keep you busy...
maybe it's a sign of getting old, when you can clearly remember the days of "unix has too many GUIs!" and seeing the good point that was therein made.
They took out edge-flipping? Man. That was the best thing about using X :-( When i moved back to Windows i really missed it, until i discovered amazing VirtuaWin - virtual desktops for Windows! It's a tiny executable (also GPL source) and handles edge-flipping etc really well. I'm surprised MS didn't buy/recreate this and put it in as a normal part of Windows. It's fast, easy... add Cygwin and you have pretty much everything cool about UNIX in Windows too.
GUIs should be consistent and minimal. Configurability is "cool" but it spoils these goals.
UI designers should not try and please everyone. They should come up with a single "vision" and implement it from start to finish.
For instance, click-to-focus or focus-follows-mouse. These are both popular, but one needs to be chosen explicitly at the outset of an interface's design. For instance, focus-follows-mouse wouldn't work right on the Mac, because different windows have different menus. Should the menu bar change everytime you move your mouse? How about if you are dragging something from a background window to a foreground window?
If you chose one focus model, you could design the entire UI so it connected and complemented that model.
Yes, you could make two different UI's, one with click-to-focus and one with focus-follows-mouse, but you would have to make *two* *separate* interfaces. You can't have one interface that has a switch, because all the other aspects of the interface will be the same for each.
KDE and GNOME both need to focus more on fixing details and bugs. Examples I've seen on my Linux machine today:
* Different programs have different layouts. Some like the toolbar buttons across the top, but a few have them down the side. Why? You can move them into different positions, but why do they start out different? And has the programmer written his program to gracefully handle each possible position?
* When I open a Konquerer bookmark from the desktop menu, then try to open another one, the appearance of the first Konq window makes the bookmarks menu immediately close. Why? Is this because I have sloppy focus? Did the programmer who designed this test all the cases?
* Generally, when you open a window and then another window, it's not consistent which gets the focus. Why can't this be predictable? For instance on the Mac, when you open a new app, it's window is the "key" window, *unless* you click on another window. Then the one you clicked on becomes key, and *stays* key, even if the new window opens in the meantime. This is predictable, and maybe even logical. The KDE programmers have to consider every possible permutation of focus model and auto-raising, etc.
Basically my point is that programmers like flexibility, orthogonality, no special cases, etc., but *design* doesn't necessarily benefit from this. A design needs to have all of it's elements woven together to create a harmonious whole. You can't do that easily if the different parts swap in and out.
I think GNOME and KDE would be much more usable if the teams took a stand and made one interface the "recommended standard" and anything else is just an add-on or a hack that you use at your own risk.
And they definitely should not just choose the opposite of each other, arrogantly. They should each independently choose the most harmonious GUI they can agree on. A few knobs to turn here and there is okay, but some stuff isn't important.
I think an interesting idea would be to have each KDE or GNOME installation "phone home" with the user's config. Then the designers could see which options or sets of options are most popular, and design around those clusters of settings. Has anyone thought of this?
They wouldn't be "forcing" anyone to use their GUIs, since there would be others to choose from.
I really find the Mac and Windows GUIs to be more usable and *predictable*.
The primary goal all OS vendors...
Keep in mind that an Operating System is NOT a GUI.
Well that all depends, a good deal of Windows can be changed by using various registery tweaks, Xteq X-Setup is the prefered program for this.
Or you can just drop in a compleatly new one.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
...like what KDE offers a user on their first login?
The main control is a slider bar, with "very little eye candy" on one end, and "way too much eye candy" on the other. The drop-down "advanced" controls allow individual checkboxes for particular candy features; the slider just turns them on and off in groups.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
NeXTSTEP cum OSX already has all this functionality. If you'd like to see more of this functionality in a Linux environment GNUStep would be a great place to start. Other than GNUStep I haven't seen any real OO environments for Linux/free OSes which is disappointing because I really think they are a cut above more traditional style desktop environments.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Over the last 2 months I've tried hard to find something better, settling on fluxbox for a while, then giving KDE 3.1 the earnest try. In the end I ended up back where I started, running enlightenment DR16.5 on all my linux boxes. I rarely am forced to work on a windows box, and wow does it remind me why I left. I would say the windows UI is the lowest common denominator, and for KDE or Gnome to try to emulate that is a waste of time. I'm with the poster who says why waste our time trying to copy windows or mac os, which IMHO is par with windows.
the rebuttal's comment that Mac OS is a very usable interface seems way off base. Simple, yes, but usable? in what way? With my setup on enlightenment I can work fast, manage multiple tasks easily, organize windows and have E remember evertyhing about it. Oh, and it just works. Want a program to start when I log in, I don't need to find some folder, or wade through half broken configuration programs, I just right click on the title bar of the program and go to remember, select restart application on login.
I want all my gimp windows to move together, right click title bar, go to groups menu and create a new group, don't want to have to do that every time, remember->group. I setup my own quick scripts to do various commands, throw them in my menu, and there I have it, left click on the desktop and I'm running anything I want. (This is my one complaint about enlightenment, that you have to restart enlightenment to get a menu change). the tooltips are great for users new to E, and the built in documentation is quite good as well.
eye candy? E's got it, snapshots of all my windows when I minimize them, or on on the pager. Ever seen the ripples effect? I like to use a wallpaper with a beach in the background and the ocean in the foreground, turn on ripples and you're at the beach. Mac OS X doesn't touch it with it's wimpy little mouseover growing icons. BTW, what's the deal with Mac OS? Is blue the only color theme you can get on the incredibly beautiful OS? Or does everyone just stick with it?
If you're a linux/BSD user and you're comfortable with the command line, and willing to invest an hour or so setting up your UI give enlightenment a serious look.
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
Ah, the mythical X == bloat myth. A classic troll, indeed.
XML causes global warming.
Want edge flipping? Run Sawfish instead of Metacity, and you can have it again.
I'm content with Metacity. You can't drag an app to the edge of the screen and have the screen flip; but you can send the app to one of the other workspaces with a click of the mouse, and you can click on the little window representation in the Workspace Switcher and drag that to move a window to another workspace.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
usability.kde.org
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
>> Lets think about designing stuff for the people who are actually going to be using it.
That *IS* the average user.