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Human Interface Subtleties in Software
Disoriented writes "As a GUI designer and programmer I enjoy sites like this. The info here is fairly old, dating back to Classic Mac OS, but it illustrates the kind of details users look for in a well-polished GUI." Mac-centric, but there are good points made in here for anyone working on GUI applications -- less bitter than the Interface Hall of Shame, too ;)
It looks like this guy just made a page to make himself feel better. Half of the "GUI subtleties" are from some app that he helped design. It's just a friggin' ftp program (and one I've never heard of, at that), and it's not exactly ground breaking.
Whoa, talk about going back to the future.
:)
For those who don't know Quinn, IIRC he's the guy who wrote Internet Config for the Mac, what 10 years ago? Up until that point, you had to change internet prefs in a bunch of different places. With his program (which, again IIRC, was eventually integrated with the OS), you could change it in one spot.
All hail Quinn!
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
One of his major points is the size of GUI targets. The edges and screen corners are easy to hit, but grossly underutilised by GUI designers. This causes more RSI in users than necessary. I've worked some apps with poorly chosen target locations and defaults that were just murder on my wrist.
For those who may be members of the ACM, the new issue of the ACM magazine Communications has an excellent issue regarding Attentive user interfaces.
Anarchie? Internet Config? Whoa! WHOA! Time warp!
My head is caught in a time warp to back when I did Tech Support at an ISP!
God, all those hours spent trying to help Mac users (with NO Internet Config) to hook up their modem, dial into an ISP, and get their IP address. Internet Config was a godsend.
If I ever run into Quinn, I'll buy him a whole pitcher of beer!
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Quinn is un-exclaimed - it's "The Eskimo!" that's exclaimed. :)
And yeah, anyone who keeps their internet settings at an OS level owes one to Quinn. It's an obvious concept that noone seemed to think of for years before Quinn did. And he didn't patent it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Not on the front page. Whats the deal?
-1 (Troll) is antihammer
I agree that keyboard shortcuts are important. But most people don't use them. On top of that, even keyboard jocks use the GUI, at least when they are first using a program. && on a lot of programs, doing most everything from the keyboard just doesn't make sense - OS interfaces and word processors (for tasks such as changing font faces &c), for example.
As for the button on the edge examples you give, most of them don't count as stuff on the edges and corners from the perspective of a GUI designer. The advantage of putting something along the edge of the screen is that you simply have to shoot the pointer in the direction of what you want to hit and click. This only works if the clickable area for a widget literally goes all the way to the edge of the screen.
The widget bars at the bottom of web browsers don't do this because nothing goes to the edge of the screen, and most of it isn't clickable, anyway.
I noticed that KDE has some of the features mentioned. I don't know about GNOME, but Mozilla doesn't have these.
- Sub-menus won't open if you move towards an already opened one.
- When you type, the cursor is hidden.
I think there might be a few old mac users on the KDE team.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
KDE gets it. There are a few pixels between the border and the button in Kicker, and it doesn't highlight quite right, but if you click, it will come up.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
The absolute corners in OS X are used by the screen saver/screen locking app. The corners can be set to be 'hot corners' to trigger the screen saver. By default, I think, they are unused.
There isn't a true equivalent to Window's 'Start' button, though -- no one piece of the Mac GUI gets that high a percentage of the use. Which is a whole 'nother thing to talk about...
This article really should be "A dozen or so things about a half dozen pieces of Mac OS software a geek thinks are cool." Most of his points are valid, but overstated. However, I do disagree with one thing: in the finder (Classic and X) when you drag a file, it does not at first highlight the window that it is in. It's not until you draw that file over another window does the other window get highlighted. Okay, so far so good. However, when you drag the item back to its original location, the originating window gets highlighted. I don't think this is optimal behaviour, but the author of this little web page goes to lengths to point this fact out! If you're going to highlight a window, always do it or never do it.
Yes, I'm still a junky. Are you still a bitch?
That isn't the Interface Hall of Shame, it's the "OS X-centric Hall of Shit." iarchitect.com is gone, but the Wayback Machine still has it.
Interface Hall of Shame A lot of this OS X IHoS's sections are like those in the original Hall of Shame. Interesting. The original is no longer up to date, however. I'd have loved to see their views of OS X and Windows XP, as well as the up-and-coming X Window desktops.
I hope the people who make stuff like, KDE/Gnome/Windows pay attention to stuff like this. Especially the busy cursor, pointer obscuring, and the heirarchial menus. If there was some way to configure KDE or Windows to follow these behaviors that would be very awesome. Does such a thing currently exist?
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
The post mentions two websites, firstly the (very very old) HI page, which believes that submenus are the dog's bollocks (that means they're great, for you Americans), and the interface hall of sha,e which has the following to say about submenus:
"Submenus are possibly the only interface element that can be physically very hard to use, and therefore should be avoided in UI design at all times, if at all possible. "
I also question the reason for this appearing on slashdot at all. What's next - good interface design on the Commodore 64???
I asked for a refund - and got my monkey back.
Who really needs a GUI for an application these days, console-based apps will once more rule the world. Bwahahahahahaaha!!!!