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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 ;)
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)
The edges and screen corners are easy to hit, but grossly underutilised by GUI designers.
This is, of course, why the Mac has a systemwide menu bar at the top of the screen, instead of a NeXT-style menu palette or a menu at the top of each window. The top-of-the-screen menu bar is said to be infinitely tall, because you don't have to worry about the Y coordinate when you click on it. Just push the mouse forward until the pointer stops moving, then click.
I write in my journal
It's just a friggin' ftp program (and one I've never heard of, at that), and it's not exactly ground breaking.
You never heard of it because you were still in diapers.
It was very ground breaking, back in 1994, back when the web was just a small part of the internet. Clean, simple interfaces; oh how I miss them.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
I think you'd find a menu pallette that popped up under the mouse cursor with a single click - paticularly if implemented as a pie menu - would be significantly faster that the Mac's single menu bar. There is a point at which having to move the mouse only a tiny distance outweighs having an infinitely high target.
There are other examples where the Mac's single menu bar is not the best solution as well, such as multiple monitors, or very high resolutions.
By default on XP, the start button is right in the corner of the screen, so you can't overshoot. But if you prefer to have a larger task bar, for more than one row of buttons, the start button is docked to the top-left corner, so you end up with a large chunk of dead-space underneath it!
Well spotted. I too thought that on return to the original window the target highlighting should disappear as, in simple terms, there ain't no bleedin' target as you ain't doin' nuffin!
The other one that I thought he overstated was the fact that his mailer was cool because it had one scroll bar for the whole message composition window rather than the admittedly disgustingly ugly multiple-region setup of the thing he was comparing it to. This is no different from what old text mode (console-based) mailers have done since the beginning of time. (e.g. Pine, which I still use). So the reason the Mac app was so great was because they had't broken an already working paradigm.
I prefer to simply look at the interfaces from hell and laugh/cry than to have a presentation of supposed good ones where sycophants fawn over them barf-inducingly.
YAW.
Your head of state is a corrupt weasel, I hope you're happy.