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KOffice GUI Competition Winner
Boudewijn Rempt writes "The KOffice GUI Competition has been won by Martin Pfeiffer. His entry was chosen from eighteen submissions by the jury because of its innovative, ground-breaking approach to workflow and document handling. Many submitters broke away from the beaten path and explored wild and wonderful ideas. The results page also has all submitted entries available for review."
Yay innovation.
IMHO a big part of the problem is that the people who can best solve the UI problems, programmers, are generally quite happy with CLIs and basic, half-working GUIs (CLIs do tend to be more efficient for coding and other relatively "geeky" tasks) and either don't care about improving things, or (more frequently, IMHO) don't even understand what's wrong in the first place. Case in point: I usually use Windows or Mac OS, but I've been trying various distros for the last 6 or 7 years, and keeping a list of the various bugs and annoyances I encounter each time. Nearly every single one of my UI-related annoyances from Red Hat 5.1 and Mandrake 6.0 is still in Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, etc. today, along with quite a few new ones from the various half-assed attempts at making things easier for newbies. Either nobody cares about fixing things (unlikely, given the number of "newbie-friendly" distros created and updated every year), or they don't really know what's wrong in the first place and instead concentrate on things they do understand (and apparently think will win over Windows and Mac users), like new features.
If somebody made a linux GUI that worked exactly like Windows 98 (or classic Mac OS), I'd use it. Unfortunately, the best anybody's done so far is something that works like Windows 3.1 and looks like a freakish combination of XP, Vista, and Mac OS X, with some DOS thrown in when the overly simplified and bug-prone GUI config tools can't get the job done.
And 99% of proprietary software has beautiful UI design and functionality? I didn't think so.