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GUIs Get a Makeover
jcatcw writes "From Xerox PARC to Apple to Microsoft, the GUI has been evolving over the years, and the increased complexity of current systems means it will continue to change. For example, Microsoft is switching from dropdown menus to contextual ribbons. Mobile computing creates new demands for efficient presentation while the desktop GUI doesn't scale to larger screens. Dual-mode user interfaces may show up first on PDA phones but then migrate to laptops and desktops. Which of today's innovations will become tomorrow's gaffs?"
You only need them to open mutiple xterm/CMD windows, so who cares?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
i think they have been slowly DEvolving over the years, becoming more bloated and complex. They are starting to outreach the average joe.
We have had simple and effective GUI's in teh past, like Atari's GEM, and Apple's Newton. Simple and effecitve. but they were tossed aside for much larger and complex systems, requiring more hardware and brain power.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I've been developing touch screen talking pie menus on handheld devices, like the Pocket PC. Pie menus work very well with touch screens, but of course the way they track and display and give feedback has to be adapted to the quirks of small touch screens. Talking pie menus give you audio feedback with a speech synthesizer, so they don't require a lot of visual attention and hand-eye coordination.
Talking pie menus make it possible to use an application without looking at the screen! That's important for mobile applications like GPS navigation systems, which people use while driving (despite all the warnings again it).
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
...well, at least for websites: Spreading the fricken article over several pages, e.g., this article...
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
The problem with guis is they don't work. There's been no evidence that they actually increase productivity or ease of use in the long term, and indeed may hinder usefulness. There's nothing you can't do in a shell that a gui provides extra ability for, when you've been well trained or decided to -learn- how to use a text mode interface well. A GUI will certainly allow for some extra functionality right off the bat, when someone is first exposed to a program they know nothing about, but after a few months usage, those who use text mode interfaces will be outstripping their gui counterparts. It's trading off learning skill with convenience, and like convenience foods ends up in bloated overweight apps always trying to cater to the lowest common denominator.
For a simple example, look at a spreadsheet in its most basic form. Tab goes to the next column over, return goes to the next row down. Entire usage of the software can be made in a text screen, and FAR quicker than entering a number, moving to the mouse, moving the mouse to the next cell, clicking, then moving back to the keyboard, when instead you can enter a number, hit return, enter a number, hit return, etc.
The "inventors" of the gui really have something to explain.
RST
Slashdot.
Gotta love an article on graphical user interfaces with no ... graphics ... of the user interface.
Hasn't changed over 5 years, until a few months ago
Just like Windows
You'll take my File/Edit/View from my cold, dead hands.
in GUIs. GUIs are currently designed not to minimize keystrokes or maximize power, but on a general sense of ooh, that looks nice. WMs like Ion at least try. More effort needs to be put into making environments that help us get work done.
So long as we're still using the mouse/keyboard as a primary interface for our computers, the current GUI model will likely stay pretty much the same for at least a good ten years or so. Once something better comes along, such as AI-assisted video/object recognition, it may open options similar to what was in Minority Report. Until then though, using a cursor for interaction will remain more effective than cursing at our machines directly.
8==8 Bones 8==8
This seems incredibly divorced from reality. Lots of people use multiple screens, and extending the same desktop across those screens works really well to manage the available space. The answer from Microsoft Research -- waste all that space by monitoring more information. So we should just take that extra screen and fill it up with pretty desklets? And this will make me a more productive person?
My father had one. I forget her name. She took dictation, corrected spelling, filed and retrieved documents. So, the ultimate interface would be called a secretary.
I'm thinking that an audio interface; secretary, telephone operator, might be a very good thing once the technology is sufficiently evolved.
While I understand that GNOME has its admirers, and it can't be classified as a failure, it sure hasn't lived up to the hype of the early days.
o oser.png
GNOME was touted as being a real competitor to KDE, before the days of Qt being dually-licensed under the GPL. There was some initial progress, but since about 2000 it seems that KDE has been the leader. Ever since Miguel became more focused on Mono, the quality of GNOME really decreased.
One notable incident was the terrible GNOME file chooser. You can see it here:
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/filech
The many usability problems are well known, and were much discussed. One major flaw was the inability to enter in a pathname or filename manually. The lack of path separators made the top breadcrumb trail difficult to follow at times. The 'Places' pane wasted a lot of space when it listed few items. The file list didn't show enough detail about each file. It wasn't possible to view only certain file types.
Frankly, it was a rather massive mistake to include that dialog. When compared to the dialogs of KDE, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows, it was the black sheep. What was worse, on some platforms non-GNOME applications like Mozilla Firefox made use of that dialog, in turn making their usability a nightmare. While things have gotten better, and the newer dialog is a slight improvement, the mistake was still very costly.
I personally know about six people who used GNOME, and swore that they'd never touch it again after seeing that monstrosity. One went back to Windows, to the best of my knowledge. The rest switched to KDE, and have been quite pleased, as far as I know.
I think that the GNOME file chooser disaster is one incident that all GUI developers should learn from. At least then it wasn't a total waste.
It's very true that the fixed menu doesn't scale... This is probably the biggest reason that I use Fluxbox. It allows me to right click anywhere on the desktop and pull up an application menu. Contrast this with my XP machine which I'm using now: It has two widescreen displays but the Start Menu only shows up on the left screen. If I'm on the non-Menu screen, I need to scroll across two desktops to click the Start button and then select. There are workarounds but some keyboards don't have the Windows key, etc.. The Application menu is also problematic for the same reasons. If someone knows a way to add entries to the XP Desktop menu, please let me know...
Is a desktop GUI that is based on the menu system style of MythTV instead of "START". This would make it SO easy to navigate for novices, I mean, after all, what's wrong with a GUI for a computer that was made to be easy enough to navigate for people who watch TV?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Ribbons : MS Products :: Ribbons : Bicycles
They don't aid in the functionality, they only appear to make things look faster, and after all is said and done, you look like a big sissy bitch for using them.
Hades, PoD: Official Advocate
Ideally the computer should just know what you want to do and do it for you. The problem is telling the computer what to do. I'm surprised that voice-recognition hasn't progressed further. The Apple OSX voice stuff is pretty cool but not responsive enough to be useable. And all it does is integrate into the window manager. Why would I want to ask the computer to open a window if I just want to ask a question? For instance, say I want to know what time it is. I can't just ask the computer, "Computer, what time is it?" Instead, I have to say, "Computer, open clock" and then read the time. Maybe some feedback would make it better. Communication requires feedback. Maybe the computer could respond, like the XO of a ship responds to the captain: "Make turns for 30 knots" XO: "30 knots, aye"
I think a big problem is the mouse. The mouse is so great for so much, yet it falls short. I know they have mice that have practically a whole keyboard on them. I'd like to see that idea extended beyond the window manager also.
One thing that has really excited me recently is the Optimus dynamic keyboard over at artlebedev.com. Thinking more about adapting the interface around the user and the software is important. A lot of that will be workflow analysis, such as "User A always saves before printing, so if they save, make the print icon easier to find and click." will be necessary.
A lot of what needs to be done the computer can do for us. The hidden options in MS Word are a good example of this. Although it was a support nightmare when it first came out, it really helps speed up the work when you are doing common repetitive tasks. This could be expanded to allow different hidden options depending on what you're working on. For instance, if you're writing a letter, addresses and envelope stuff should magically appear, but it should not show up if you're writing a scientific paper.
One thing that the MS monoculture has brought us is a somewhat standard UI experience for most users. That would be impossible with 100 competing OS's. The web does not offer that opportunity except maybe through some toolkits like Swing (which sucks), or Ruby on rails with the prototype.js. The monoculture has stifled innovation, however, so I hope in the future there will be more people thinking about design when they make their interface and MS being open enough with this Aero stuff to allow designers freedom to make something new. I seriously doubt that will happen, however.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
http://www.abclinuxu.cz/images/clanky/kratky/kde4- plasma-2.png
http://img93.imageshack.us/img93/4884/filebrowser0 ql.jpg
Once this is out, is will impress lots of folks including myself. That will be its time. I know that for others, some found on slashdot, KDE will always be a non starter.
On a side note, the Morris Minor had its time too. Here it is:
http://www.oldclassiccar.co.uk/classic-car-images/ morris3.jpg
I'll never forget my ride in one of these as a kid.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think he meant "See GIMP, for an example of a spectacularly badly designed graphical user interface, and compare it to Photoshop, if you want to see how much better a well designed user interface can be."
I hate Adobe as much as anyone, but there's no reason for GIMP fans to lie about how easy it is to use, compared to Photoshop.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
What about (Microsoft's) Bob?
(Disclaimer: I have been a KDE user continuously since late 1998.)
The one thing I always ask when presented with a GUI change is, "How will it improve my productivity?"
Now, from looking at those screenshots, I have my doubts. That new taskbar idea looks like shit. Notice that the labels on most of the items are truncated after about six to eight characters. It makes it difficult to know what they're saying. I mean, look near the bottom. What site is "www.pl"? What is "www.ku"? Were I not a previous user of KDE, I would have no idea that "Konver" was the truncated form of "Konversation". Look at all the wasted space above and below the truncated labels. Compared to the old panel, that sidebar is a piece of shit.
What's that thing in the middle supposed to do? Can I click on those icons on the left to accomplish something? Why are there icons that look to be from Mac OS X, and appear to represent web browsers and email clients, doing next to a description of the Kopete instant messenging software?
And why so many textual descriptions about the applications? Being a long-time KDE user, I already know all that information. I don't want to read some bullshit marketing blurb about Kopete, I just want to use Kopete.
As for the shot of Konqueror, I don't see the need for all that gradient nonsense. I wastes a lot of screen space. What is wrong with highlighting the item selected on the left, and then only having a thin vertical separator bar like it currently is? The current look of Konqueror is very compact, makes very good use of the screen space, is comprehensible, and works very well. I don't see any benefit from changing it.
Like I said earlier, I ask myself, "How will it improve my productivity?" In this case, I don't like the answer I see. I like that KDE is trying to innovate. But they're going in the wrong direction. They need to focus on making better use of screen real estate. We don't all have 24" LCD monitors yet. On a 15" or even 17" screen, any wasted space is unacceptable. And the changes they do make have to have a purpose, hopefully increasing productivity. But it doesn't look like that's the case, as most of these seem to do the opposite. They add confusion and reduce clarity. That's not a good thing to be doing.
By the way, Photoshop has scripting, too. The GIMP fans should learn more about the competition before trying to trash it. One reason GIMP is so far behind Photoshop, is that many of its developers refuse to try Photoshop or learn more about it, because they want to remain "pure" (i.e. proudly wearing a badge of ignorance). That's why real artists who use Photoshop regularly can't stand GIMP.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Shouldn't that be from Stanford Research Institute to xerox to...
SRI is where Engelbart and crew started (he later ended up at Xerox PARC). What the doremouse said has a good review of the beginings of the PC.
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
We already have that with CRT monitors... it's called burn-in
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I find it interesting that the examples of bad GUIs are 3/4 Microsoft. While those three are bad (Clippy? Bob? Ew. I get adaptive menues, though. The idea is valid, to a point.)
The Apple example, handwriting recognition on the Newton, is a good gaff. Which is to say it isn't something that any rational person would look out and say "That's dumb. Don't do that." It isn't Clippy. It isn't Bob. It's trying to get the computer to adapt to the person rather than getting the person to adapt to the computer. The big win for Palm was that Grafitti forced the user to adapt to the computer. Our handwriting is the way it is (hopefully) so that other people can read it to. Typewriting is not a natural thing, even though some of use geeks reach WPM speeds that make it seem like it is.
When we're talking about verbal user interface gaffs, we'll find similarly goofy things, and we'll find things that made sense intellectually but didn't work in reality. That's what we call research, kids.
Unless we're talking about GUIs that can catch fish, shouldn't it be "gaffe"?
I firmly believe that when it comes to GUIs, change is almost always for the worse. One reason for this is that once a set of GUI conventions has become established, change is disconcerting--you now have to accustom yourself to the new "look" or to the new way that the GUI works. That inconvenience is rarely repaid by the alleged advantages of the change.
As an example, consider the difference between the Windows 2000 and XP desk tops. Just how is the XP desktop better than the older one? I sure couldn't see any advantage to it. Yet, if you were to use the darn thing (and not switch to the "classic" view), you'd have to figure out again how to do a bunch of stuff you already knew how to do before the interface changed. This is progress? Even at the detail level, the changes are silly and unhelpful. Look at those three-dimensional window title bars. Why is that bulgy look better than the less obtrusive flat title bar of the old Win 2K interface? What convenience or information is added by the 3D bulge? Or how about the XP icon for video options--it's a screen with a flat paintbrush on it instead of the 2K screen with a round paintbrush and ruler in front of it. The two look different enough that it takes me a couple of extra seconds to find that icon in the Control Panel whenever I'm forced to use the default XP interface. It's not that the new icon is better or worse than the old one--but why ever change a familiar, easy to recognize icon? It's done to create the illusion of progress, of course.
Making icons look "cooler" in successive iterations of software is one of my particular pet peeves. Whenever someone releases a new version of their software, they think that people won't believe they got their money's worth if the GUI looks the same--so they jazz up the icons. Usually, this means adding more detail, even though this violates the basic principle of the icon: that it should be simple and easy to recognize. In other words...icons should be iconic.
That brings me to another reason why software publishers change GUIs. From the article:
Excuse me, but if you've got "exploded" features, then you do not have a problem that can be solved by a revamped GUI--you have bloatware. Clean up the mess, and start over.
I haven't seen these new "ribbons" MS is talking about for LongVista, but even the name is dumb. Look, the people at Xerox Park gave us the foundation of a great GUI, and there's no reason to change that basic set of visual metaphors until there's a fundamental change in the mechanics of the computer/human interface. The requirements for a good GUI are well-understood: it should be as simple as possible, it should be consistent between applications, it should use easily recognized familiar symbols and conventions. It most definitely should not change from one moment to the next according to the notions of some guy in Redmond who thinks he can anticipate what I want to do.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
so awesome.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
ribbon menu sounds like Word 1.0 on DOS' menu
hopefully file saves can go back to this intuitive nirvana...
Transfer -> Disk
use an etch-a-sketch
Beer. It's not just for breakfast anymore.
...absolutely all we need is halfway thoughtful, somewhat intelligent application of the paradigms we already have.
If software developers just spent an extra hour to watch an untrained user play with their software... and their managers gave them a couple of extra weeks to incorporate what they learned by watching... that would have more effect on software usability than the introduction of new techniques.
The problem today is that so much software leaves you gasping with amazement at the seeming perversity of their design. It's been observed since the day Windows 95 was introduced that it is stupid to turn off your computer from a button labelled "Start." Microsoft has had over a decade and one, two, three, four, five major software releases to do something about it, and they haven't. If they don't get it yet, all the pie menus and gestures and voice recognition isn't going to help them.
You may cry foul because this isn't strictly speaking, a software problem, but will you take a gander at the button layout on this portable DVD player? In case you don't get it--it's so mind-boggling it took me a while to get it--the northeast button moves you east, the southeast button moves you south, and so forth. That's why every button has a little printed arrow next to it.
An awful lot of modern software design seems to me to be be putting little printed arrows next to utterly misplaced buttons.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
ion3 window manager. plan9 interoperability.
Voice recognition is a common thing I read here, but I whole-heartedly disagree. I already think office noise chatter is too high. I don't wnat to imagine when everyone is talking to their computer to tell it what to do.
What most replies here lack the understanding in is that an input method has its purposes and its uses. See the whole CLI vs. GUI argument here. Voice is just another input. It's great for GPS navigation or a mobile phone in your car, but for an office suite? Definitely not: ugh! How about in a library? How about at a LAN party? Anywhere where there are many people.
Voice recognition isn't the "killer app" of input devices. I think a combination of keyboard, mouse, stylus, joy stick, voice recognition, and touch screen would be a good start. Voice recognition for dictation, keyboard for editing, stylus for graphics drawing, mouse for web browsing (fine grain arbitrary clicking), touch screen for fast navigation of larger buttons (coarse grain arbitrary clicking), etc.
Why must we be confined to the keyboard and mouse?
:wq
Stroller.
Agreed, the old GTK file chooser is an absolute monstrosity. Looks like relief is finally on the way with the new GNOME 2.16 http://www.gnome.org/start/2.16/notes/C/rnbackend. html
Penny - plain text accounting
There's a lot of eye candy etc that does not make things better, but just adds clutter and confusion.
Unfortunately too, people learn bad habits and build up expectations that will be with us forever. For example Start/Shutdown is so logically broken, but once people have learnt about the Start button, they expect to see it there. First impressions count a lot, so if you take away the Start button most people will feel a bit lost and will have a negative experience. Thus people won't want to let go of Start even if it is in their longer term interests to learn something better.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"GUIs Get a Makeover"
How about learning from Game GUI's? Need to meet the needs without the historical baggage.
How about focusing on UI's (no 'G') for the disabled? The motor impaired? The just plain getting old?
If you really wanted to make the system safer etc, you could use the GPS to determine if you're moving or not and shut down the menus etc while the car is moving.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I have no desire to have to talk to my computer. I have less desire to hear all my coworkers talking to THEIR computers. I doubt my roommates want to hear me babbling all evening. Talking to the computer, even if it works perfectly, is still ackward.
Adaptive UIs (as mentioned in the article) are a bad idea because users can't memorize (an commit to instinct) actions. However, the new Word interface is a good idea because it presents only the options that are currently applicable. (Well, it tries. Whether it is implemented well is something I haven't explored yet.)
I think that by convention every function available in an application should be accessible either directly or indirectly from the main menu.
.ini files like on windows, or the registry, etc). Using a scripting language to configure the application makes the file more difficult to edit for novice users, makes syntax errors more likely because the syntax is necessarily more complex, and makes parsing by third party applications more difficult because, again, the syntax is necessarily more complex. Additionally, a scripting language is just stupid overkill for a configuration file that needs to turn on and off options and specify a path. By definition, a configuration file shouldn't be doing anything *conditionally*. If something like that is in a .conf file, than you put it in the wrong place. Sadly, many linux daemans are guilty of this (especially apache, which is otherwise a nice and powerful web server).
This used to be more or less a design standard (I think apple published it in their human interface guidelines?). For the most part, people use keyboard combos, toolbar buttons, or context menus; however, the main menu serves as a kind of index of all of the functionality that is available in the application. On macintosh it is also a place to quickly look up the the keyboard shortcut binding for a function.
Unfortunately, some developers have gotten lazy recently and made functionality available through only one source, instead of the usual triplet of main menu, context menu, and keyboard bindings. This is annoying when someone makes functionality that is only accessible by context menu, but it is crippling when functionality is only accessible from a keystroke. Worse, sometimes there is no documentation as to what keystroke is needed, and the functionality becomes less of a feature and more of an easter egg for whoever stumbles upon it.
Sadly, Linux software is the main offender here. Unfortunately many developers are totally unaware of the importance and difficulty of good UI design, and writing a GUI becomes an afterthought. In large companies this is rectified because people who specialize in UI design are hired, and on macintosh and windows, apple and microsoft publish UI standards that all applications should meet, but no one seems to be providing this service for Linux.
One other deadly sin of software design is writing software that is only configurable through a text file. Having a human readable text file to configure the application is a feature, but *not* having a preferences GUI in you application that wraps all supported features in the config file is just downright lazy.
Worse are applications that use a scripting language to configure themselves instead of a regular record format (i.e. xml properties files like apple uses, or
And I mean, that's why the USB HID standard exists. A buttons-n-dials type hardware interface should just appear as an undifferntiated joystick-like input device. So to test user software you can hook up any $30 USB joystick and plug it in, and your OS should enumerate all the axises, sliders and buttons.
Alas, there's no simple way to register variables with an always-active interface like that.
The application has to specifically want to have certain variables modified in such an arbitrary fashion. And few developers have the time or patience to, on top of everything else, hook up a Gravis gamepad and negotiate the game-centric APIs that Windows provides to get access to these generic interface devices. And make sure that the sliders n' whatnot get priority mapped to whatever setting is currently most important (or possible to change), and that it can change in realtime.
There are some realtime performance applications that let you do this (all of them that I know are audio/video DJ apps)... typically you map a mouse axis, or a joystick axis, or a midi event trigger to some internal variable that can be continiously controlled. You ususally have a subdialog where you have a "realtime modify this parameter" checkbox or whatnot, at which point it pops up a dialog which prompts you to wiggle the input dohick you want mapped to it, warn you if there's a conflict, and then to calibrate it.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
How much of a gaffe is it to mis-spell "gaffe" in the title of your article?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
You do sound like a fanboy. Not that I disagree entirely, I just don't think hyperbole is helping here. I doubt even MS uses VB for anything critical.
But let's ignore Windows, and Vista (which does it right, according to you), and focus on the Mac. Recently, I booted Ubuntu on my Powerbook, and I couldn't believe how much faster it was -- until I noticed where the speed was coming from. Switching virtual desktops on OS X currently gives me a rotating cube effect, which makes it easy to tell what I just did, and also helps teach people what a virtual desktop is -- but on Ubuntu, there's no animation at all, just an icon to show me which one I'm on.
This kind of thing is pervasive. It seems like launching an app by clicking it in the dock will always bounce the dock icon before it shows you a window. Expose, while it's a nice idea, animates, whereas alt+tab moves between apps, not individual windows. The Dashboard animates and still manages to take a solid couple of seconds if I haven't used it yet on that boot. Dialog boxes animate slowest of all, which is especially annoying if I'm moving quickly through a series of them with the keyboard.
So, you're right, animation doesn't necessarily have to slow down the machine. It can, however, slow down the user experience. But some of those fancy effects do help. No one would take an OS seriously if it didn't have solid dragging -- if dragging a window meant watching its outline move, then dropping the outline and watching the window blink over. Drop shadows and transparency, and even little animations, can actually improve the experience -- drop shadows, in particular, make a clear visual distinction between one window and another, and which is on top.
But misusing animation is like misusing any other GUI element, only worse. Misusing them can be like using checkboxes where you should use a radio button -- misleading at best. At worst, actually debilitating -- like using radio buttons where you should have checkboxes.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Many vendors and frameworks have been trying for years to lead the UI movement.
But neither win32, mfc, qt, gtk, kde, wxWindows can find the promise of separate the OS rigidity from the UI
Just Squeak give us more freedom, but from a business perspective Adobe is playing a very strong card with Flex
Imagine a creative designer with all the freedom to create the best UI without more limitations!
We can see some real examples of Windows interfaces in flash like ScreenTime
Mac users managed to cope with the loss of the "Special" menu and the relocation of shutdown and restart to the "Apple" menu so I'm sure Windows users could cope with changing Start/Shutdown.
I mean this is slashdot
The analogy is false, because its premise is false.
Rather, if Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit. I think that a function of evolution is that as traits emerge, a species starts to diversify, and the complexity of the system by which the trait is favored becomes more complex, until it flat out wins, then there is a return to simplicity.
It's sort of that way with scientific theory. Someone will have a quantam leap (no pun intended) forward in a model that describes the universe, and it's something really short and sweet, like E=mc^2. And then science says, "Oh, except when you're in a crowded elevator!" and, "Well, not really for very large values of 2!" and wonderful stuff like that, until someone realizes that, duh, the universe is really simple. And so on.
I want to also say that when I say the universe is really simple, I don't mean we can comprehend it. I just mean it's simple. If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must mod me +5 Insightful.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
It makes sense when you understand a) the purpose of the "Start Menu" and b) the history behind it.
The Start Menu is the "one stop shop" for initial tasks in Windows - it's the UI element you go to (or are supposed to) for launching programs, configuring the machine, searching, help, etc, etc. It is (roughly) equivalent to Classic MacOS's Apple Menu, the NeXT Dock, and similar "do it from here" elements in other GUIs. Logically, in Windows, the "Shut Down" command belongs in this UI element and nowhere else (with the possible exception of a dedicated button on the taskbar, like Ubuntu does - although back in the day the problem then would have been wha icon to put on the button).
*Originally* (in the first "Chicago" betas), the Start Menu wasn't actually called the "Start Menu" and didn't have "Start" on it - it was just a button with the Windows logo, much like the GNOME and KDE versions. However, during their usability testing, Microsoft found that users couldn't actually figure out what to do when the system first booted and all they had was an empty desktop and taskbar, with a little Windows logo at one end and a clock at the other (I can't even remember if the clock was there at that stage). So the button got a label - "Start" - to signify that it was the UI element where you "started" to do everything.
First impressions count a lot, so if you take away the Start button most people will feel a bit lost and will have a negative experience. Thus people won't want to let go of Start even if it is in their longer term interests to learn something better.
It's interesting to note that in Vista, the "Start" label is gone. Presumably Microsoft's usability studies have concluded that the "Start Menu" UI element is now so entrenched, users no longer need to be taught what it is.
I don't think we had sound on our workstations until the Sparcstation 1 or maybe 1+, and we mainly used that for writing to other coworkers' unprotected /dev/audio rather than for anything useful, but an IPC was also fairly easy to carry around...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The most annoying thing about my computer is that stupid Microsoft key. It's placed at such an inconsiderate place. While doing anything, an accidental press of that key will interrupt everything I'm doing and the damn Start menu would pop up.
Every get interrupted while playing a game? You know what I'm talking about.
I'm so tempted to just remove that key physically. Yes I know, Linux.... but I can't use that on my office PC.
Is there any way to disable that M$ key or move map it to another key instead? Having it go to the "Scroll Lock" key would be nice. Out of the way, can be used if needed.
eTrade SUCKS
I just looked at the GUI demo on Microsoft's website, and those "Ribbon" thingys look awfully familiar. I seem to recall seeing something very similar waaay back in the days of Lotus 1-2-3. Of course, 1-2-3 didn't have the silly little pictures, but the menu structure was definitely "ribbons."
Hmm
> Let me start off with a disclaimer: I hate KDE. (Now, now, it's not the time for a flame way! :P)
;-)
And I just love KDE. Glad we took that out of the way. Now, I'm ready when you are...
> Personally, I don't mind that interface. Besides, if that's your only problem with GNOME, then we must have it pretty good!
Well, I don't use it a lot, but I can say I don't mind it much, too. Now, opening file happens all the time everywhere; if people dislike this, it's possible one of the worst places to err. This can sour the whole day-to-day experience. Though, I repeat, in my personal case it's not such a big problem.
> I "strongly dislike" KDE's browsing system (one arrow left, one arrow right, one arrow up, one arrow is a crazy swirl, all so close together and so similar in appearance that it really gets frustrating at times.)
Boy, I was thinking totally the other way. When I want to do operations of the same kind I always expect them to be grouped. It's been so since, what, 25 years ago? Since Wordstar (movement ctrl-keys grouped), XTree (intelligent command grouping at the bottom of the screen)... this simply is logical. Regarding being similar, well, in Windows it's not. So, I keep looking for an up-arrow, which in reality is a folder icon (with an up-arrow in it!). D-U-M-B design!
> And why the default is set to open folders with one click is beyond me.
What's the problem? Every program should be so. Things get so much easier, you even get to save your fingers! And selecting is done by dragging a square around the icon, which makes it similar to other usages in graphic programs (and it's a Graphic User Interface, for starters!). With two-clicks, either I miss the timing and the program does not start after a too long click interval -- or worse, I click twice from conditioned reflex and start things I just meant to select.
> I have one program (Noteedit) that uses the KDE interface, and because of that, I didn't bother downloading all of the customization crap, so I'm stuck with it (if someone has a solution, tell me please!).
Use more KDE programs and get the themes... (me runs laughing)
> Also, the taskbar/menu at the bottom always looks too cluttered to me.
How so? You can select what stays in the toolbar. Right mousebutton, remove. Can't be easier. In fact, it's a little cluttered indeed, but this is a defect it shares with Windows. Maybe the Plasma people can figure out a mouseover way of uncluttering, I don't know. AFAIK, Gnome is the same -- but it has a top toolbar to share the icons (and waste precious screen space).
> And the clock is just ugly.
Gnome has better looks. Period. Everaldo is great. Maybe as much as Jimmac. But Everaldo does icons separately; the Gnom(e) environment is artistically better thought up. See Deviantart for a comparable design. But KDE vastly compensates this with better inner workings.
IMHO, and comparing to cars (again): Gnome has Italian car looks. KDE has German car engineering.
> And why do they stack the window list in two rows?
I guess there's an option for this, I'm not sure. I guess the idea is to save space. I use it vertically and just see the icons, not the descriptions, so I cannot help you here.
> I came over from the Windows world, and was introduced to GNOME and KDE at the same time (I was playing around with SUSE and Fedora). I liked both the same and eventually my final decision came down to the GUI. KDE just hurt my eyes to use. It's a little hard to explain. All of the icons were so...BIG, and pixilated. And despite the fact that KDE looked a lot like XP's UI, I went to GNOME.
And you were right from this point of view. Gnome is more beautiful, KDE requires a lot of tweaking to get as good-looking (but Plasma seems promising). But KDE works a lot better. There's more consistency in how apps look... even if it's not as beautiful, it's a coherent design. Gnome, OTOH, has had many diff
Which of today's innovations will become tomorrow's gaffs?
My prediction is one mentioned in the blurb: the contextual ribbon. It sucked in XP and it looks like it will get worse in Vista. It's an interface designed around the assumption that users cannot learn. It's great for a newbie, but it blows chunks for intermediate and advanced users. It's a usability issue. When menus reorder items the user is unable to learn where they are. Half locations I click on in Windows menus are those stupid down arrows to see the REST of the freaking menu!
If you have too many menu items that you need to start hiding them, start rethinking if you need all those items. Think of <gasp> submenus. Think about other forms of command. Don't throw out the entire menu concept, because it ain't broke!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
How can I as a ./ poster, be expected to read this article?
GIMP has a pretty good separation between the interface and the backing engine. Because of this, you can get something like GIMPShop, which is a Photoshop-style interface atop GIMP's engine. So if you really hate the GIMP's interface, don't use it. Sheesh.
Also, when you say that Photoshop has scripting, do you mean that you can use a full-featured scripting language like Perl to execute Photoshop commands, possibly without even opening the GUI? Or is it an attempt to make a scripting language without requiring the user to type, by recording actions and making the user drag them around? I only saw it once, but it looked like the latter. I could, of course, be wrong.
I still wish GIMP had the "Cutout" plugin that Photoshop has had for years and years. I loved that thing, and "Posterize" just looks like junk in comparison.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
How many chunks does the arrangement of keys on a QWERTY keyboard take up? How many chunks does remembering that the left mouse button is action and the right one is alternate?
I'd be interested in seeing those scientific usability studies you mentioned, as I'd like to to find out why I don't seem to have the problem with GUIs that you describe. (Remembering that "ls" lists files or "rm" deletes them is about as basic as remembering the above "chunks" for me.) Maybe I'm just special.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Sweet merciful Zeus, no. Programming languages (and the UNIX command line) are optimized for people who use it a lot. It's a tradeoff between a steep learning curve and maximal utility once it's been mastered, and a shallow learning curve and a low ceiling on the power that even an adept user can exercise. This is why we have "rm" instead of "delete" and "file" instead of "identifyFileFormat" or some such braindamage.
The UNIX command line has a relatively steep learning curve, though there are ways to help with that. (Tab-completion of long arguments, for instance, helps.) But it's not for the casual user. It's designed to let people who will be spending plenty of time working on these systems do their work as efficiently and powerfully as possible.
None of this means that the GUI doesn't have its place. Nutbars in the above thread aside, graphics editing is an obvious GUI task. But doing nontrivial system administration becomes a bitch to do without a powerful command line.
And what distro ships with csh as its default? Who doesn't use bash?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I think the reason Microsoft changed the menus was that they needed to change SOMETHING that was significant in order to justify calling it a new release.
In answer to the question posed: The gaff that will be seen with 20-20 hindsight in a few years is that Windows can only have a single user interface. If they would isolate (further) the GUI from the rest of the OS they could (like Linux) have a multiplicity of users interfaces and if people were comfortable with the old one they could continue to use it with the new OS (or office version, etc).
Let me know when my scalable fully-vectorized desktop arrives, so that when I score a 300dpi monitor, the only change will be that everything looks a bit sharper.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Sounds like vi.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
...and arbitrarily chosen files.
A nice little command line program to do this is cpio. It has a ton of options and it takes a while to get used to what various option combinations do but the tutorial, info cpio, provides lots of examples. One example: % find . -depth -print0 | cpio --null -pvd new-dir will move any number of arbitrarily named files/sub-directories to a new directory. You can also eliminate files/sub-directories you don't want to pass to the new directory with options but it may be easier to just delete them from the new directory.
...and not a single picture. Of any GUI.
I look forward to the sequel on CLIs with tons of screen caps.
Some car computers and GPS navigation systems do limit the commands you can use while the car is in gear, for example Windows Automotive 5.0's AUIT (Automotive User Interface Toolkit), whose "Driver Distraction Control reports to applications when the car is in drive, so they can limit their functionality.
I'm sure there's a snarky digital rights management joke in there somewhere...
When you start TomTom Navigator, it makes you agree to the following before proceeding: "IMPORTANT: When using navigation aids, both hardware and this software product, it is your sole responsibility to place, secure, and use these aids in a manner that will not cause accidents, personal injury or property damage, or in any way obstruct your view. You, the user of this product, are solely responsible for observing safe driving practices. Do not operate this product while driving. Park the vehicle first. [I Agree]"
The purpose of GPS navigation systems warning people not to use them while driving is to protect the asses of the company that developed it from lawsuits.
The purpose of safer user interfaces requiring less visual attention is to protect the asses (and other parts) of the people driving and riding in cars, and other people sharing the road with them.
I think it's important to go beyond legal disclaimers, and to design safer user interfaces, because protecting people from physical harm is at least as important than protecting companies from lawsuits. Of course people are going to use GPS navigation systems while driving, so they should be designed not to require your undivided visual attention. That's where touch screen pie menus with audio/voice feedback come in handy.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Why do I get the feeling that some joke just went over my head?
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
I'd say gaining complexity is perhaps the definition of evolution, perhaps even including bloat and complexity (even biological systems aren't immune. Lots of complex animals have useless bits left over weighing them down. Appendix, etc).
I agree with most of your other argument but you are flat wrong when you say the appendix is a "useless bit". By some very elementary research it can be seen that the human appendix, for example, is not vestigal and certainly seen to play a part in the immune system. In fact, the appendix can also be found useful for reconstructive surgery. If it has to be removed so be it, but do not classify it as useless just because some biology textbook says so, as research such as above has already been conducted to show that it is useful.
I think the argument is better made that GUIs have evolved too much for their own good. I wonder what would happen if you launched NT 4's explorer.exe in WinXP.... I think i'm gonna go try it...
Let us know the results you find and I hope you don't have anything vital that's not backuped on the machine before attempting your experiment.
At first, I chose to use JavaScript to script my PocketPC application, because it was the most obvious "consumer oriented" scripting language, with a free implementation in C (SpiderMonkey, the original JavaScript engine, built into Firefox and many other applications).
It worked, but it was big and slow. And it was a pain in the ass to interface with C and C++, because SWIG doesn't support it, and it has a really nasty extension API. But I didn't realize how truly horrible it was, until I saw how bad SpiderMonkey JavaScript ranked in the Computer Language Shootout. It's not just the worst, it's MORE THAN TWICE AS BAD as the second worst!
What amazes me about SpiderMonkey JavaScript, is that it manages to be magnificently slow AND waste huge amounts of memory, without actually getting any benefits from all the trade-offs and compromises it made!
It's not just at the bottom of the list of the computer language shootout ranking, it's waaaaay below the next worst language: more than twice as bad, in fact!
Last place SpiderMonkey's ratio to C is 26, while next to last place Smalltalk GST's ratio is 12, so SpiderMonkey's 2.25 times worse than the slowest Smalltalk! (That's with a 1 multiplier for full cpu time and memory use, to consider both.)
In contrast, Lua is the fastest scripting language in the shootout. In a head-to-head comparison with JavaScript, Lua totally smokes JavaScript and leaves it in the dust, with some benchmarks scoring as high as 71, 77, 80 times better than JavaScript.
Lua's an extremely well designed and implemented language, very clean and simple, few compromises and blemishes, excellent licensing terms, very easy to integrate with C and C++ with SWIG and other tools, has few dependencies, runs everywhere, and it's even easy to learn, read and write.
Lua already existed (in an early form) by the time Netscape started kludging together LiveScript then renaming it JavaScript. It would be a better world if Netscape had decided to use Lua instead of inventing their own half-assed language, and getting distracted by the Java Juggernaut.
But in spite of that dot-com-bubble diversion, Lua has finally proven itself, and is extremely popular in the game industry, widely used in games like World of Warcraft. A great way to see how powerful it is, and learn practical Lua programming, is to check out and look at the source code of a sophisticated WOW extension like Auctioneer.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I want to also say that when I say the universe is really simple, I don't mean we can comprehend it. I just mean it's simple.
I often wonder why people continually make this assumption. There is no evidence for this point of view, at least none that I've seen.
Sounds like wishful thinking to me.
A blog about stuff.
I'm on Ubuntu Dapper, which uses GNOME 2.14. (I spend a lot of time in gedit.) What you might want to do is attach a debugger to the hung process then send it signal 11 and get a backtrace to see where it's infinite-looping. Might help the developers. This is assuming you care enough to go through that mess.
I'm inclined to believe this an actual problem because I had a similar one with gnome-cups-icon, where it would eat up all idle CPU time for no apparent reason. It was a real bug, and it did in fact just get fixed. (The bug was in cupsys, though.)
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I understand that bash has a raft of extensions, but sh is its older, standards-compliant moral equivalent. And the original question was really "who uses csh?", which is, apparently, not "nobody" but rather "almost nobody".
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Actually text config files are fine, for any user capable of running a text editor, provided:
1. The program works if the file is missing, or if the file contains syntax errors.
2. Comments are supported and lines can be commented out by putting a # or something at the start of the file.
3. A fully-commented example file is provided, listing every option and what the default value is and what the possible values are. Ideally the program itself can create this if asked.
4. It is easy to load a new configuration. If necessary the program should have command to kill and restart itself.
A gui is nicer but the above will get you 50% of the usablility for about 1% of the work.
Scripting languages are a pain in these files. You can get all the power of it by having a configuration that says "run this script file". Obviously the sourced script can do anything, but all the constant settings can be in a flat file that both the GUI and text editor can update.
Am I the only person who learned keyboard shortcuts by noticing them written on menus? You know, when you hit Edit->Cut, it says Ctrl-X next to "Cut", so that you'll know next time?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Sheez, do I have to deconstruct it for you? The expression means that GIMP wastes a lot of your time, which is not a problem if your time is worthless. But most people value their time as priceless, so it costs them too much to use GIMP. By wasting your own time, you're certainly not hurting Bill Gates or John Warnock.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
It's very practical and the folks who ever get it working *very* well will be rewarded. Want to know why? Think baby boomer generation, older people, disposable income, reaching retirement or comfortable in established jobs-and age related problems like arthritis and a lot of vision problems as well. Stiff fingers or outright pain and loss of function hits a large segment of the population as you get older, and a lot of computing action is going on now in homes. Ya, maybe not practical in cubes yet so much, but seeing as how the telephone has been in offices for generations now and it hasn't stopped business yet with that yakking, I am not seeing vocal user interface as any big problem. Make the cube walls a little higher and thicker and use better sound absorbtion materials and that might help with the noise travelling aspect.
Just out of curiosity, did you post that with Lynx? Given the superiority of text-based interfaces, you wouldn't use a graphical browser would you?
With GNU/Screen, you don't even need that!
My dear, what a statement! You probably also live in a single room house (maybe even in a cave) without a kitchen, cooking on the fire outside and sleeping without a bed on the bottom. Well that's perfectly fine for you if you want it that way but I can assure you that almost all others don't.
Usuful GUIs are an necessity these days as are kitchens. Why do you think hasn't the Linux desktop become a widespread reality? Why do you think is there still a large driver problem for Linux? It's because of people like you who can't understand that even applications need to provide a minimum amount of comfort so they get acceptable by a majority.
What annoys me most is not your statement but that there isn't more protests against it. Sorry I don't care for troll ratings any more but I have to say anybody who agrees with you is just an outdated model of a conservative computer masochist. You are the ones who hampers most that Linux ever gets a chance to become an accepted system on the desktop.
Sorry I'm fed up and don't like to be part of this community anymore.
O. Wyss
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
I can tell you, I have used it, and it is far superior to any other layout scheme in an office suite I've seen. It takes up as much space as a toolbar+menus, it has much larger icons which let you see what effect you are going to have.
I wonder if this would be a benefit for a system, like the Mac, where it already has a mile-high menubar.
The ribbon's icons are bigger, true, but the mile-high menubar takes up less space but is "bigger" to hit with the mouse. (Oh, and since you have one ribbon per window, the Mac menubar takes up *far* less space, overall.)
Perhaps Apple didn't invent this because they didn't need to. It does seem like an awkward interface, but Microsoft did need to do something about their tiny, hard-to-hit menubars. Perhaps it was inevitable that they'd come up with a solution less elegant than just fixing the menubar (which would have the side effect of admitting Apple has been right for the past 20+ years, and they were wrong).
If you are THAT annoyed over the ribbon you are either a) not very smart and has a hard time learning anything new or b) an unapologetic a-priori Microsoft basher. The fact is, it's far better than anything else on the market.
Ah, I love that argument. 'If you don't agree with me, you must be prejudiced, and please disregard the implicit prejudice in this sentence.' (Bonus points for using incorrect grammar in a sentence accusing others of being "not very smart"!)
imagemagick give you the ability to process images and add filters, effects, text, format changes, etc.. not only on one file, but on hundreds at once.
-Woof woof woof!
Yes, PHP is cobbled together in a grotesque way that's like Perl with all the elegance drained off. It's the GUI of programming languages. It's popular, but that doesn't mean it's good.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Eh, I ended up with a spare 2 gig laptop drive from a friend's laptop that was destroyed in several interesting ways, all accidental, so I stuck NT4 on it just for kicks and giggles. Nothing on the main drive dual booting Gentoo and XP I'd hate to lose either.
:) The lack of the knowledge to fiddle with ordinals (or even what the things are... my primary coding experience consists mostly of perl) might have something to do with it. Perhaps I'll revisit it someday - NT 4's interface really flies on this laptop (Dell Latitude C610) compared to XP's. Even my company's crappy ActiveX web-based CRM runs faster on NT 4's standalone IE6 than XP's. Funny how that works out. Just tonight I also got USB working in some usable fashion for thumb drives and HIDs, which surprised me since I'd always been told NT4 just plain couldn't do USB. Only thing left keeping me from just leaving this laptop on NT4 for work is the wireless - I don't think anyone ever made ipw2200 drivers for NT 4.
:P
Unfortunately, it ended up fairly unexciting. Apparently MS did something with ordinal number 510 (or was it 512?) in shell32.dll since NT4. I don't have the inclination to mess with trying to swap out shell32s or try to hack the ordinal back in there, so I'll probably leave it at that
Interesting links on the appendix. I haven't done much (any?) biology since high school, and that's what we were always told. ISTR someone in the class asking why, if it was useless and caused problems when burst, it wasn't just removed at birth and the teacher didn't really have an answer. Gov't schools ftw I suppose
I wouldn't have bought a Mac if the interface looked the same as OS09. Sorry. The UNIX guts were nice, but I could get a PC laptop for half the price and run somthing better than OS9 in front of Linux. The OS9->OSX transition took very little difficulty even after having used the old interface for about eight years.
I regularly switch between XP and KDE. XP is standard with the taskbar on the bottom, KDE has the taskbar on autohide on the left of the screen. It takes zero effort to reorient your brain between tasks. In a regular day I use intefaces on KDE, XP, OSX, a PSP, and a DS in addition to whatever video games I play, to do basically the same thing.
I love the vestigal argument. "We don't know what this organ does yet so it must do nothing." Way to go, thats how you expand your horizons! Talk about thinking outside the box. No organ, tissue or cell in your body is vestigal, they all serve their purpose, even if we don't know what it is right now. I mean, the egyptians were the smartest civilisation of their time and they thought the brain was useless. Hmm, then again......
my utility belt tells me its to the bar batman
As Ambrose Bierce defined a cabbage: a vegeatble about the size of a man's head, and as wise.
Most GUI menus seem to suffer from the "its got to look cool" effect and to hell with the overall functionality. Any interface should be designed with efficiency in mind although what is efficient to one becomes a nightmare to another. In many cases the so called efficient interface is decided on by people who will hardly ever use it and the person who has the job of actually doing the work is stuck with it.
When people get stuck in an inefficient process they either leave (normally the best solution) or just put their brain in neutral and do what they are told without really thinking even if what they are told to do is really stupid.
Most people can learn good computing skills if they feel that they have some control but many people don't have any control and seem to have accepted that they can just go up to a computer and "magical things" happen. Change in business rarely comes from the rank and file workers but the managers and if those managers have very little IT knowledge or just "follow the leader" can you blame people for just doing their job without really thinking.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
The designers of TOPS-20s understood how "human engineering" and user interface design applied to command line interfaces and language design.
-Don
http://www.linique.com/dlm/tenex/hbook.html
Origins and Development of TOPS-20
by Dan Murphy Copyright (c) 1989, 1996 - Dan Murphy
Another area where TENEX, and later TOPS-20, excelled was in the user interface, described in detail below. A key reason that we were able to extend the user interface so significantly is that the code which implemented it ran an an ordinary user program. Hence, it wasn't constrained by size or limited by functions which could not be performed in kernel mode. Beyond that, debugging it was much simpler -- it didn't require stand-alone use of the machine as did kernel debugging. All of this allowed a great deal of experimentation and evolution based on tuning and feedback from real use and real users.
User-oriented Design Philosophy
A piece of system design "philosophy" had emerged at BBN and among some of the ARPA research sites that was to have a large impact on the overall feel of TENEX and, ultimately, TOPS-20. At the time, we called this "human engineering" -- we wanted the system to be easy to learn and easy to use, and we wanted the system to take care of as many grungy details as possible so that the programmer or user did not have to deal with them. Beyond that, we were willing to spend real machine cycles and real (or at least virtual) memory to make this happen.
This philosophy led initially to the human interface features of the EXEC, including "escape recognition", the question-mark help facility, optional subcommands, and "noise" words. Few people now argue against the need to provide effective human interfaces, but at that time there were many detractors who felt that it was a waste of cycles to do such things as command recognition. These kinds of things, they said, would "slow the system down" and prevent "useful work" from getting done. Other contemporary systems used short, often one-letter, commands and command arguments, provided no on-line help, and did not give any response to the user other than the "answer" (if any) to the command that had been entered.
Computer use by non-experts
Many such systems fell into the "by experts, for experts" category. That is, they were built by experts and intended to be used by other experts. An "expert" would obviously not need frivolous features like noise words or command recognition. Experts would know, not only all the commands, but all the legal abbreviations as well. Experts may have read the manual once, but would always remember everything needed to interact with the system. So went the implicit assumptions about users -- either you were an expert, or you were an inferior being not really entitled to use the Computer anyway.
The TENEX team took a different view. It was clear that the power of computers was increasing every year and so one should expect the computer to do more and more interesting things. Most people would agree that a major purpose of computer automation is to relieve people of boring, repetitive tasks; we believed that purpose extended to computer system development as well, and that it was wrong to require a person to learn some new set of boring, arcane tasks in order to use the computer. The machine should adapt to man, not man to the machine.
The view was probably reinforced by the artificial intelligence research being done in the environment where TENEX was designed. In such areas as speech recognition, pattern recognition, and natural language comprehension, massive computation power was being applied to make computers interact in ways that would be more human. These were long-term efforts, but we wanted our computer systems to be more human-oriented in the sort term as well.
One of the ideas to come out of the AI re
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Just because you CAN change something, why turn it into a fashion thing and cause all those IT novices to have to relearn a GUI? Most novices I train don't want to learn new programs let alone new window GUIs - it's the single most popular reason for not switching to Linux for a novice used to Windows.
... the controls on a JCB digger do not change every few years in order to sell more JCBs. Hi Fi systems went into complexity in the 70's with people wanting more knobs and buttons to show how sophisticated they were. Most people's Hi Fi gear now consists of an ipod and speakers with just a couple of knobs and switches.
... what is important is LONGTERM stability in an interface so that everyone can learn it and trust it and trust themselves to be able to use it and continue gaining skill in using it. This is NOT a competition to get the most usable GUI or easiest to train on ... that development cycle may never end.
Cars do not have a new pedal layout every few years
Seriously
Meanwhile if you want to be able to TALK to the PC controlled house of the future isn't that more like the command line? Talking is the future. And talking takes place on a 1-dimensional time line not a 2d or 3d GUI screen.
If we compare the first GUIs from Xerox to the most advanced GUIs today, what has really changed is the graphical effects and the number of available options. The rest are the same: the GUI includes commands, options and canvases where the user clicks, drags the mouse and types in using the keyboard.
Don't change the position of menu items and controls, highlight or emphasize controls the AI thinks will be useful. Instead of tucking away infrequently used menu items under a submenu or pinning frequently used controls onto a ribbon, why not just change the color or text size of menus/controls according to past use or predicted use?
AI should point out where the menus/controls are rather than risk disorienting the user by moving them around. For example, if the AI determines that the user will probably want to sort the selected data, maybe the menu containing sort can change to a "hot" color while, say, the view menu turns cooler. This way the program is teaching the user a consistent way to do the task.
This is already being done in WinXP, e.g. newly installed programs are highlighted. Visual Studio also has a nice dynamic help panel that directs you how to do things rather than just doing it for you (and leaving you at the whim of the AI when you need to do the task next time).
When I teach people how to use a program, I often find myself telling the user what parts of the window/screen are significant to look at during what particular tasks. Computers are gradually getting better at guessing what you want to do, but since we're not there yet, let's keep the AI's predictions suggestions instead of a forced rearranging of your environment.
If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must mod me +5 Insightful.
But he doesn't live on Endor, so your post is not... Oh damn.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Meta will eat itself
I wish I had mod points now - this comment deserves a +5 funny
Except that "evolution" in this sense in no way applies to non-biological things. If you use evolution just to mean "change," then yes, computers and software have evolved, as in changed. But despite the word looking the same and seeming so convenient, you can't transition and make an analogy with biological evolution, because the word in that context doesn't mean anything even remotely like what it does whe talking about the "evolution" of Windows. So your analogy not only doesn't work, but does damage to the scientific theory you're trying to analogize Windows to, not only via guilt by association, but because your murky reasoning will be taken by some people to mean "aha! evolution doesn't make any sense! it's just like with computers..."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://www.videobomb.com/posts/show/3863
What in XP used the ribbon? The first, and as far as I know only, apps to use the ribbon are the new office products that are just now in beta. Personally, I love the ribbon. Doesn't take long at all to get used to and works extremely well.
What in XP used this robbon that you think sucked?
Of course if you have a non native English accent you are toast.
Funnily enough some voice recognition applications play nice with me if I fake a US accent! (West or East Coast, LA or NY if you get my drift. My Texan does not seem to fare very well, but that may be politically motivated by politically conscious but overenthusiastic developers...).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I often wonder why people continually make this assumption. There is no evidence for this point of view, at least none that I've seen. It's an artifact of a certain kind of thinking. Engineers, physicists, IT geeks, most of these are "bottom up" thinkers, which point of view assumes that everything is pretty simple, reductionism ad absurdio is a good idea, etc. But these points of view have difficulty handling interaction effects and forms, hence you have physics textbooks with passages like "Imagine a spherical or point-shaped cow..." Example, my roommate programmed this simulation of ant behavior. Ants act radically different in groups than they do alone--their behavior forms spatial patterns and also patterns in the time scale. So he reads up on ant behavior and makes this part of the simulation--"See? The complex behavior is part of the ant." But he doesn't seem to want to wrap his brain around the idea that the complex behavior was not observable by one ant alone, so the complex behavior is not just an aggregation of individual behaviors. They acted properly because he made them act properly, but the internal rules that actually govern the behavior are unknown. There may be limits to our cognitive ability to understand the universe, ergo, it will always remain complex--assuming it is not does not mean that it is not...not if you're really a scientist (empiricist) anyway. 'Course, I could be completely full of shit, who knows?
Ok, let me preface with the fact I've not seen the Vista UI yet, but when the article talked about the ribbon interface that changes based on what component had control, all I could think of was the old Lotus interface that didn't have drop down menus, but replaced the main bar with the sub-options depending on what you were doing.
Can anyone say if the ribbon model is similar?
So instead they're doing maladaptive behaviors. Sounds about right.
If everyone was 400% more efficient with text based consoles, we would need less people employed
and more people as slum sucking looosers on the street.
Havent you learned, in-effecient systems keep more populace employed and thus under more control.
Besides, keyboards suck, when you're drunk and want to get some work done.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
But I do want an affordable two foot by four foot screen so I can lay out all my work within view like a real desk. _Then_ I'll think about power gloves and the like to manipulate objects.
Indeed, Tenex did it first, but UNIX does it now -- specifically bash, but other modern shells as well. Even Windows' cmd.exe has a tab-completion feature, though it has to be enabled in the registry, and it kind of sucks.
.ps files in the current directory.)
I understand that tab completion is a good idea. I agree that tab completion is a good idea. How exactly is UNIX "so far behind"? Current tab-completion works not only on command names, but paths and program parameters. It allows for filtering by file type. (For instance, typing ps2pdf will only display
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
How can an article about GUIs not have any pictures? They can't honestly expect me to read that.
I often wonder why people continually make this assumption. There is no evidence for this point of view, at least none that I've seen.
I'm not sure I'm wrong, and I'm aware it's an assumption. But I think that people continually make that assumption, because of what I said about scientific breakthrough. In the cycle of scientific advancement, there come points where everything we "know" is explainable by a very simple expression. Then we learn more things, and have to keep adding conceptual limbs until the whole thing's a big flow chart of except-whens. It's like the software development cycle. Every once in a while, there are so many new features and new stuff the devs want to implement that a rewrite of the code becomes the most logical step, and it returns the code to relative elegance and simplicity once again.
So much for why people assume the universe is simple. Why do people assume the universe is complex? You can't argue the "evidence" point, either, because I think that evidence, according to your definition, is complex. A description of something always loses the elegance of the thing itself. Like a translation or transliteration. I think it's evident that the universe is simple, but notice how simple the preceding paragraph is.
So again, why assume the universe is complex?
Please stop stalking me, bro.
NT4 has a faster Windows Explorer and Start menu. Probably because is not "web based", and you can't do some things on it like move Start menu items around. But it is very fast. I even used NT4's shell32 (and comdlg32) in Windows 2000 for a while. Until I accepted the fate of slowness. I still think the XP Start menu is slow. (w/o the useless delay, of course)
Someone wrote USB drivers for NT4. (I think I posted that here years ago). You can also install DirectX 5 beta (no hardware 3D, but some old cards had accelerated OpenGL drivers). There are probably too many updates after sp6a, and a lot of extra random stuff because a lot of servers ran NT4.
I remember when Microsoft was proud of their drop-down menus on Windows 3.0. It was really fast. Those times will never return, when speed was the priority, stupid useless fancy stuff was the last. Probably MS Bob was a preview of the doom of computing power. I still can't believe Windows includes a 70's-like Calculator running in a PC probably more powerful than a 70's supercomputer.
> I haven't done much (any?) biology since high school, and that's what we were always told.
Mmmm. In chemistry we were told at one point that electrons orbit atoms like planets orbiting a star, going round and round in more-or-less circular paths. This is, of course, a load of hooey. In the first place, electrons are attracted by electromagnetic force, not by gravity, and in the second place, electrons are subatomic particles, which do not, in fact, behave like miniature charged marbles.
As for the appendix, it *does* in fact serve a physiological purpose, just not one that is as easy to understand or quantify as a lot of organs. The same is true of the tonsils.
In short, the world is more complicated than undergraduate-level textbooks like to explain. You'll do well to remember that. It applies to more subjects than just science.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
People having been talking about this for decades (no pun intended), but its computing-while-driving that seems to be pushing this appoach. You dont want a driver's eyes and hands distracted. Yet s/he may want map directions, car status, text-messaging/mail, and sound entertainment.
I'm still waiting for a combination GUI & CLI interface ala Autocad. Being able to enter commands in the CLI to manipulate files that are selected in the GUI would be fab.
If you can remove something - the appendix for example - and not notice it's gone, I'd say that's a pretty good indication that it didn't do anything. Same deal for eyes on blind cave fish, wings on ostriches, a whale's hind legs, etcetera. No amount of 'out-of-the-box' thinking is going to arrive at a use for hind legs on a whale.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
I don't know if the universe is simple because I don't know how to define "simple." But I do think the universe is simpler than we assume. Much of the complexity we see arises from simple interactions of simple agents. Whenever you have simple forces/molecules/cells/ants whatever interacting, obeying to simple rules, their population behaviour is sometimes very complex to describe. We usually attribute complexity to these behaviours, overlooking their simple roots. As we learn more about what governs these emergent complexity, thing become simpler. You could say that the complexity emerged is every bit as defining as simplicity of its causes, but I think the emergent behaviour is secondary and the its simple roots are primary simply as a result of causation. If you accept this POV, classifying complex emergent phenomena as "simple" as long as its foundations are simple, you have your evidence. The history of science is abound with examples of explaining complex phenomena with simple causes.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Good to see you're still around, "C.W.". ;)
-- There is no truth. There is only Perception. To Percieve is to Exist.
I must commend you on the guide linked in your sig, I assume you're the author. I read it, and it's very good. It probably won't make any new converts, but it's an extremely useful primer for the ones that are curious and seriously want to give Linux a whirl. Having been on Linux for a while, I would absolutely have benefited from it when I switched.
I'll read it more thoroughly later, and come back to you with comments if I have any.
No karma bonus because of OT, but to fellow Slashdotters: Give it a read, it's well written and definitely worth a look.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
While your point is valid, some of your history is not:
The Apple menu in Systems 1-6 was not used as a launch bar or anything else of the sort. In most cases it contained an item called "About [program name]", a divider, and a list of Desk Accessories*. Regular programs could not be launched from the Apple menu at all (at least not directly), and there was no way for a user to manipulate the contents other than by installing and removing Desk Accessories.
Starting in System 7 the Apple menu could be used as a launch bar, and eventually even got support for hierarchial folders for things like "Recent Documents". But it was intended as a user-customizable shortcut bar, and to provide access to legacy Desk Acessory-like programs, not as the primary launch system.
At no time did the Apple menu allow you to do anything other than launch a program or Desk Accessory (though in the System 7.5 days there was a program that initiated a shutdown). The "Special" menu provided functions like "Shutdown" until OS X, and in OS X the Apple menu is a lot like the "Special" menu from pre-X days.
*Desk Accessories were very limited programs that had to be installed into the resource fork of the System file. They ran in the address space of a regular program, and did not even have access to draw their own menus. In System 7 they got their own address space and a default set of menus as legacy support, and developers were encouraged to create stand-alone programs instead of Desk Accessories.
We have 23 chromosomes, full of DNA. A lot of it is junk data. Many other creatures have 20, 26, 12, 4... whatever. Bacteria have a tiny fraction of this amount of DNA. Viruses an even tinier fraction.
Of course life got more complex. We just reached a 'sufficient' level of complexity millions of years ago. You can surely bet that early land animals, 900 million years ago, had a lot less DNA than the average reptile nowadays.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
FWIW, I run kcalc on Linux all the time, even often when I have multiple OOo Calc windows open.
Don't knock simple single-purpose utilities.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
It's a shame they didn't just label it "Menu", since selecting it gives you, well, a menu. Perhaps that would have been too simple, or forced too many people to reach for their dictionaries :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I thought I made it clear that cpio was anything but intuitive:
but do you feel that cpio isn't a useful tool for some reason? I am always eager to learn from my mistakes and misconceptions from those with different experience and knowledge.The last time I used cpio I moved over a 100 files and sub-directories, all of different file types, maintaining permissions and structure with one command which, I thought, was pretty cool.
The purpose of the Start Menu was to avoid the inevitable look-and-feel lawsuit from Apple. Windows 3.x's Program Manager made it look too much like a Mac. So they crammed it all into one impossible-to-navigate but easy-to-defend-in-court menu.
Chewbacca and the Wookies live on Kashyyyk. The Ewoks live on a moon of Endor, not Endor itself.
Sorry, we'll have to rescind that +5 insightful, now.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
I find it preposterous that any self-respecting /.er (DISCLAIMER: I don't respect myself, specifically BECAUSE I'm a /.er) wouldn't have heard of the Chewbacca Defense. But I suppose anything's possible.
Here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_Defense
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Why would they do that when they were creating a system *after* Apple (thankfully) lost the "Look and Feel" court case ?
"Start/Shutdown is so logically broken,"
Start is where you go to start a process. Where else would you go to Start your Shutdown process? I've heard this (logically broken) a lot, but I've never seen a real demonstration that it is actually true. All I've seen is some intellectual wanking of the "Shutdown is a finish task; finish and start are antonyms; therefore, the menu should be called something other than start" sort. Does anyone have actual evidence that more people stare at the screen wondering, "Where could shutdown be? All I see is 'Start'" than people would stare at the screen wondering, "What should I do now? I see a menu button and some pretty pictures and a clock."
I.e. I've never seen a good demonstration that conjoining two words that are antonyms in one context is a bad UI.
Well FYI: text == graphics, in case you didn't notice. Ever hear of fonts, glyphs, unicode, typesetting, layout, flow, justification, css styles, colorization, syntax highlighting, selection, cut and paste, drag and drop, scrolling, outlining, collapsing, linking, etc? So yes, texual user interfaces == graphical user interfaces, unless you're reading text as braille.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
I didn't mean to say that you were trying to prove that it was as trivial. My only point was that in the context of this debate, your comment was pretty funny, even if coincidentally so.