But I think these complex tools are an exception, and I would not provide tools like that to the vast majority of people who are better served by a simple editor like TextEdit (which is far simpler, but also far more powerful than Notepad).
That's fine, nobody is saying that everyone needs Maya. You were saying, however, that menus are a sign that a program is "too complicated", and to that I strongly disagree.
Menus are an important aspect of a program's accessibility, this is especially true on a Mac! Menus are fundamental to the architecture of the system, and programmers are encouraged to replicate all important functionality within them for this reason. They allow the handicapped access to functions that might be otherwise difficult or impossible to navigate to using stepwise controls, tongue sticks for the quadriplegics, voice commands, Braille systems, or VoiceOver. For beginners and intermediate users, they provide training wheels toward learning keyboard shortcuts and what the software is capable of. They make the Help menu more useful as you can search for features using common language. For power users they provide extensive automation hooks (especially where there is no AppleScript dictionary) and customisation since on a Mac, menus are fully keyboard customisable.
This stuff is useful, even essential, from Stickies on up. Just because you don't need it doesn't mean the software doesn't either, as a tool for many. You don't know how I use a computer, I don't know how you use yours. You can't make assumptions about design based on your usage patterns or preferences.
Oh come on, this is just brushing the problem under the rug. You're moving all of that complexity out of view, but you're not removing it.
You misunderstand me. Part of the problem with the UI you posted a link to is that because of the irrational fear of using menus, they have had to relocate bog standard application control functions as permanently visible buttons. By simply adding a File menu and a Help menu, you could remove 25% of the clutter in this screenshot. Next, some of these things are clearly configuration related, rather than something you need constant access to, such as proxies. They can be located in menus as toggles, or in a preference window.
The answer isn't to strip out all of the features, but to create a design that supports the features, and part of that is putting standard (such as File:Quit) or seldom-used stuff (like links to a web page) into menus.
The fact that it's a front-end to wget points to the fact that the UI of the underlying command prompt is the source of the design problem...
I don't really follow that argument. Modern CLI is as much for automation as it is for the user. Geeks use this stuff to build complex toolchains and to configure systems for unattended operation. Think of command-line flags as a sort of "API" and you're closer to the truth. Since commands are simple text strings, they can be constructed programmatically, parsed and dropped into anything that can store text.
How a user-land GUI approaches the underlying tool has nothing to do with the underlying tool's "API" save for its core feature breadth (though there is much you can do on top of an API of course). It's the responsibility of the programmer/designer to turn the raw functionality of the tool into a system that humans can interface with efficiently.
The whole example is kind of contrived, but the point is that engineers design poor UIs.
Indeed, to the point that it doesn't serve your argument well at all. A front-end to wget is hardly an example of something that needs to be made as simple as TextEdit. It's a power tool to start with, and the basic goal of it is in itself a complex task, so much so that you'd have to describe what it even does to the average person who doesn't conceptu
As to the quality, I've never noticed it being significantly worse than Apple's DVD player, the main difference being interlacing, you have to remember to turn deinterlacing on if you leave it off for other things--and yes, without proper deinterlacing it can look pretty awful.
But then, I don't watch films on a home theatre rig or anything fancy. Perhaps I am a bit of a troglodyte in that regard. My computer monitor and headphones is sufficient for me to enjoy the experience, so maybe I'm not seeing what would otherwise be obvious if I tried to use VLC on a large television screen or projector.
Because downloading is kind of lame & takes hours if you have normal Internet access speeds. I prefer to rent DVDs because the quality is significantly superior and I like the commentary and behind the scenes stuff. Just rip the DVD and return it, it is fun to browse at the rental place if it is a good one. Lots of esoteric old titles nobody bothers to seed.
Try VLC. It is the only thing I will use to watch DVDs these days. For one thing you can start playing the film immediately for most discs, just stick it in and load with menus skipped. For those discs that put other crap in the 1-1 position, loading to the menu means just that. No preview bullshit, no restricted navigation, no tedious animated menu effects, just straight to the navigation point, click play and the film starts without every other authoritative government's angry and unskippable piracy warnings.
I'd much prefer many small programs that do very few things, very easily and very well; versus large programs that try to be everything to everyone. Incidentally, that is also the unix philosophy.
Yes, but as you know, that philosophy of a thing doing one thing well, is a statement on the scope of any particular piece of software, not its depth or capabilities. A program can, and likely should, go to whatever depth is necessary within its scope. If I want to do some serious text editing, I want a deep text editor like Sublime or gVim, not something like TextEdit or Notepad.exe. Some people can get by with those all right, and indeed I use simple programs like that if all I need is to quickly change a typo in a.txt file--but often I need more. All of these examples are text editors, they have a similar narrow scope, their "thing", they stick with what they should be doing and nothing more--however there is a huge difference between Notepad.exe and gVim when it comes to depth within that scope.
I don't get your screenshot though, how is this supporting your case? That seems, actually, to be a prime example of a utility that would really benefit from a few menus! I mean, this is exactly why menus are a good thing. Look, they even waste space with buttons for "Exit", "Save" and Load! What a waste of space and mental serenity. Bad as that is though, I don't see anything here that would classify as being out of scope, or example of software that is trying to do too many things. All of these are integral to the function of page scouring--one thing--and thus good example of a narrow scope with depth (as would be wget, the underlying engine behind this particular front-end).
I shudder to think what is behind that "Pro Mode" though. Ha.
Oh please. Unless you want a world full of foolish "apps" instead of honest to goodness software that can actually do more than three things, getting rid of menus is woefully stupid. It's not "hiding" commands to put things in menus. The menu system is an extremely efficient triggering and referencing system, as efficient to use with a mouse as a keyboard. It makes everything easy to find, not hard.
That is not to say that every program needs a menu, but they are the exceptions. Serious software with anaemic menus is not even worth the download bandwidth and are deleted from my computer promptly. That includes crappy consumer oriented browsers like Chrome.
I am confused, the suggestion was to use an E Ink device for reading, not to buy a dozen (or presumably eleven if you already have a phone) different gadgets.
That is an interesting and novel idea you have there. Kudos for coming up with that line of thinking, yourself. It might not have much merit in the practical world, but it is catchy, and I bet you could get a lot of people blindly repeating it as though it were a proven fact, based on that.
Bullshit. The World Wide Web ran just fine for over a decade without excruciating ads everywhere. And yes, if you were to ask me which version of the Web I would take, the free but relatively low-key, or the highly commodified wasteland of Capitalism run amok, then of course I would take the old WWW back. I would gladly see this whole JavaScript, Flash riddled shallow 'social' monster that it has become, vanish without a trace.
If running with AdBlock contributes in some small way to the decline of the materialistic money grubbing component of the Web that I despise, well that is all the more reason to run it. And Gladly.
You should be relying upon bandwidth throttling features to do that for you, not the inefficiency of your tech. Speed is vital in this market because speed reduces the chances of causing data conflicts. Slow and steady background uploads increase risk of conflicts as the average user doesn't pay attention to upload/download status before shutting down a machine or resuming work. Faster transfer reduce problematic "lazy" sync usage at a statistical scale.
Yeah, I tend to switch around plug-ins, as Google changes things to mess up downloaders, downloaders adapt, but not at an equal rate. Right now this one seems to be working (so long as 720p is fine):
Indeed, I'm not running Flash either. I don't even have it installed. That is why I mentioned using a download utility to acquire videos from websites rather than viewing them in page.
Only a small minority of sites flat out won't work without scripting. Just cruise past those idiot webmasters (they were probably making Flash only sites back in the day) and find an analogous site, there are usually many.
Then there are some that bitch if you have it off, like YouTube (they cannot track you as well without it, which is why they whine). But they are still functional. I can make full use of YouTube without scripting, with a Flash downloader. I get better performance than with their shitty streaming thing, anyway.
And always send feedback if a company or individual is clearly clueless over how scripting should be optional to the functioning of a site. If you never write in, they will never know their site is broken in a secured environment.
Actually, speaking globally the average person with access to technology does pirate media and software. They might not be using Bittorrent, but the guy that burned the 500 Best Software DVD likely is. The average person is buying it from a street vendor. So with distribution as with the initial crack, it only takes a few people to facilitate, or "mainstream", if you wish, piracy.
Isn't that basically what I said? I think you're misreading me. SeaMonkey is an evolution from Mozilla as Firefox is, they are two separate forks from the same source, but SeaMonkey retains the core Mozilla design in its browser component (not to mention the suite aspect) whereas Firefox has gone consumer-oriented. However both started out from Mozilla, so saying that SeaMonkey is more like how Firefox used to be is not inaccurate.
Yeah, it still includes everything the old Mozilla suite did, though you can largely ignore all of that. I don't use ChatZilla and all that. The only important thing to me is that the browser component is sufficiently configurable and efficient. Firefox had the right idea to begin with, way back when, but in my opinion it has gone too far along the path of simplification and just seems to be trying to play catch up with a false target these days. I stopped using it several years ago when it was clear that the vision for Firefox wasn't in line with what I wanted out of a browser.
Opera died in the sense that it is no longer a leader in browser technology, as it has been for well over a decade, and is just skinning the Chromium project now. Out of context, that's okay, there have been plenty of skinning projects over the years that have been worth merit, but its the equivalent of say, Mozilla just giving up and using the IE engine and building a shell around it. They have ditched all of their code, from what I can tell, and unless you are keen on Chromium in general, I don't really see why you would be inclined to use the newer Opera versions over grabbing the latest Chromium build.
Opera before the transition vs. now simply is not comparable on any grounds. I used Opera for years, it was my favourite browser even though it didn't have the extension library that FF did, in large part because it natively did what it needed to do without extensions, and I liked their M2 client as well, which was one of the few e-mail clients that captured some of what Gmail got right. But, all of that is gone now. 100%, gone.
Perhaps some day they will rebuild some of their legacy, but I'm not crossing my fingers, especially with the misguided notions about bookmarks being worthless and so on.
In the past few years I've taken to just not even using a stylesheet when I browse. This isn't always easy to do in the browser, but some extensions can help. Web Developer extension can assign a keyboard shortcut so that if the design is super offensive I can just go back to something that uses a font size and window width I prefer. It often means scrolling past a header area rife with bullet lists, but that's an acceptable compromise for me.
Unfortunately some sites do not even gracefully degrade to simple display such as that, as they have a bunch of dumb Javascript stuff that is hidden by default, like "Page didn't load successfully" messages and progress spinners doing nothing. Ha. Yeah, it is getting to the point where browsing the web is like reading a crappy grocery stand magazine. I find myself doing less and less of it as well.
Maybe all of us that care should just move back to Gopher.:)
Have a look at SeaMonkey. It is the way Firefox used to be before it all started to go to shit when Chrome came out. It is as far as I know, the last real browser being maintained, since Opera died.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but six months is, at least, 40 or 50 major version increments for trendy browsers like Chrome and Firefox.
Right.
I could care less what you think!
That's fine, nobody is saying that everyone needs Maya. You were saying, however, that menus are a sign that a program is "too complicated", and to that I strongly disagree.
Menus are an important aspect of a program's accessibility, this is especially true on a Mac! Menus are fundamental to the architecture of the system, and programmers are encouraged to replicate all important functionality within them for this reason. They allow the handicapped access to functions that might be otherwise difficult or impossible to navigate to using stepwise controls, tongue sticks for the quadriplegics, voice commands, Braille systems, or VoiceOver. For beginners and intermediate users, they provide training wheels toward learning keyboard shortcuts and what the software is capable of. They make the Help menu more useful as you can search for features using common language. For power users they provide extensive automation hooks (especially where there is no AppleScript dictionary) and customisation since on a Mac, menus are fully keyboard customisable.
This stuff is useful, even essential, from Stickies on up. Just because you don't need it doesn't mean the software doesn't either, as a tool for many. You don't know how I use a computer, I don't know how you use yours. You can't make assumptions about design based on your usage patterns or preferences.
You misunderstand me. Part of the problem with the UI you posted a link to is that because of the irrational fear of using menus, they have had to relocate bog standard application control functions as permanently visible buttons. By simply adding a File menu and a Help menu, you could remove 25% of the clutter in this screenshot. Next, some of these things are clearly configuration related, rather than something you need constant access to, such as proxies. They can be located in menus as toggles, or in a preference window.
The answer isn't to strip out all of the features, but to create a design that supports the features, and part of that is putting standard (such as File:Quit) or seldom-used stuff (like links to a web page) into menus.
I don't really follow that argument. Modern CLI is as much for automation as it is for the user. Geeks use this stuff to build complex toolchains and to configure systems for unattended operation. Think of command-line flags as a sort of "API" and you're closer to the truth. Since commands are simple text strings, they can be constructed programmatically, parsed and dropped into anything that can store text.
How a user-land GUI approaches the underlying tool has nothing to do with the underlying tool's "API" save for its core feature breadth (though there is much you can do on top of an API of course). It's the responsibility of the programmer/designer to turn the raw functionality of the tool into a system that humans can interface with efficiently.
Indeed, to the point that it doesn't serve your argument well at all. A front-end to wget is hardly an example of something that needs to be made as simple as TextEdit. It's a power tool to start with, and the basic goal of it is in itself a complex task, so much so that you'd have to describe what it even does to the average person who doesn't conceptu
As to the quality, I've never noticed it being significantly worse than Apple's DVD player, the main difference being interlacing, you have to remember to turn deinterlacing on if you leave it off for other things--and yes, without proper deinterlacing it can look pretty awful.
But then, I don't watch films on a home theatre rig or anything fancy. Perhaps I am a bit of a troglodyte in that regard. My computer monitor and headphones is sufficient for me to enjoy the experience, so maybe I'm not seeing what would otherwise be obvious if I tried to use VLC on a large television screen or projector.
Because downloading is kind of lame & takes hours if you have normal Internet access speeds. I prefer to rent DVDs because the quality is significantly superior and I like the commentary and behind the scenes stuff. Just rip the DVD and return it, it is fun to browse at the rental place if it is a good one. Lots of esoteric old titles nobody bothers to seed.
Try VLC. It is the only thing I will use to watch DVDs these days. For one thing you can start playing the film immediately for most discs, just stick it in and load with menus skipped. For those discs that put other crap in the 1-1 position, loading to the menu means just that. No preview bullshit, no restricted navigation, no tedious animated menu effects, just straight to the navigation point, click play and the film starts without every other authoritative government's angry and unskippable piracy warnings.
You can practically follow the plot!
Yes, but as you know, that philosophy of a thing doing one thing well, is a statement on the scope of any particular piece of software, not its depth or capabilities. A program can, and likely should, go to whatever depth is necessary within its scope. If I want to do some serious text editing, I want a deep text editor like Sublime or gVim, not something like TextEdit or Notepad.exe. Some people can get by with those all right, and indeed I use simple programs like that if all I need is to quickly change a typo in a .txt file--but often I need more. All of these examples are text editors, they have a similar narrow scope, their "thing", they stick with what they should be doing and nothing more--however there is a huge difference between Notepad.exe and gVim when it comes to depth within that scope.
I don't get your screenshot though, how is this supporting your case? That seems, actually, to be a prime example of a utility that would really benefit from a few menus! I mean, this is exactly why menus are a good thing. Look, they even waste space with buttons for "Exit", "Save" and Load! What a waste of space and mental serenity. Bad as that is though, I don't see anything here that would classify as being out of scope, or example of software that is trying to do too many things. All of these are integral to the function of page scouring--one thing--and thus good example of a narrow scope with depth (as would be wget, the underlying engine behind this particular front-end).
I shudder to think what is behind that "Pro Mode" though. Ha.
Oh please. Unless you want a world full of foolish "apps" instead of honest to goodness software that can actually do more than three things, getting rid of menus is woefully stupid. It's not "hiding" commands to put things in menus. The menu system is an extremely efficient triggering and referencing system, as efficient to use with a mouse as a keyboard. It makes everything easy to find, not hard.
That is not to say that every program needs a menu, but they are the exceptions. Serious software with anaemic menus is not even worth the download bandwidth and are deleted from my computer promptly. That includes crappy consumer oriented browsers like Chrome.
I am confused, the suggestion was to use an E Ink device for reading, not to buy a dozen (or presumably eleven if you already have a phone) different gadgets.
That is an interesting and novel idea you have there. Kudos for coming up with that line of thinking, yourself. It might not have much merit in the practical world, but it is catchy, and I bet you could get a lot of people blindly repeating it as though it were a proven fact, based on that.
Bullshit. The World Wide Web ran just fine for over a decade without excruciating ads everywhere. And yes, if you were to ask me which version of the Web I would take, the free but relatively low-key, or the highly commodified wasteland of Capitalism run amok, then of course I would take the old WWW back. I would gladly see this whole JavaScript, Flash riddled shallow 'social' monster that it has become, vanish without a trace.
If running with AdBlock contributes in some small way to the decline of the materialistic money grubbing component of the Web that I despise, well that is all the more reason to run it. And Gladly.
You should be relying upon bandwidth throttling features to do that for you, not the inefficiency of your tech. Speed is vital in this market because speed reduces the chances of causing data conflicts. Slow and steady background uploads increase risk of conflicts as the average user doesn't pay attention to upload/download status before shutting down a machine or resuming work. Faster transfer reduce problematic "lazy" sync usage at a statistical scale.
Yeah, I tend to switch around plug-ins, as Google changes things to mess up downloaders, downloaders adapt, but not at an equal rate. Right now this one seems to be working (so long as 720p is fine):
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...
Indeed, I'm not running Flash either. I don't even have it installed. That is why I mentioned using a download utility to acquire videos from websites rather than viewing them in page.
Only a small minority of sites flat out won't work without scripting. Just cruise past those idiot webmasters (they were probably making Flash only sites back in the day) and find an analogous site, there are usually many.
Then there are some that bitch if you have it off, like YouTube (they cannot track you as well without it, which is why they whine). But they are still functional. I can make full use of YouTube without scripting, with a Flash downloader. I get better performance than with their shitty streaming thing, anyway.
And always send feedback if a company or individual is clearly clueless over how scripting should be optional to the functioning of a site. If you never write in, they will never know their site is broken in a secured environment.
Actually, speaking globally the average person with access to technology does pirate media and software. They might not be using Bittorrent, but the guy that burned the 500 Best Software DVD likely is. The average person is buying it from a street vendor. So with distribution as with the initial crack, it only takes a few people to facilitate, or "mainstream", if you wish, piracy.
Sweet! Thanks, I'll check it out.
It looks nice, but unfortunately it is Windows-only from what I've seen? I need Linux/Mac compatibility.
Isn't that basically what I said? I think you're misreading me. SeaMonkey is an evolution from Mozilla as Firefox is, they are two separate forks from the same source, but SeaMonkey retains the core Mozilla design in its browser component (not to mention the suite aspect) whereas Firefox has gone consumer-oriented. However both started out from Mozilla, so saying that SeaMonkey is more like how Firefox used to be is not inaccurate.
Yeah, it still includes everything the old Mozilla suite did, though you can largely ignore all of that. I don't use ChatZilla and all that. The only important thing to me is that the browser component is sufficiently configurable and efficient. Firefox had the right idea to begin with, way back when, but in my opinion it has gone too far along the path of simplification and just seems to be trying to play catch up with a false target these days. I stopped using it several years ago when it was clear that the vision for Firefox wasn't in line with what I wanted out of a browser.
Opera died in the sense that it is no longer a leader in browser technology, as it has been for well over a decade, and is just skinning the Chromium project now. Out of context, that's okay, there have been plenty of skinning projects over the years that have been worth merit, but its the equivalent of say, Mozilla just giving up and using the IE engine and building a shell around it. They have ditched all of their code, from what I can tell, and unless you are keen on Chromium in general, I don't really see why you would be inclined to use the newer Opera versions over grabbing the latest Chromium build.
Opera before the transition vs. now simply is not comparable on any grounds. I used Opera for years, it was my favourite browser even though it didn't have the extension library that FF did, in large part because it natively did what it needed to do without extensions, and I liked their M2 client as well, which was one of the few e-mail clients that captured some of what Gmail got right. But, all of that is gone now. 100%, gone.
Perhaps some day they will rebuild some of their legacy, but I'm not crossing my fingers, especially with the misguided notions about bookmarks being worthless and so on.
In the past few years I've taken to just not even using a stylesheet when I browse. This isn't always easy to do in the browser, but some extensions can help. Web Developer extension can assign a keyboard shortcut so that if the design is super offensive I can just go back to something that uses a font size and window width I prefer. It often means scrolling past a header area rife with bullet lists, but that's an acceptable compromise for me.
Unfortunately some sites do not even gracefully degrade to simple display such as that, as they have a bunch of dumb Javascript stuff that is hidden by default, like "Page didn't load successfully" messages and progress spinners doing nothing. Ha. Yeah, it is getting to the point where browsing the web is like reading a crappy grocery stand magazine. I find myself doing less and less of it as well.
Maybe all of us that care should just move back to Gopher. :)
Have a look at SeaMonkey. It is the way Firefox used to be before it all started to go to shit when Chrome came out. It is as far as I know, the last real browser being maintained, since Opera died.
You get extension compatibility with FF, too.