I never said progressive disclosure didn't exist in KDE. I was simply saying that the original poster was rediscovering a well known design pattern. I also made the point that these things are better determined by experts than by a mob of hackers on slashdot.
I also never said that progressive disclosure was necessary for a good user interface. Despite what has already been posted here there is very little progressive disclosure in an automobile's interface. It simply isn't needed. There are a few simple idioms in an automobile's interface, that once learned become second nature. By definition, an idiom must be learned without reference to prior experience, but because there are few of them we get by.
Progressive disclosure implies that the advanced features are found gradually through normal usage (usually by visual hints). This doesn't mean you should segregate all your advanced features so simple minded users won't see them. It means as a user digs further into a particular feature, more and more options are presented.
As you say, I don't think KDE is missing these things. But it could do better. I think many open source projects would benefit from a professional opinion. I'm just another programmer. I've worked with HID people and have been seriously impressed. I just wish they were as enthusiastic about open source as many programmers I know.
The term is Progressive Disclosure. It's basic human interface design. This is why open source projects don't pass these studies with flying colors - rather than ask UI experts to solve UI issues, we ask slashdot. Then we all hash it around until one underrated post manages to reinvent the wheel.
Here's a better question.. how dow we sell open source to HID people?
By "ported to Managed C++" you really mean "compiled to IL to run on the CLR". There's a big difference. This code is not managed, its just unsafe code running in a VM (there was more information on this on Channel 9 last week). The radar program they created was written in managed code.
Of my three computers (1 mac, 1 sony & 1 emachine) only one has a floppy. It's a detachable drive for a Sony laptop and I don't even remember where it is. I've been without floppy drives for quite a while now, and hadn't even noticed it until someone else pointed it out.
Everyone talks about CD-Rs and keychain drives replacing floppies, but I believe the network sealed the fate of the floppy long before keychain drives became popular.
Would disks still be cheaper if Blockbuster video was turned into a ATM-sized kiosk? Drive up, plug in your keychain drive, download a few movies and drive away. You could put them in wal-mart, the grocery store, and the gas station for $2000 apiece. For that matter, your workplace could keep one next to the vending machines at work. You could download your movies on the way home from work without even stopping anywhere.
Sure the drive cost more than the keychain, but the kiosk costs allot less than a store. It would even be cheaper than netflix.
Thanks for the tips. My first GSOD was not long after I bought the mac. I hadn't yet added any hardware, so that probably isn't the issue (unless it shipped with faulty hardware). It could easily be a power issue. I might look into that.
My issues aside, doesn't the XP BSOD occur for the exact same reasons as the mac GSOD? It seems to me the only reason people see more of the BSOD is because there is greater chance of hardware conflict and bad drivers (since there is more crappy hardware out there for the PC).
There are very few crashes for normal users of Macs, and the ones that do occur generally affect only the program crashing rather than bringing down the whole machine.
I love my mac, but I've heard this from several sources and it just isn't true. When my mac goes down, it goes down hard. My screen is darkened and a message appears in at least 4 languages telling me I must power off my computer. (Grey screen of death?). Although this has only happened to me 3-4 times in the past two years, I have two XP machines, neither of which has given me a BSOD (ever). Maybe I'm just the odd case, but as far as I can tell the Mac OS X isn't any more stable than XP.
That said, I plan on replacing my XP machines with Macs as I get the chance. The benefits defiantly outweigh the costs.
Breaking encryption schemes is entirely different from utilizing the decryption software in your computer/DVD player. This is about usage. Nothing more.
DeCSS doesn't break anything anymore than a third party garage door remote 'breaks' the garage door opener. It uses the existing code. The only difference is a matter of degree. CSS goes a little further in obscuring its interface than a garage door opener does. If "Consumers who purchase a product containing a copy of embedded software have the inherent legal right to use that copy of the software" then why can't I use the software on my DVD player to play my DVD?
'Consumers who purchase a product containing a copy of embedded software have the inherent legal right to use that copy of the software. What the law authorizes, Chamberlain cannot revoke.'
How is this different from making a copy of my nintendo game to use on my computer? Or accessing my fairplay encoded music from another music player?
I thought he was joking. Maybe he was and the moderators didn't get it. No way is "Art of Computer Programming" a book about "applying code to real-world situations". Interesting academic information, yes, but not exactly mainstream stuff.
I assume you're aware that this will be a second edition. The first was good, but I could do without the printed reference material. I think if they cut that out they could bring it up to the standards of their other books fairly easily.
He might talk about his feelings on stem cell research in front of a crowd or with religious leaders, but why would Bush volunteer to talk to scientists about it? It would be like talking down affirmative action at a NACCP convention.
Yeah, this is frustrating. I don't give money to the EFF to get individuals off the hook on technicalities. I give it to them to fight for cases that will influence the way our laws work. But in order to make these changes, they need to take on cases. And in order to fairly represent clients in cases like this, they can't just pass up the gimmie to go for a verdict that would help others in the future. Maybe next time.
I'm reading his book (Hackers and Painters), which is a collection of these essays you talk about. He has an entire chapter in his book called "What you can't say" in which he talks about how often extremely controversial subjects turn out to be correct. He explains his method of guessing which shocking thoughts are wrong and which are just unfashionable. This outcry against Java is just an attempt to put his name in history as being the guy who said it first (as are most of his essays). It does him no harm for several reasons:
1. Because of his personal programming style, he would never like java anyway 2. Eventually Java (like anything else subject to technological change) will become unpopular and he will be proven correct 3. He prides himself on his nerdyness and doesn't care what management types think of him. He is looking for acceptance from the slashdot geek, who will more often than not agree with his language preferences
And even if those in charge follow every letter of the law, to say "I'm not going to do anything illegal" assumes the law is perfect and you have a perfect understanding of it. Everyone is doing something illegal. The trick is to mold the government in a way that people in power can't take advantage of our fallibility while still keeping some amount of order.
In typical slashdot fashion, you've taken my comment totally out of context (and removed the context so no one would notice). I was trying to point out the huge overhead of J2EE, and how a lighter framework is more useful in most situations. You only proved my point further by suggesting even more useful lightweight frameworks.
You are right, in that JSP isn't the cleanest solution. Tapestry is much cleaner. I've seen demos of velocity.. it just looks like another syntax of jsp to me. I don't see how its any cleaner. Struts isn't a presentation layer, so it can't be used as a replacement for jsp (although it augments JSP well).
You should be happy using servlets and jsp. Together, they provide you with most of the functionality you will ever need. Most companies switch to J2EE because IBM and Bea spend a lot of money pushing it. They think they need J2EE for these features: - Transactions - Persistance - Security - Scalability
Transactions (like the servlet api) are provided via an API subset that you can add to any program (J2EE or otherwise).
The J2EE persistence layer is almost silly. It would take a bit of writing to explain the historical reasons for the mistakes, but essentially Entity Beans were made to fulfill a need that no one had (client side references to server side persistable objects). Sun then changed their mind as to what need they filled (they are now simply a persistence model), and then kept making improvements to compete at this new task. Almost any other persistence model runs as well and they are all less complicated. J2EE 3 promises to improve on both fronts, but by leaving backwards compatibility, they haven't really reduced the learning curve much.
J2EE also has method level declarative security. Since the declarations are in the deployment descriptor, their not really dynamic. This isn't anything really exciting either.
Scalability is a bit difficult to argue. The lighter weight alternatives to J2EE (servlet containers, Spring, etc.) may scale to a decent size, but I haven't seen any example of huge applications being run with these solutions. If anyone hears of an Ebay sized app running on a Tomcat cluster, please post.
If you really want to learn EJB still, I would look for an entry level J2EE job. The books explain the implementation details, but I have yet to see any give honest explanations of when you should use parts of J2EE and what their limitations are.
I highly doubt that a ported.NET app is going to follow the HIG that most mac apps adhere to.
I don't think you understand what cocoa# is. Its not for porting existing.net applications (although you could, if you had clean separation between the interface and logic, but it would be a lot of work). Cocoa# will allow the programmer to bind their.NET code to a cocoa nib file just as the Java cocoa bindings do. Porting a.net application to cocoa# will require a complete UI rewrite. Why wouldn't such an application follow the HIG?
Windows forms applications, of course will probably never follow the HIG.
That is SO not the point. Why the hell should a, for example, 55 year old occasional computer user need to even know WHAT Java is, let alone UNDERSTAND why they need to install it?
You're assuming the software is targeted at the mass market. In that case, you would have wrapped everything up with an installer which would have taken care of the jvm issues for you (Try installing intellij idea on Windows for an example). Java isn't the only platform with dependencies. Most programs have dependencies on other libraries, and their installers take care of those for you. What makes you think Java is any different? You can't look at a handful of programs on sourceforge and think you understand the platform they were written on based on that limited experience. Those programs weren't written for joe blow. They were written for us.
It's now clear that longhorn will be introducing a whole pile of new proprietary offerings with its new browser to facilitate the much needed improvement in web apps. But with details locked up, presumably until release, I'm very glad that other browsers are now looking ahead in their own direction.
This doesn't change the message of your post, but Microsoft is being surprisingly open about what their doing. Avalon and XAML information is all over the MSDN. Of course, you can only use it hands-on if you can get a beta of longhorn, but information on how it works is out there. This doesn't change anything, of course. These are still proprietary solutions.
I'm really surprised at how the open source community is ignoring Avalon. It seems like we should be learning from it (its successes and its failures) as soon as we can.
Slashdot Mirror
I never said progressive disclosure didn't exist in KDE. I was simply saying that the original poster was rediscovering a well known design pattern. I also made the point that these things are better determined by experts than by a mob of hackers on slashdot.
I also never said that progressive disclosure was necessary for a good user interface. Despite what has already been posted here there is very little progressive disclosure in an automobile's interface. It simply isn't needed. There are a few simple idioms in an automobile's interface, that once learned become second nature. By definition, an idiom must be learned without reference to prior experience, but because there are few of them we get by.
Progressive disclosure implies that the advanced features are found gradually through normal usage (usually by visual hints). This doesn't mean you should segregate all your advanced features so simple minded users won't see them. It means as a user digs further into a particular feature, more and more options are presented.
As you say, I don't think KDE is missing these things. But it could do better. I think many open source projects would benefit from a professional opinion. I'm just another programmer. I've worked with HID people and have been seriously impressed. I just wish they were as enthusiastic about open source as many programmers I know.
The term is Progressive Disclosure. It's basic human interface design. This is why open source projects don't pass these studies with flying colors - rather than ask UI experts to solve UI issues, we ask slashdot. Then we all hash it around until one underrated post manages to reinvent the wheel.
Here's a better question.. how dow we sell open source to HID people?
By "ported to Managed C++" you really mean "compiled to IL to run on the CLR". There's a big difference. This code is not managed, its just unsafe code running in a VM (there was more information on this on Channel 9 last week). The radar program they created was written in managed code.
Of my three computers (1 mac, 1 sony & 1 emachine) only one has a floppy. It's a detachable drive for a Sony laptop and I don't even remember where it is. I've been without floppy drives for quite a while now, and hadn't even noticed it until someone else pointed it out.
Everyone talks about CD-Rs and keychain drives replacing floppies, but I believe the network sealed the fate of the floppy long before keychain drives became popular.
Would disks still be cheaper if Blockbuster video was turned into a ATM-sized kiosk? Drive up, plug in your keychain drive, download a few movies and drive away. You could put them in wal-mart, the grocery store, and the gas station for $2000 apiece. For that matter, your workplace could keep one next to the vending machines at work. You could download your movies on the way home from work without even stopping anywhere.
Sure the drive cost more than the keychain, but the kiosk costs allot less than a store. It would even be cheaper than netflix.
Thanks for the tips. My first GSOD was not long after I bought the mac. I hadn't yet added any hardware, so that probably isn't the issue (unless it shipped with faulty hardware). It could easily be a power issue. I might look into that.
My issues aside, doesn't the XP BSOD occur for the exact same reasons as the mac GSOD? It seems to me the only reason people see more of the BSOD is because there is greater chance of hardware conflict and bad drivers (since there is more crappy hardware out there for the PC).
There are very few crashes for normal users of Macs, and the ones that do occur generally affect only the program crashing rather than bringing down the whole machine.
I love my mac, but I've heard this from several sources and it just isn't true. When my mac goes down, it goes down hard. My screen is darkened and a message appears in at least 4 languages telling me I must power off my computer. (Grey screen of death?). Although this has only happened to me 3-4 times in the past two years, I have two XP machines, neither of which has given me a BSOD (ever). Maybe I'm just the odd case, but as far as I can tell the Mac OS X isn't any more stable than XP.
That said, I plan on replacing my XP machines with Macs as I get the chance. The benefits defiantly outweigh the costs.
Breaking encryption schemes is entirely different from utilizing the decryption software in your computer/DVD player. This is about usage. Nothing more.
DeCSS doesn't break anything anymore than a third party garage door remote 'breaks' the garage door opener. It uses the existing code. The only difference is a matter of degree. CSS goes a little further in obscuring its interface than a garage door opener does. If "Consumers who purchase a product containing a copy of embedded software have the inherent legal right to use that copy of the software" then why can't I use the software on my DVD player to play my DVD?
Making a copy of a Nintendo game isn't using that copy, it's using another copy
What about playing a DVD or a fairplay encrypted song. There are no copies being made in those cases.
'Consumers who purchase a product containing a copy of embedded software have the inherent legal right to use that copy of the software. What the law authorizes, Chamberlain cannot revoke.'
How is this different from making a copy of my nintendo game to use on my computer? Or accessing my fairplay encoded music from another music player?
I thought he was joking. Maybe he was and the moderators didn't get it. No way is "Art of Computer Programming" a book about "applying code to real-world situations". Interesting academic information, yes, but not exactly mainstream stuff.
I assume you're aware that this will be a second edition. The first was good, but I could do without the printed reference material. I think if they cut that out they could bring it up to the standards of their other books fairly easily.
He might talk about his feelings on stem cell research in front of a crowd or with religious leaders, but why would Bush volunteer to talk to scientists about it? It would be like talking down affirmative action at a NACCP convention.
Sounds good. Any suggestions?
Yeah, this is frustrating. I don't give money to the EFF to get individuals off the hook on technicalities. I give it to them to fight for cases that will influence the way our laws work. But in order to make these changes, they need to take on cases. And in order to fairly represent clients in cases like this, they can't just pass up the gimmie to go for a verdict that would help others in the future. Maybe next time.
I learned about the longest walk in grade school. That would have been about 1986. My history book was neither modern nor advanced.
I'm reading his book (Hackers and Painters), which is a collection of these essays you talk about. He has an entire chapter in his book called "What you can't say" in which he talks about how often extremely controversial subjects turn out to be correct. He explains his method of guessing which shocking thoughts are wrong and which are just unfashionable. This outcry against Java is just an attempt to put his name in history as being the guy who said it first (as are most of his essays). It does him no harm for several reasons:
1. Because of his personal programming style, he would never like java anyway
2. Eventually Java (like anything else subject to technological change) will become unpopular and he will be proven correct
3. He prides himself on his nerdyness and doesn't care what management types think of him. He is looking for acceptance from the slashdot geek, who will more often than not agree with his language preferences
And even if those in charge follow every letter of the law, to say "I'm not going to do anything illegal" assumes the law is perfect and you have a perfect understanding of it. Everyone is doing something illegal. The trick is to mold the government in a way that people in power can't take advantage of our fallibility while still keeping some amount of order.
In typical slashdot fashion, you've taken my comment totally out of context (and removed the context so no one would notice). I was trying to point out the huge overhead of J2EE, and how a lighter framework is more useful in most situations. You only proved my point further by suggesting even more useful lightweight frameworks.
You are right, in that JSP isn't the cleanest solution. Tapestry is much cleaner. I've seen demos of velocity.. it just looks like another syntax of jsp to me. I don't see how its any cleaner. Struts isn't a presentation layer, so it can't be used as a replacement for jsp (although it augments JSP well).
J2EE isn't a prerequisite for jms
You should be happy using servlets and jsp. Together, they provide you with most of the functionality you will ever need. Most companies switch to J2EE because IBM and Bea spend a lot of money pushing it. They think they need J2EE for these features:
- Transactions
- Persistance
- Security
- Scalability
Transactions (like the servlet api) are provided via an API subset that you can add to any program (J2EE or otherwise).
The J2EE persistence layer is almost silly. It would take a bit of writing to explain the historical reasons for the mistakes, but essentially Entity Beans were made to fulfill a need that no one had (client side references to server side persistable objects). Sun then changed their mind as to what need they filled (they are now simply a persistence model), and then kept making improvements to compete at this new task. Almost any other persistence model runs as well and they are all less complicated. J2EE 3 promises to improve on both fronts, but by leaving backwards compatibility, they haven't really reduced the learning curve much.
J2EE also has method level declarative security. Since the declarations are in the deployment descriptor, their not really dynamic. This isn't anything really exciting either.
Scalability is a bit difficult to argue. The lighter weight alternatives to J2EE (servlet containers, Spring, etc.) may scale to a decent size, but I haven't seen any example of huge applications being run with these solutions. If anyone hears of an Ebay sized app running on a Tomcat cluster, please post.
If you really want to learn EJB still, I would look for an entry level J2EE job. The books explain the implementation details, but I have yet to see any give honest explanations of when you should use parts of J2EE and what their limitations are.
I highly doubt that a ported .NET app is going to follow the HIG that most mac apps adhere to.
.net applications (although you could, if you had clean separation between the interface and logic, but it would be a lot of work). Cocoa# will allow the programmer to bind their .NET code to a cocoa nib file just as the Java cocoa bindings do. Porting a .net application to cocoa# will require a complete UI rewrite. Why wouldn't such an application follow the HIG?
I don't think you understand what cocoa# is. Its not for porting existing
Windows forms applications, of course will probably never follow the HIG.
That is SO not the point. Why the hell should a, for example, 55 year old occasional computer user need to even know WHAT Java is, let alone UNDERSTAND why they need to install it?
You're assuming the software is targeted at the mass market. In that case, you would have wrapped everything up with an installer which would have taken care of the jvm issues for you (Try installing intellij idea on Windows for an example). Java isn't the only platform with dependencies. Most programs have dependencies on other libraries, and their installers take care of those for you. What makes you think Java is any different? You can't look at a handful of programs on sourceforge and think you understand the platform they were written on based on that limited experience. Those programs weren't written for joe blow. They were written for us.
There were a lot of good ideas when a similar question was asked a couple hours ago.
It's now clear that longhorn will be introducing a whole pile of new proprietary offerings with its new browser to facilitate the much needed improvement in web apps. But with details locked up, presumably until release, I'm very glad that other browsers are now looking ahead in their own direction.
This doesn't change the message of your post, but Microsoft is being surprisingly open about what their doing. Avalon and XAML information is all over the MSDN. Of course, you can only use it hands-on if you can get a beta of longhorn, but information on how it works is out there. This doesn't change anything, of course. These are still proprietary solutions.
I'm really surprised at how the open source community is ignoring Avalon. It seems like we should be learning from it (its successes and its failures) as soon as we can.