This is clearly a troll, but I have to say, I quite agree with you. At the moment CE is significantly better than anything the linux community is offering. However, lots of people are working on it, and things are likely to change. WinCE is not perfect, I for one, can think of many things I would like to see done differently.
The IPAQ is interesting because it is the first PDA with enough oomph to do useful things with. I would prefer to develop those for a Linux environment - probably mainly for reasons of personal taste, but I think there are some good commercial and technical reasons too. Also, it's fun, which is quite important, and to my mind significantly more fullfilling than trolling on Slashdot.
I wanted to look at the trailor, but I'm a bit worried that a film about Artificial Insemination might not be appropriate to download and watch in my office.
A few years ago when every news program had an obligatory story about the Information Super Highway, there was a lot of discussion about certain groups being excluded from using the new technology, with a resultant 'information underclass'. Most of the fears were over money - poor people not being able to afford the technology.
It seems to me that these concerns are more likely to come true if people have to spend money on software, and on high powered expensive hardware to deal with 'the most up-to-date' OS/browser/etc... A web that is increasingly dependent on any software platform that is not free, should be of concern to society as a whole, not just geeks with an axe to grind.
Many of the posts are from people who actively chose to ignore web sites that they can't read in their browser. At some stage we might not have this luxury
client side scripts that take a long time to load and don't add anything useful to the page
server side scripts that take a long time to serve and don't add anything useful to the page
Soooo, the first thing has nothing to do with JSP, which is server side, and the second thing is about how you perceive the trade-off between performance and content.
Given that you read (and post to) slashdot -which uses server side CGI scripts, and that you appreciate some customization, you do, infact like dynamic server-side content generation. Just as long as it's efficient.
JSP offers an alternative to CGI, which, in some situations can be faster than Perl because of the way the server deals with processes. (One process for the Java Virtual machine with threads handling
requests, rather than one process per CGI request).
So perhaps your rant was a little misdirected.
A better reason to dislike JSP is that it doesn't enforce the seperation between content and presentation. An XML + XSLT/XSP with Cocoon is an alternative that is, IMHO a cleaner solution.
I was chatting with a colleague yesterday about trying to do something very similar, by looking at the history of interactions left in the scribbled out addresses you get on reusable internal mail envelopes.
I reckon it would show the most valuable thing to understand about a job - the most important people in any organisation are the admin. and support staff. They know everybody.
I wasn't quoting... I agree that Sullivan said it first.... But, it is also quite clear that the phrase 'Form Follows function' is a defining one for the whole Bauhaus Movement. Form follows function came into general use as a phrase in the 30's in the States and the 40's in Europe. Gropius and his friends moved to the US around that time to get away from Nazi germany.
However, some people have argued that the general concepts can be traced back much further - to the Italian jesuit monk Carlo Lodoli. The cornerstone of Lodoli's teaching was the maxim that nothing should be put on show (in rapresentazione) that was not in function (in funzione), that is, a working part of the structure.
These ideas, plus the idea of organic architecture were all kicking around in the mid 18th century with people like Horatio Greenough writing about them. Mix in the purity of Asian and Japanese art that was getting seen in the west for the first time and it's not surprising that the same ideas were sprouting in different places at the same time (e.g. Charles Rennie Macintosh in Glasgow as he rejected the decoration of Art Nouveau for a more elegant simplicity).
do you have a reference for that? There was a cool experiment designed to measure people's response time that went as follows:
The subject sat looking at a screen with a slide projected on it. They were given a button which advanced the slide, and told to press it when they felt like it - when they were bored by the image they were currently looking at. A set of electrodes measured various brain waves - there was an obvious signal before the button was pressed that was decribed as the onset potential: it was assumed to be related to the decision to change the slide.
The interesting thing happened when instead of using the subject's button-press to advance the slide, the experimenters secretly started using the onset-potential (plus a time delay) as the trigger instead.
When this happened, subjects reported that the slide moved on before they'd decided to press the button, and that the projecter seemed to know what they were about to do....
Freaky, and similar to your menu story. I collect this kind of thing, I would love a reference if you have one...
I quite agree. Whatever happened to the Bauhaus principle of 'form follows function?'.
I think this point is really important, it disturbes me the way things are going.
Surely, the point of a GUI front ent to an OS is:
i) to give you the relevant information quickly, efficiently and as unobtrusively as possible.
ii) to let you navigate the data and apps to get the job done as easily as you can.
This sounds to me exactly the same demands placed on the signs we take for granted in metros and streets. Taking Harry Beck's fantastic, London Underground map as an example, it takes the complex tangled mess of underground lines and represents it with a clean and simple diagram. Sans serif fonts, no complex shading, straight lines and a complete lack of unnecessary clutter.
The same is true for road signs and the direction signs around public spaces. No beautifully shaded pictures of toilets or telephones, just a few distilled strokes that are enough to clearly represent the concept. I dread to think how many more people would die in fires if these simple design principles weren't stuck to by the graphic designers responsible for 'Fire-Exit' signs...
Why is a file manager with huge shaded icons, that use up loads of colors and make it harder to see the filename, better?
When the web first got going properly there were loads of horrific web sites featuring uber-graphic-design that made it really difficult to actually get at the information. Most of them died a death - nowdays we have things that are a lot cleaner, simpler and easier to use (like slashdot).
As technology becomes a familiar tool - rather than an exciting new thing to play with as well as use, it gets more and more boring. As it should - fading into the background to just do its job, rather than existing up front, to be looked at and impressed by.
I suspect, that, just as people turn off all the anoying sounds associated with a window manager, until there's just a beep for errors (usually), people using a filemanager such as Nautilus, or KFM, will shrink the icons and make them less 'attractive' until they have a minimal, functional tool that doesn't take up more real estate or perceptual space than it needs to.
Actually - this is probably wrong. Most users will just say 'I don't like it, it doesn't feel right', and turn to something else...
Hi, I come from England (in Europe, where the history comes from).
We get our films way after the rest of Europe because movie companies are so tight we typically get the reels that were shown in the US, after the film has closed in their theatres. At least with dubbed films they actually have to bother about making a fresh set of films up with the new audio on them. As a result the French end up with less scratches as well as getting the film earlier. That said, they have to put up with any English people speaking as though they've just got back from the dentist and the anasthetic hasn't worn off yet. It is really strange to here how other nationalities think you sound. If that made sense.
When I was working in Paris I heard a French comedian saying that the reason why L'acadamie allowed le weekend was because of the French habit of shortening every word - and le conge de fin de semaine would become le con which would be rude.:-)
As a Brit, I share your nervousness - I noticed that I could do an American, or and English langauage course at most of the language schools in Paris.
Name me one country in the world where there is as much money to spend on healthcare as people would like.
If an Atari does the job then use an Atari. They're cheap. I wonder how many more patients in the UK or US could be treated if people didn't upgrade their computers/stethescopes/coffee machines etc. because they want something new and shiny, rather than because there's a good reason for it.
Plus, it's probably pretty well debugged by now...
I can totally understand why the 'Huge Two' would have problems with the 'Big Two' borrowing heavily from their UI style. I would defend my IP like a Jackal in the same position.
But, from the Linux point of view, copyware is significant because it can serve to ease the transition from one OS to another. I bet most UNIX hackers, forced to use NT, end up installing a Bash clone and Xemacs. Otherwise, using the computer feels like you're wearing boxing gloves.
As far as 'a slick elegant consistency' I totally agree with you; the best thing we could do is feed the Penguin to the KDE dragon and then send St George in. I personally find the cartoons would be better in a Pokemon cartoon.
rant:What's more galling is the amount of time you waste on hold being forced to listen to someone else's appalling taste in Adult Orientated Rock (or, as I faced today, 101 Christmas Hits from groups that should have been strangled at birth), when all you want to do is tell them you need to swap the graphics card because its knackered.
Then, when you finally get through, you have to go through a tedious process of diagnosing the fault you've already diagnosed, even though the first thing you did was explain why it was the graphics card that needed replacing. (The second thing was to explain to the person at the other end of the phone that the 'keyboard' is that big grey flat thing infront of them with all the buttons on.)
Quality control of the 'technical support' staff wouldn't go amiss either.
caveat:It's not the poor guy on the end of the phone's fault either - the companies don't want to invest in training them up to do thier job properly. Poor sods, I think it must be one of the most soul destroying things to have to do day in, day out.
errm, I'm confused.
You start off by saying that [it's] an Explorer ripoff and that's a bad thing. You then go on to say how much you like a Mac interface, and that something that worked more like a Mac would be a good thing.
Your last sentence is Howzabout some innovation, instead of redoing something someone else has already done?
Forgive me if I'm misrepresenting you by paraphrasing... Isn't making a GUI work a bit like insert your favorite GUI here redoing something someone else has already done.
I agree with your point though, whatever system you use, faffing around to get it to feel like the one you would like to be using is a pain in the backside and best to be avoided. As I said in a different post, if you're trying to persuade people to trust and use something new, making it behave and look like something that they are familiar with may well be a good thing to do.
Dropping features you like - rather than turning them off, is clearly a mistake because if someone else gives you those features you're going to go with them. My main point is different though - it's what the default should look like. Themes and L&F allow you to offer a 'look like a new mac but with the cool bits from the old mac' functionality with one click.
Is it just me or is the example .png really ugly?
on
Alpha-Blending On KDE
·
· Score: 5
Ok, it's just me...
I'm spending a lot of life building GUI's (in Java) and I have some questions about icons and eye-candy:
As hackers, we all know that you can unplug one icon and replace it with another, the type of graphic art is totally unrelated to the quality of the code and the app, and so on, but, the look and feel can have a pretty major effect on the way people take to your software.
In my experience, if people are a little unsure how much they should trust your code, and how much time they should invest in it, 'clean and professional' is more likely to give the right impression than 'cute and well drawn'. Think Nokia mobile phone vs. a Micky Mouse novelty candlestick one. (I'm not saying that the icons are as bad as that - just that that's the sort of distinction I'm trying to make).
I know it's all themed, and you can set the theme to be whatever you want, but I would suggest that the default theme should be much more 'serious'. We all love the penguin, some love the KDE dragon, but would we get more respect if the images were less cuddly - harder? I guess this is why the Playstation 2 looks like it does, and why it's logo is made up of a set of straight lines on a white background. It looks hi-tech and cool.
Someone else (rebelcool) made the point that 'looking like Windows is a good thing because Microsoft have spent a lot of money on research and they know what they're doing'. I kind of agree with that, but there is a better reason: Most people who use a computer understand the Microsoft GUI. It might not be the best on a level playing field, but the playing field isn't level - pretty much everyone is familiar with Microsoft's GUI.
To use the same steering wheel analogy: Every car has a steering wheel because every car has a steering wheel. Thus, steering wheels make the best user-interfaces, simply because they mean that anyone with a driving license can just get in and drive off.
One final point, I'm so used to Unix I find typing on a Windows box feels like I have boxing gloves on. I hate it, I find it frustrating. So I install bash shells and emacs, and do everything I can to make it look like what I'm used to. It's a pain, and I certainly can't do it on a stranger's computer I happen to be using for a bit. I have an enormous amount of empathy for Windows users in a hurry who have to make the switch in the other direction.
Slashdot Mirror
This is clearly a troll, but I have to say, I quite agree with you. At the moment CE is significantly better than anything the linux community is offering. However, lots of people are working on it, and things are likely to change. WinCE is not perfect, I for one, can think of many things I would like to see done differently.
The IPAQ is interesting because it is the first PDA with enough oomph to do useful things with. I would prefer to develop those for a Linux environment - probably mainly for reasons of personal taste, but I think there are some good commercial and technical reasons too. Also, it's fun, which is quite important, and to my mind significantly more fullfilling than trolling on Slashdot.
I wanted to look at the trailor, but I'm a bit worried that a film about Artificial Insemination might not be appropriate to download and watch in my office.
Soft boil an egg.
It seems to me that these concerns are more likely to come true if people have to spend money on software, and on high powered expensive hardware to deal with 'the most up-to-date' OS/browser/etc... A web that is increasingly dependent on any software platform that is not free, should be of concern to society as a whole, not just geeks with an axe to grind.
Many of the posts are from people who actively chose to ignore web sites that they can't read in their browser. At some stage we might not have this luxury
So you are complaining about:
Soooo, the first thing has nothing to do with JSP, which is server side, and the second thing is about how you perceive the trade-off between performance and content.
Given that you read (and post to) slashdot -which uses server side CGI scripts, and that you appreciate some customization, you do, infact like dynamic server-side content generation. Just as long as it's efficient.
JSP offers an alternative to CGI, which, in some situations can be faster than Perl because of the way the server deals with processes. (One process for the Java Virtual machine with threads handling
requests, rather than one process per CGI request).
So perhaps your rant was a little misdirected.
A better reason to dislike JSP is that it doesn't enforce the seperation between content and presentation. An XML + XSLT/XSP with Cocoon is an alternative that is, IMHO a cleaner solution.
I was chatting with a colleague yesterday about trying to do something very similar, by looking at the history of interactions left in the scribbled out addresses you get on reusable internal mail envelopes.
I reckon it would show the most valuable thing to understand about a job - the most important people in any organisation are the admin. and support staff. They know everybody.
I wasn't quoting... I agree that Sullivan said it first.... But, it is also quite clear that the phrase 'Form Follows function' is a defining one for the whole Bauhaus Movement. Form follows function came into general use as a phrase in the 30's in the States and the 40's in Europe. Gropius and his friends moved to the US around that time to get away from Nazi germany.
a i.html
However, some people have argued that the general concepts can be traced back much further - to the Italian jesuit monk Carlo Lodoli. The cornerstone of Lodoli's teaching was the maxim that nothing should be put on show (in rapresentazione) that was not in function (in funzione), that is, a working part of the structure.
(Good OO design/ Abstract Data Types ?)....
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/2360/jm-eng.fff-h
So, arguably Lodoli said it first, in Italian, in 1750..
These ideas, plus the idea of organic architecture were all kicking around in the mid 18th century with people like Horatio Greenough writing about them. Mix in the purity of Asian and Japanese art that was getting seen in the west for the first time and it's not surprising that the same ideas were sprouting in different places at the same time (e.g. Charles Rennie Macintosh in Glasgow as he rejected the decoration of Art Nouveau for a more elegant simplicity).
do you have a reference for that? There was a cool experiment designed to measure people's response time that went as follows:
The subject sat looking at a screen with a slide projected on it. They were given a button which advanced the slide, and told to press it when they felt like it - when they were bored by the image they were currently looking at. A set of electrodes measured various brain waves - there was an obvious signal before the button was pressed that was decribed as the onset potential: it was assumed to be related to the decision to change the slide.
The interesting thing happened when instead of using the subject's button-press to advance the slide, the experimenters secretly started using the onset-potential (plus a time delay) as the trigger instead.
When this happened, subjects reported that the slide moved on before they'd decided to press the button, and that the projecter seemed to know what they were about to do....
Freaky, and similar to your menu story. I collect this kind of thing, I would love a reference if you have one...
I quite agree. Whatever happened to the Bauhaus principle of 'form follows function?'.
I think this point is really important, it disturbes me the way things are going.
Surely, the point of a GUI front ent to an OS is:
i) to give you the relevant information quickly, efficiently and as unobtrusively as possible.
ii) to let you navigate the data and apps to get the job done as easily as you can.
This sounds to me exactly the same demands placed on the signs we take for granted in metros and streets. Taking Harry Beck's fantastic, London Underground map as an example, it takes the complex tangled mess of underground lines and represents it with a clean and simple diagram. Sans serif fonts, no complex shading, straight lines and a complete lack of unnecessary clutter.
The same is true for road signs and the direction signs around public spaces. No beautifully shaded pictures of toilets or telephones, just a few distilled strokes that are enough to clearly represent the concept. I dread to think how many more people would die in fires if these simple design principles weren't stuck to by the graphic designers responsible for 'Fire-Exit' signs...
Why is a file manager with huge shaded icons, that use up loads of colors and make it harder to see the filename, better?
When the web first got going properly there were loads of horrific web sites featuring uber-graphic-design that made it really difficult to actually get at the information. Most of them died a death - nowdays we have things that are a lot cleaner, simpler and easier to use (like slashdot).
As technology becomes a familiar tool - rather than an exciting new thing to play with as well as use, it gets more and more boring. As it should - fading into the background to just do its job, rather than existing up front, to be looked at and impressed by.
I suspect, that, just as people turn off all the anoying sounds associated with a window manager, until there's just a beep for errors (usually), people using a filemanager such as Nautilus, or KFM, will shrink the icons and make them less 'attractive' until they have a minimal, functional tool that doesn't take up more real estate or perceptual space than it needs to.
Actually - this is probably wrong. Most users will just say 'I don't like it, it doesn't feel right', and turn to something else...
adds a whole new meaning to the phrase ad nausium...
fair point.
:-)
Hi, I come from England (in Europe, where the history comes from).
We get our films way after the rest of Europe because movie companies are so tight we typically get the reels that were shown in the US, after the film has closed in their theatres. At least with dubbed films they actually have to bother about making a fresh set of films up with the new audio on them. As a result the French end up with less scratches as well as getting the film earlier. That said, they have to put up with any English people speaking as though they've just got back from the dentist and the anasthetic hasn't worn off yet. It is really strange to here how other nationalities think you sound. If that made sense.
When I was working in Paris I heard a French comedian saying that the reason why L'acadamie allowed le weekend was because of the French habit of shortening every word - and le conge de fin de semaine would become le con which would be rude. :-)
As a Brit, I share your nervousness - I noticed that I could do an American, or and English langauage course at most of the language schools in Paris.
Name me one country in the world where there is as much money to spend on healthcare as people would like.
If an Atari does the job then use an Atari. They're cheap. I wonder how many more patients in the UK or US could be treated if people didn't upgrade their computers/stethescopes/coffee machines etc. because they want something new and shiny, rather than because there's a good reason for it.
Plus, it's probably pretty well debugged by now...
I can totally understand why the 'Huge Two' would have problems with the 'Big Two' borrowing heavily from their UI style. I would defend my IP like a Jackal in the same position.
But, from the Linux point of view, copyware is significant because it can serve to ease the transition from one OS to another. I bet most UNIX hackers, forced to use NT, end up installing a Bash clone and Xemacs. Otherwise, using the computer feels like you're wearing boxing gloves.
As far as 'a slick elegant consistency' I totally agree with you; the best thing we could do is feed the Penguin to the KDE dragon and then send St George in. I personally find the cartoons would be better in a Pokemon cartoon.
To Green Berret?
Or perhaps Tin Hat...
[W]henever researchers have gone into the fugu and looked for human genes, by and large they've found them.
But only if they look in the right Plaice
Please don't try to post the whole sequence to Slashdot...
rant:What's more galling is the amount of time you waste on hold being forced to listen to someone else's appalling taste in Adult Orientated Rock (or, as I faced today, 101 Christmas Hits from groups that should have been strangled at birth), when all you want to do is tell them you need to swap the graphics card because its knackered.
Then, when you finally get through, you have to go through a tedious process of diagnosing the fault you've already diagnosed, even though the first thing you did was explain why it was the graphics card that needed replacing. (The second thing was to explain to the person at the other end of the phone that the 'keyboard' is that big grey flat thing infront of them with all the buttons on.)
Quality control of the 'technical support' staff wouldn't go amiss either.
caveat:It's not the poor guy on the end of the phone's fault either - the companies don't want to invest in training them up to do thier job properly. Poor sods, I think it must be one of the most soul destroying things to have to do day in, day out.
You start off by saying that [it's] an Explorer ripoff and that's a bad thing. You then go on to say how much you like a Mac interface, and that something that worked more like a Mac would be a good thing.
Your last sentence is Howzabout some innovation, instead of redoing something someone else has already done?
Forgive me if I'm misrepresenting you by paraphrasing... Isn't making a GUI work a bit like insert your favorite GUI here redoing something someone else has already done.
I agree with your point though, whatever system you use, faffing around to get it to feel like the one you would like to be using is a pain in the backside and best to be avoided. As I said in a different post, if you're trying to persuade people to trust and use something new, making it behave and look like something that they are familiar with may well be a good thing to do.
Dropping features you like - rather than turning them off, is clearly a mistake because if someone else gives you those features you're going to go with them. My main point is different though - it's what the default should look like. Themes and L&F allow you to offer a 'look like a new mac but with the cool bits from the old mac' functionality with one click.
I'm spending a lot of life building GUI's (in Java) and I have some questions about icons and eye-candy:
As hackers, we all know that you can unplug one icon and replace it with another, the type of graphic art is totally unrelated to the quality of the code and the app, and so on, but, the look and feel can have a pretty major effect on the way people take to your software.
In my experience, if people are a little unsure how much they should trust your code, and how much time they should invest in it, 'clean and professional' is more likely to give the right impression than 'cute and well drawn'. Think Nokia mobile phone vs. a Micky Mouse novelty candlestick one. (I'm not saying that the icons are as bad as that - just that that's the sort of distinction I'm trying to make).
I know it's all themed, and you can set the theme to be whatever you want, but I would suggest that the default theme should be much more 'serious'. We all love the penguin, some love the KDE dragon, but would we get more respect if the images were less cuddly - harder? I guess this is why the Playstation 2 looks like it does, and why it's logo is made up of a set of straight lines on a white background. It looks hi-tech and cool.
Someone else (rebelcool) made the point that 'looking like Windows is a good thing because Microsoft have spent a lot of money on research and they know what they're doing'. I kind of agree with that, but there is a better reason: Most people who use a computer understand the Microsoft GUI. It might not be the best on a level playing field, but the playing field isn't level - pretty much everyone is familiar with Microsoft's GUI.
To use the same steering wheel analogy: Every car has a steering wheel because every car has a steering wheel. Thus, steering wheels make the best user-interfaces, simply because they mean that anyone with a driving license can just get in and drive off.
One final point, I'm so used to Unix I find typing on a Windows box feels like I have boxing gloves on. I hate it, I find it frustrating. So I install bash shells and emacs, and do everything I can to make it look like what I'm used to. It's a pain, and I certainly can't do it on a stranger's computer I happen to be using for a bit. I have an enormous amount of empathy for Windows users in a hurry who have to make the switch in the other direction.
Still got down moderated though...
...bet it can't chew gum at the same time.