Not necessarily. It's often said there are two important stages of the UI in a program. There's the initial time to learn it, get used to how it operates in relation to what's being done, and there's how well it operates when you're actually used to it.
Different programs have different focuses. If I was writing a piece of photo software - the sort that's thrown in with cheap digital cameras etc, then I'd probably strive to make it very intuitive when the user first used it, based on the assumption that people buying cheap digicams aren't well versed in graphics software. That may come at the cost of making very restrictive when the user wanted to use the program in the future and expand on what they want to do.
If the software was harder to learn, then it may be that when you're more used to it, you can use it a lot more fluently after you've gotten used to it, compared to if it had been easier to grasp. It isn't hard and fast though that an easy to grasp interface is restrictive later on, or that a difficult interface is more productive after a while - but it's a rough idea of two different approaches designers can have to an interface. Needless to say, there are interfaces that are both difficult to learn, and still crap when you've got used to it.
It's been said before (I think in the context of DSpam) that humans don't have a 100% rate for spotting spam, false negatives etc. I know when I train my spam filter, I'm sometimes unsure whether to feed it some newsletters - some mailings/press releases I do actually want, but others, which are very similar in style, I now consider rubbish.
Gates might also have different opinions on what constitutes spam to some members on a human spam filtering team. He might see requests for interviews as spam while the filter people wouldn't. Not to mention after a day of reviewing messages on a screen, somebody might hit the wrong button.
I remember some people claiming certain spam engines (DSpam again?) were actually more reliable than humans. What if I do have a Nigerian friend anyway, who happens to be the daughter of a rich business man who wants to transfer funds to my bank account?;-)
Paste and Go is something I use religiously. Just hit Ctrl+D and it'll go to the URL in your clipboard instantly. Also, the copy link address menu item is something I'm surprised Firefox hasn't picked up on as it's such a common task.
Is it possible to reassign keyboard shortcuts in FF? I can't stand using Alt+Home for my homepage, I find Opera's Ctrl+Space far easier as my hands are already on that side of the keyboard.
Still, I find Opera far faster on slower (~P3 450MHz) machines, which is where I spend a lot of my time...
I'm working on a P3 450MHz PC a lot of the time (running Debian), although I have a 1.8GHz next to it, I do most of my work on here. I try and try Firefox but I just can't live with it, it feels horribly slow compared to Opera.
Definitely with software, there's an aspect of "tricking" the user into thinking the software's fast. I remember reading somewhere about loading times of Linux vs. Windows machines and that there actually wasn't much in it simply because of the graphics that the Windows loading screen uses. On an identical machine here, when I time it, Linux is only a few seconds behind Windows loading, with no boot caching system etc.
The post I saw put it down to things such as... when Windows loads the screen stays black for a little bit, then the logo fades in.. a sequence that uses a few seconds, the fast moving scrolling bit makes the user think the machine is working hard, even if it shows no useful sign of how far through the bootup process the machine is. Likewise, when you log into a domain on Windows 2000/XP, you get another fast scrolling image that seems to serve the same purpose. Watching a new FC3 install I've just done... it seems to take forever as the progress bar moves very slowly while it loads.
Example with Opera - when I hit Ctrl+N for a new tab or use the gesture, the window immediately turns white, and the focus is put on the address bar. [b]Then[/b] the tab is put in the list, the window title changes etc. Doing the same in Firefox, what appears to happen is the title bar changes, window turns grey, address bar put into focus then the window turns white. It could be that Firefox is using XUL and that's slower on this older machine, while Opera's using Qt.
Perhaps it's more streamlined code? Either way, even if people complain that you're just deceiving the user, it certainly doesn't do any harm and greatly improves the user's experience - should this be a focus point for Firefox?
Windows is self installing
Eh? I installed FC3 yesterday on a machine to play with it (I'm normally a Debian fan) and the whole thing's done in X, and is very easy to go through. I'm sure Ubuntu, Mandrake etc are even easier. The first part of the installation of WinXP that asks details about partitions and filesystems is all done in text mode. Do you mean that Windows is bundled with new PCs? Is that an advantage of Windows?
self fixing
How so? Self-breaking in my experience. Unfortunately, part of my job requires me to repair Windows machines, and I'm sceptical at best about any "self fixing" Windows does.
self updating
So is FC3 to name one. It has a program called up2date which as soon as I'd installed FC, it flashed and asked me to download some new versions that had been released. Other distros also have similar systems.
It all depends on the distro. A lot of distros have done a brilliant job for the desktop user giving them great hardware detection, clear control panels to change settings. There are distros (my favourite, Debian) that cater to those of us like to understand what's going on, but even so, the package system and the community are brilliant.
While you may be flamed for suggesting that, I find that although it's pretty fast, IMO, Opera's faster. My main desktop machine's a PIII 450MHz, 384MB RAM, running Debian and Opera feels a lot more snappy, particularly when moving between tabs, opening new windows etc.
Worth the money I think. And yes, I do install Firefox in a lot of places!
Ah thanks, I was hoping/expecting that was the case.
I never realised about the fish:/ handler until today... it's brilliant! Just being able to work on a remote machine with Kate etc like it's local is brilliant:)
I think the parent means just that - say a web page redirected you to, for the sake of argument, the audiocd: handler - by passing data to this handler, could there be a security problem? Either accessing data or controlling parts of the system?
Yep, it's the same as typing it in, but some users will click on anything, and I know that when I'm browsing the net, I don't double check every link begins with http://....
Even though I use KDE every day on my machines, I don't use Konqueror for anything other than file browsing, so I've no idea on this...?
To be fair, Windows has problems with this as well, and it stems from a large, diverse, and active development community. It also can result from ego.
I'd also like to add to that paragraph, Microsoft themselves. Compare buttons and menus in say, the latest version of Office (XP?) to the ones you get in Explorer.
Some distros are doing great work with themes so that Qt and GTK look identical out of the box, which is brilliant. The only other point is the guidelines as you mention...
My main desktop has an NVidia Geforce 4 based card as its primary display with an ATI Rage II PCI card that I stole from my old P200. It works flawlessly under Linux - I don't know how various distros (SuSE, Fedora, Mandrake etc) handle dual monitors, I use Debian and X probed and set up both displays in my config file just fine:)
All I did after that was edit the XF86Config file to get my preferred resolutions on each of the monitors, but if your distro is multi-monitor aware, then its config tool (Yast etc) should handle it.
I run a 17" Mitsubishi CRT and a cheap 15" TFT screen. The CRT I use for image editing, web design etc as the colour reproduction is far better, but I find the text on the TFT is sharper and is easier to work at for long lengths of time.
So now when I travel, instead of the airline sending my luggage to another city, it can end up anywhere in the *solar system*. Yeah, that's just what we need!
"The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage." - Mark Russell
Er... re-read my post slowly this time. I didn't say they weren't a company. I said they weren't just a company. And a waiver for what exactly? Asking people in the community to help on an OSS project? I didn't think you needed a waiver for that - I haven't heard you complain about Zend (creators of PHP), MySQL AB and all of the rest.
At the moment they're paying through the nose for the rights to use the Real software. An open video codec of this nature doesn't exist at the moment - they *are* spending money developing it, but they're asking for contributions from the community. Which is entirely acceptable in my books as they're going to donate a totally patent free, next generation, first of its kind video codec back to the community. They're not selling it - they're donating it for anybody to use, just like they've worked on technology in the past.
If you don't want to help, nobody's forcing you to. If somebody does want to help, it'll just move things along a little faster.
And on a side note, weren't the 1400 workers transferred to Siemens and not totally laid off?
I don't normally feed trolls... but what the hell.
a) the BBC isn't just a "company" - it's the highest quality broadcaster in the world. They always have done research and been at the forefront of new technology throughout their history. This is a project that anybody can help contribute to - as it'll benefit the community as a whole when it's complete.
b) they have put effort into it already - they've put out quite a few releases already (SF page) and have been working on it for a couple of years
c) although they want it to improve their online streaming services (currently done using Real technology), an open standard, no encumbrance from patents, with technology that other codecs at present don't use, is a very important project for not only the BBC, but for all of the computing community
They've already done it. What is the X-Box, if not a PC locked down to MS-approved software? All they don't do is call it what it is.
However, remember that the X-Box is a bad example - it's Microsoft's product from base hardware up. You purchased the X-Box from them and you can only get their software (according to you, I don't own one, nor do I condone it).
Remember, the various parts and chips in a PC are made by quite a few different companies, even they do have a common aim...
Yep, I find that Firefox is slow on my main workstation too (450MHz P3, Debian), so I use Opera instead as my main browser. It's very quick, and packed full of features.
There may possibly be an exploit in the future with Firefox's XPI system - it uses a whitelisting system at the moment. We'll see how it lasts!
does it automatically and painlessly migrate all necessary MSIE data?
In my experience, yes. It moves everything across, including saved passwords according to the list... same with Thunderbird. If your non-techy user has installed any application before (InstallShield etc) then they'll figure out Firefox easily. Just follow the instructions to install, and when it's run, it'll import everything from Internet Explorer straight away.
And what about utilities to remove the spyware his machine may already be infested with? Any suggestions?
I've used Ad-aware (http://www.lavasoft.de/) a bit but normally I run a scan using that and then find and take the rest out manually. Ad-aware would probably serve to confuse if the user isn't at all techy however, and no malware removal tool works every time.
As you said, it's either going to be licensing or simply that we don't have the source available for all of the Windows programs out there. Open source programs it could be done for, but otherwise, changing where files are stored would break most programs.
And just to add to that, Perl is open source so if it doesn't compile on your architecture of choice, you can make it happen. With Java, you're dependant on which architectures Sun supports, will decide to support in the future, and which they'll decide to drop...
the EU *SHOULD* back this move by mandating that any Office Suite that is to be sold in the EU...MUST conform to that ISO specification
That's a bit draconian isn't it? I agree with the idea of the governments in the EU using open standards, but as much as I support OSS, that's a bit over the top isn't it?;-)
If the guy doesn't mind (although if it's MSN, then you could do it without adding him to the list) then file a bug report against Gaim (http://gaim.sf.net/) and give the developers an example they can test against. They should be able to track down a problem quite easily if they have an example of what is crashing it.
Slashdot Mirror
I was replying regarding interfaces generally to an AC saying:
If it takes a month to learn a UI, then its fucked right out of the box, period. Wise up.
Not necessarily. It's often said there are two important stages of the UI in a program. There's the initial time to learn it, get used to how it operates in relation to what's being done, and there's how well it operates when you're actually used to it.
Different programs have different focuses. If I was writing a piece of photo software - the sort that's thrown in with cheap digital cameras etc, then I'd probably strive to make it very intuitive when the user first used it, based on the assumption that people buying cheap digicams aren't well versed in graphics software. That may come at the cost of making very restrictive when the user wanted to use the program in the future and expand on what they want to do.
If the software was harder to learn, then it may be that when you're more used to it, you can use it a lot more fluently after you've gotten used to it, compared to if it had been easier to grasp. It isn't hard and fast though that an easy to grasp interface is restrictive later on, or that a difficult interface is more productive after a while - but it's a rough idea of two different approaches designers can have to an interface. Needless to say, there are interfaces that are both difficult to learn, and still crap when you've got used to it.
It's been said before (I think in the context of DSpam) that humans don't have a 100% rate for spotting spam, false negatives etc. I know when I train my spam filter, I'm sometimes unsure whether to feed it some newsletters - some mailings/press releases I do actually want, but others, which are very similar in style, I now consider rubbish.
;-)
Gates might also have different opinions on what constitutes spam to some members on a human spam filtering team. He might see requests for interviews as spam while the filter people wouldn't. Not to mention after a day of reviewing messages on a screen, somebody might hit the wrong button.
I remember some people claiming certain spam engines (DSpam again?) were actually more reliable than humans. What if I do have a Nigerian friend anyway, who happens to be the daughter of a rich business man who wants to transfer funds to my bank account?
I was just looking through OSDir at some other stuff when the Slashdot effect took hold.
Just typical.
Thanks for that too.
Paste and Go is something I use religiously. Just hit Ctrl+D and it'll go to the URL in your clipboard instantly. Also, the copy link address menu item is something I'm surprised Firefox hasn't picked up on as it's such a common task.
Is it possible to reassign keyboard shortcuts in FF? I can't stand using Alt+Home for my homepage, I find Opera's Ctrl+Space far easier as my hands are already on that side of the keyboard.
Still, I find Opera far faster on slower (~P3 450MHz) machines, which is where I spend a lot of my time...
I agree with all of your comment.
I'm working on a P3 450MHz PC a lot of the time (running Debian), although I have a 1.8GHz next to it, I do most of my work on here. I try and try Firefox but I just can't live with it, it feels horribly slow compared to Opera.
Definitely with software, there's an aspect of "tricking" the user into thinking the software's fast. I remember reading somewhere about loading times of Linux vs. Windows machines and that there actually wasn't much in it simply because of the graphics that the Windows loading screen uses. On an identical machine here, when I time it, Linux is only a few seconds behind Windows loading, with no boot caching system etc.
The post I saw put it down to things such as... when Windows loads the screen stays black for a little bit, then the logo fades in.. a sequence that uses a few seconds, the fast moving scrolling bit makes the user think the machine is working hard, even if it shows no useful sign of how far through the bootup process the machine is. Likewise, when you log into a domain on Windows 2000/XP, you get another fast scrolling image that seems to serve the same purpose. Watching a new FC3 install I've just done... it seems to take forever as the progress bar moves very slowly while it loads.
Example with Opera - when I hit Ctrl+N for a new tab or use the gesture, the window immediately turns white, and the focus is put on the address bar. [b]Then[/b] the tab is put in the list, the window title changes etc. Doing the same in Firefox, what appears to happen is the title bar changes, window turns grey, address bar put into focus then the window turns white. It could be that Firefox is using XUL and that's slower on this older machine, while Opera's using Qt.
Perhaps it's more streamlined code? Either way, even if people complain that you're just deceiving the user, it certainly doesn't do any harm and greatly improves the user's experience - should this be a focus point for Firefox?
To clarify that, it uses Google AdWords... so in true SlashBot style, it must be good!
Seriously, it'll track just like Google AdWords does elsewhere on the web. I've paid for the full version and personally, I find it well worth it.
I can't resist the flame bait...
Windows is self installing
Eh? I installed FC3 yesterday on a machine to play with it (I'm normally a Debian fan) and the whole thing's done in X, and is very easy to go through. I'm sure Ubuntu, Mandrake etc are even easier. The first part of the installation of WinXP that asks details about partitions and filesystems is all done in text mode. Do you mean that Windows is bundled with new PCs? Is that an advantage of Windows?
self fixing
How so? Self-breaking in my experience. Unfortunately, part of my job requires me to repair Windows machines, and I'm sceptical at best about any "self fixing" Windows does.
self updating
So is FC3 to name one. It has a program called up2date which as soon as I'd installed FC, it flashed and asked me to download some new versions that had been released. Other distros also have similar systems.
It all depends on the distro. A lot of distros have done a brilliant job for the desktop user giving them great hardware detection, clear control panels to change settings. There are distros (my favourite, Debian) that cater to those of us like to understand what's going on, but even so, the package system and the community are brilliant.
While you may be flamed for suggesting that, I find that although it's pretty fast, IMO, Opera's faster. My main desktop machine's a PIII 450MHz, 384MB RAM, running Debian and Opera feels a lot more snappy, particularly when moving between tabs, opening new windows etc.
Worth the money I think. And yes, I do install Firefox in a lot of places!
Ah thanks, I was hoping/expecting that was the case.
:)
I never realised about the fish:/ handler until today... it's brilliant! Just being able to work on a remote machine with Kate etc like it's local is brilliant
I think the parent means just that - say a web page redirected you to, for the sake of argument, the audiocd: handler - by passing data to this handler, could there be a security problem? Either accessing data or controlling parts of the system?
Yep, it's the same as typing it in, but some users will click on anything, and I know that when I'm browsing the net, I don't double check every link begins with http://....
Even though I use KDE every day on my machines, I don't use Konqueror for anything other than file browsing, so I've no idea on this...?
To be fair, Windows has problems with this as well, and it stems from a large, diverse, and active development community. It also can result from ego.
I'd also like to add to that paragraph, Microsoft themselves. Compare buttons and menus in say, the latest version of Office (XP?) to the ones you get in Explorer.
Some distros are doing great work with themes so that Qt and GTK look identical out of the box, which is brilliant. The only other point is the guidelines as you mention...
My main desktop has an NVidia Geforce 4 based card as its primary display with an ATI Rage II PCI card that I stole from my old P200. It works flawlessly under Linux - I don't know how various distros (SuSE, Fedora, Mandrake etc) handle dual monitors, I use Debian and X probed and set up both displays in my config file just fine :)
All I did after that was edit the XF86Config file to get my preferred resolutions on each of the monitors, but if your distro is multi-monitor aware, then its config tool (Yast etc) should handle it.
I run a 17" Mitsubishi CRT and a cheap 15" TFT screen. The CRT I use for image editing, web design etc as the colour reproduction is far better, but I find the text on the TFT is sharper and is easier to work at for long lengths of time.
So now when I travel, instead of the airline sending my luggage to another city, it can end up anywhere in the *solar system*. Yeah, that's just what we need!
"The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage." - Mark Russell
Er... re-read my post slowly this time. I didn't say they weren't a company. I said they weren't just a company. And a waiver for what exactly? Asking people in the community to help on an OSS project? I didn't think you needed a waiver for that - I haven't heard you complain about Zend (creators of PHP), MySQL AB and all of the rest.
At the moment they're paying through the nose for the rights to use the Real software. An open video codec of this nature doesn't exist at the moment - they *are* spending money developing it, but they're asking for contributions from the community. Which is entirely acceptable in my books as they're going to donate a totally patent free, next generation, first of its kind video codec back to the community. They're not selling it - they're donating it for anybody to use, just like they've worked on technology in the past.
If you don't want to help, nobody's forcing you to. If somebody does want to help, it'll just move things along a little faster.
And on a side note, weren't the 1400 workers transferred to Siemens and not totally laid off?
I don't normally feed trolls... but what the hell.
a) the BBC isn't just a "company" - it's the highest quality broadcaster in the world. They always have done research and been at the forefront of new technology throughout their history. This is a project that anybody can help contribute to - as it'll benefit the community as a whole when it's complete.
b) they have put effort into it already - they've put out quite a few releases already (SF page) and have been working on it for a couple of years
c) although they want it to improve their online streaming services (currently done using Real technology), an open standard, no encumbrance from patents, with technology that other codecs at present don't use, is a very important project for not only the BBC, but for all of the computing community
And find that the whole text was already available through Project Gutenburg? ;-)
Does anybody know if they're using texts from Guternburg for this? It'd be a good combination.
They've already done it. What is the X-Box, if not a PC locked down to MS-approved software? All they don't do is call it what it is.
However, remember that the X-Box is a bad example - it's Microsoft's product from base hardware up. You purchased the X-Box from them and you can only get their software (according to you, I don't own one, nor do I condone it).
Remember, the various parts and chips in a PC are made by quite a few different companies, even they do have a common aim...
Yep, I find that Firefox is slow on my main workstation too (450MHz P3, Debian), so I use Opera instead as my main browser. It's very quick, and packed full of features.
There may possibly be an exploit in the future with Firefox's XPI system - it uses a whitelisting system at the moment. We'll see how it lasts!
does it automatically and painlessly migrate all necessary MSIE data?
In my experience, yes. It moves everything across, including saved passwords according to the list... same with Thunderbird. If your non-techy user has installed any application before (InstallShield etc) then they'll figure out Firefox easily. Just follow the instructions to install, and when it's run, it'll import everything from Internet Explorer straight away.
And what about utilities to remove the spyware his machine may already be infested with? Any suggestions?
I've used Ad-aware (http://www.lavasoft.de/) a bit but normally I run a scan using that and then find and take the rest out manually. Ad-aware would probably serve to confuse if the user isn't at all techy however, and no malware removal tool works every time.
As you said, it's either going to be licensing or simply that we don't have the source available for all of the Windows programs out there. Open source programs it could be done for, but otherwise, changing where files are stored would break most programs.
And just to add to that, Perl is open source so if it doesn't compile on your architecture of choice, you can make it happen. With Java, you're dependant on which architectures Sun supports, will decide to support in the future, and which they'll decide to drop...
Too bad you can only drink "sweet sweet chocolate" in a dark, virus infested alley, while coffee can be enjoyed by everyone, everywhere.
Unless you believe that the ingredients and recipe of the cup of coffee should be available and distributed with the cup of coffee.
the EU *SHOULD* back this move by mandating that any Office Suite that is to be sold in the EU...MUST conform to that ISO specification
;-)
That's a bit draconian isn't it? I agree with the idea of the governments in the EU using open standards, but as much as I support OSS, that's a bit over the top isn't it?
If the guy doesn't mind (although if it's MSN, then you could do it without adding him to the list) then file a bug report against Gaim (http://gaim.sf.net/) and give the developers an example they can test against. They should be able to track down a problem quite easily if they have an example of what is crashing it.