Linked from TFA is a BBC produced podcast interview (available in Ogg Vorbis format, CC Attr-NC-SA) with Ashley Highfield which is extremely enlightening.
Rather than the very lightweight interviews I've read with him lately (I don't care if he has an iPod!), this is pretty in depth, and Mr Highfield comes across as having quite a lot of clue. It's well worth listening to.
To make a few of the points from the interview:
It sounds like there's going to be up to four different iPlayers:
The windows one (currently in Beta)
One for virgin media set-top boxes (Virgin has a monopoly on Cable TV in the UK). (coming around Christmas)
The flash based streaming one (coming after Christmas)
One for Macs, which is based on Adobe AIR, and allows downloading (not announced, and they won't until they know that it works
It seems that there isn't a plan to allow downloading for Linux, because as Mr Highfield (correctly) says, open source and DRM are incompatible. DRM can never work on Linux (not that it works anywhere else), and so while they're thinking about providing the iPlayer on Linux, it will only be in a future beyond DRM.
There's also some interesting stuff about how much it would cost for the BBC to buy all of the rights for their programming (lots) and how the Beethoven experience experiment changed the landscape
I believe the process of watching people try to use prototypes is called ethnographics, and as I see it, it has a failing in that it is practically impossible to find someone in the west who hasn't used some sort of user interface. All you are going to see when watching someone try to use a GUI for the first time is simply going be what they have learnt from other GUIs, and that gives you the bad as well as the good.
A well designed UI that is different from what a user has used before will of course be harder to use for the first hour or so, but if it is consistent (and well documented) there is no reason that a user shouldn't be able to be more productive under something better after a little while.
I think the claims that the Sun study showed up poor usability, which has now been fixed are disingenuous, because GNOME isn't meant to be the desktop environment you used last.
Your mouse is not an intuitive interface, if you had never seen a mouse, never seen one on TV and never seen someone use one, you wouldn't expect it to move a pointer on your screen. But it is simple to learn just from touching one, and largely consistent accross almost every application you will ever use, so you don't think about it any more. That makes a mouse a good user interface.
"
If you're going to go on a flamewar, please do some research. Go to Desktop Preferences, Keyboard Shortcuts and then choose "Emacs" from the text editing shortcuts dropdown box. There you go, emacs keybindings."
Touche. I didn't realise that was there, thanks, you've made my day.
"
That was a brilliant example of all that was wrong with GNOME. Who on Gods green earth needs 4 different type of clock?"
My point wasn't that all the available clock applets were good, or that anyone would need all of them (of course nobody would want more than one, as long as its the right one). My point was that users didn't understand how to add a clock to the panel because they didn't understand what an applet was. If you understand what an applet is, it is easy to go through "add applet" > "clocks" and choose one of them, no matter how many choices you are given. The problem wasn't that there were too many clocks (even if thats the users in the study maight have said), but that the idea of an applet wasn't clearly defined. If there was some visual distinction between launchers and Applets, GNOME would be much more usable, because it would be more consistent and discoverable.
"
Huh? What is wrong with a maximise button? Every UI I've ever seen has one of these, and no the Mac way of expanding to some apparently random size is not good, it's a pain in the ass."
I'm guessing that every UI you've ever seen has a legacy as in a cooperative multitasking operating system, where it was impractical to actually use more than one application at one time. There are a lot of UI "features" that are actually cruft that no one is willing to ditch even though they are now irrelevent (like file open dialogs which duplicate file managers). I can see how people find maximise buttons useful under certain circumstances, but if you hit alt-tab every time you need to see something else, you might as well be on Windows 3.1. Fortunately a lot of applications which really might need all your attention now have propper full screen modes. If our hearts are pure, maybe we can eleminate the maximise button within our lifetimes, and windows will be as large as they need to be, and no larger.
"
Yes, and the GNOME developers are developing for non-geeks. If you have a problem with that, go fork the old gnome1.4 codebase and continue loading it up with more clocks or something."
A good user interface is a good user interface whoever its designed for. All humans have basically the same needs. We know quite a lot about what makes for a good user interface, and GNOME has a chance to do it all, from a relatively blank canvas. Despite what some people have been saying recently, it is possible to make a UI that is usable by all, flexible and still consistent. It frustrates me to watch the GNOME project duplicate the bad bits of windows along with the good, and introduce inconsistancies with the few applications that were already standard on the UNIX desktop (even if those things are only defaults).
Wow, I didn't realise I was so opinionated about all this, I failed User Interface Design last semester:-)
When people talk about an intuitive interface, they are mostly talking bollocks. There is a great quote that "The only intuitive interface is the nipple, after that it is all learnt" (I don't know who said it, but it is certainly true).
Part of my point was that there seems to be a drive in GNOME to remove configurability because it confuses people, which may be true in some cases, but in cases like the "too many clocks" example, it is possible that the user just doesn't understand a metaphor because it has never been explained and it is different from what they have seen before. An applet is a program, just like a webbrowser, only it resides in a specific part of the screen. It is seen as a good thing for there to be plenty of web browsers, so why shouldn't there be a choice of clock applets? There is of course no reason, and a user that understands what an applet is would have no problem in understanding that there is a choice of applets to perform a given task. It doesn't help that launchers and applets are mixed into the same panel, without any differentiation between them. An applet is a good metaphor, the confustion exists in how it is used in GNOME.
I think that configurability is basically a good thing, but it desktop environments should handle it better. A big preferences dialog full of cryptic names for rarely used options is bad UI, but the trick isn't to get rid of configurability, the aim should be to make it available in consistent and discoverable ways which aren't overwhelming.
Take for example, the GNOME panel. It is possible to change its colour, or make it transparent through a right click menu. However it looks ugly, because the applets inside it still use the defualt GTK theme. A much better UI would be to allow transparency to be handled in GTK themes, and allow themes to be applied through drag and drop. Then you could have a theme that made windows transparent in some pretty way, and then drag it onto the panel, so that the panel would become transparent, and all of the applets inside would inherit the theme. You could drag the same theme onto your terminals to make them transparent too, or any other application you wanted. That makes every application more configurable, but the configurability is implicit in the framework and consistent accross applications, rather than explicit through a menu hardcoded into the application.
The reason I think that GNOME should use either emacs or vi keybindings (no worse than Windows, not at all hard to learn, just different), is that user interfaces should be consistent, a text editor is essential in UNIX (thats not going to go away), and there is nothing in either GNOME or KDE which can rival those two.
I would like your mother to use GNOME too, but I'd rather she used it because it was better than what she is used to, than because it was as good, and you told her to.
There has been a lot said about the usability of GNOME, and a lot of work done to make the user interface more consistant. However I think that it has mostly been a waste of time. The people who are writing the GNOME Human interface guidelines are forgetting that the majority of GNOME users are going to be UNIX/Linux users, and that to these people it is not necessarily atractive to use a desktop environment which tries simply to be a better Windowss than windows. Take for example key bindings. In the Unix world there have always been two different sets of keybindings that people use, emacs keys and vi keys. I think that it is fair to say that the majority of unix users spend a lot of thier time in either emacs or vi. Gnome used to try to emulate some of the emacs default keybindings, but now they all seem to have been replaced with windows keybindings.
Another good example is the "too many clocks" problem. A Sun sponsored ethnographic study into GNOME usability said that users were confused when trying to add a clock to a panel, because there was a multiplicity of clock applets. The people who write these things make a basic mistake of thinking that a windows user should be able to walk up to a UNIX machine, grab the mouse and go, and that makes for good user interface. Well its not true. The old MacOS is often cited as a good UI. The first time I tried to use it, I didn't have a clue what was going on. The menu bar at the top confused the hell out of me. That doesn't mean that it wasn't a good UI, it just means that it wasn't TWM or windows 3.11, which is what I was used to at the time. So I was pissed off when I upgraded my version of gnome and half the applets I used had gone!
Don't even get me started on window managers with maximise buttons!
Developers should remember who they are developing for, and give more precedence to unix traditions than to windows traditions. It is nice to be able to attract new users from other platforms, but it shouldn't be at the price of losing users on the current one. Users from MacOS or windows should have to learn how to use a new user interface. If theres nothing different then theres no point in changing.
Is this the future of Mozilla?
on
Phoenix 0.4 Released
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I still use Mozilla most of the time, because I use Mozilla Mail as my mail client, but I have been using Nightly builds of Phoenix from time to time, and I have to say I'm impressed. With the Tabbed browsing extensions and Optimoz installed I think it is the best browser I have come accross.
I think that Phoenix is more than a good web browser though, I think it is nothing less than a complete vindication of the Mozilla project. Pheonix shows that all of the time put into Mozilla has not just produced bloat, it has also produced a code base that is useful enough to make something extremely efficent and effective, extremely quickly.
It is also very good to see something come out of Mozilla that isn't just an unbranded version of Netscape, and I would like to see more of this. Given the work that is going into producing the GRE (Gecko Runtime Environment) which aims to make a distribution of the bits of Mozilla that are used by everything, so that programs can be linked against it without needing the whole broweser suite to be installed, I think that Pheonix and other apps like it (a mail reader and all the rest) could be the future of Mozilla.
Mozilla 1.0 was both a Monolithic Communications Suite and an application framework, and Phoenix has shown the power of that frame work. I would like it if Mozilla 2.0 was just a framework, but it was released with a set of standalone programs that worked well together, but could be used equally well seperately, and I think it would do Mozilla's credibility a lot of good if it was something that definately isn't Netscape.
I wonder if anyone at Mozilla.org is thinking like this.
Although i do understand where RMS is coming from with the GNU/Linux thing, I think he has chosen a bad way to argue it.
It is completely true to say that I am a Linux user, since I do use Linux (the kernel). It therefore seems completely reasonable to call a group of people like me a Linux User Group.
It may be true to say that we are also a GNU/Linux User Group, but that doesn't give him grounds to attack people for using the former.
My first Linux system was a 386 sx 33, 4mb ram, with Slackware 2.3 (i think, it had kernel 2.2.8) Hmmm, I remember my first kernel compile, it was about 12 hours. fun fun fun. I actually did quite a few of them! I never really coped with X, not because it didn't run, but because I couldn't cope with 640x480, which was all my monitor could take.
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly, they aren't putting the Mac second, they're placing Virgin Media set top boxes second.
Linked from TFA is a BBC produced podcast interview (available in Ogg Vorbis format, CC Attr-NC-SA) with Ashley Highfield which is extremely enlightening.
Rather than the very lightweight interviews I've read with him lately (I don't care if he has an iPod!), this is pretty in depth, and Mr Highfield comes across as having quite a lot of clue. It's well worth listening to.
To make a few of the points from the interview:
All in all, a very interesting listen.
I believe the process of watching people try to use prototypes is called ethnographics, and as I see it, it has a failing in that it is practically impossible to find someone in the west who hasn't used some sort of user interface. All you are going to see when watching someone try to use a GUI for the first time is simply going be what they have learnt from other GUIs, and that gives you the bad as well as the good.
A well designed UI that is different from what a user has used before will of course be harder to use for the first hour or so, but if it is consistent (and well documented) there is no reason that a user shouldn't be able to be more productive under something better after a little while.
I think the claims that the Sun study showed up poor usability, which has now been fixed are disingenuous, because GNOME isn't meant to be the desktop environment you used last.
Your mouse is not an intuitive interface, if you had never seen a mouse, never seen one on TV and never seen someone use one, you wouldn't expect it to move a pointer on your screen. But it is simple to learn just from touching one, and largely consistent accross almost every application you will ever use, so you don't think about it any more. That makes a mouse a good user interface.
Touche. I didn't realise that was there, thanks, you've made my day.
My point wasn't that all the available clock applets were good, or that anyone would need all of them (of course nobody would want more than one, as long as its the right one). My point was that users didn't understand how to add a clock to the panel because they didn't understand what an applet was. If you understand what an applet is, it is easy to go through "add applet" > "clocks" and choose one of them, no matter how many choices you are given. The problem wasn't that there were too many clocks (even if thats the users in the study maight have said), but that the idea of an applet wasn't clearly defined. If there was some visual distinction between launchers and Applets, GNOME would be much more usable, because it would be more consistent and discoverable.
I'm guessing that every UI you've ever seen has a legacy as in a cooperative multitasking operating system, where it was impractical to actually use more than one application at one time. There are a lot of UI "features" that are actually cruft that no one is willing to ditch even though they are now irrelevent (like file open dialogs which duplicate file managers). I can see how people find maximise buttons useful under certain circumstances, but if you hit alt-tab every time you need to see something else, you might as well be on Windows 3.1. Fortunately a lot of applications which really might need all your attention now have propper full screen modes. If our hearts are pure, maybe we can eleminate the maximise button within our lifetimes, and windows will be as large as they need to be, and no larger.
A good user interface is a good user interface whoever its designed for. All humans have basically the same needs. We know quite a lot about what makes for a good user interface, and GNOME has a chance to do it all, from a relatively blank canvas. Despite what some people have been saying recently, it is possible to make a UI that is usable by all, flexible and still consistent. It frustrates me to watch the GNOME project duplicate the bad bits of windows along with the good, and introduce inconsistancies with the few applications that were already standard on the UNIX desktop (even if those things are only defaults).
Wow, I didn't realise I was so opinionated about all this, I failed User Interface Design last semester
When people talk about an intuitive interface, they are mostly talking bollocks. There is a great quote that "The only intuitive interface is the nipple, after that it is all learnt" (I don't know who said it, but it is certainly true).
Part of my point was that there seems to be a drive in GNOME to remove configurability because it confuses people, which may be true in some cases, but in cases like the "too many clocks" example, it is possible that the user just doesn't understand a metaphor because it has never been explained and it is different from what they have seen before. An applet is a program, just like a webbrowser, only it resides in a specific part of the screen. It is seen as a good thing for there to be plenty of web browsers, so why shouldn't there be a choice of clock applets? There is of course no reason, and a user that understands what an applet is would have no problem in understanding that there is a choice of applets to perform a given task. It doesn't help that launchers and applets are mixed into the same panel, without any differentiation between them. An applet is a good metaphor, the confustion exists in how it is used in GNOME.
I think that configurability is basically a good thing, but it desktop environments should handle it better. A big preferences dialog full of cryptic names for rarely used options is bad UI, but the trick isn't to get rid of configurability, the aim should be to make it available in consistent and discoverable ways which aren't overwhelming.
Take for example, the GNOME panel. It is possible to change its colour, or make it transparent through a right click menu. However it looks ugly, because the applets inside it still use the defualt GTK theme. A much better UI would be to allow transparency to be handled in GTK themes, and allow themes to be applied through drag and drop. Then you could have a theme that made windows transparent in some pretty way, and then drag it onto the panel, so that the panel would become transparent, and all of the applets inside would inherit the theme. You could drag the same theme onto your terminals to make them transparent too, or any other application you wanted. That makes every application more configurable, but the configurability is implicit in the framework and consistent accross applications, rather than explicit through a menu hardcoded into the application.
The reason I think that GNOME should use either emacs or vi keybindings (no worse than Windows, not at all hard to learn, just different), is that user interfaces should be consistent, a text editor is essential in UNIX (thats not going to go away), and there is nothing in either GNOME or KDE which can rival those two.
I would like your mother to use GNOME too, but I'd rather she used it because it was better than what she is used to, than because it was as good, and you told her to.
There has been a lot said about the usability of GNOME, and a lot of work done to make the user interface more consistant. However I think that it has mostly been a waste of time. The people who are writing the GNOME Human interface guidelines are forgetting that the majority of GNOME users are going to be UNIX/Linux users, and that to these people it is not necessarily atractive to use a desktop environment which tries simply to be a better Windowss than windows. Take for example key bindings. In the Unix world there have always been two different sets of keybindings that people use, emacs keys and vi keys. I think that it is fair to say that the majority of unix users spend a lot of thier time in either emacs or vi. Gnome used to try to emulate some of the emacs default keybindings, but now they all seem to have been replaced with windows keybindings.
Another good example is the "too many clocks" problem. A Sun sponsored ethnographic study into GNOME usability said that users were confused when trying to add a clock to a panel, because there was a multiplicity of clock applets. The people who write these things make a basic mistake of thinking that a windows user should be able to walk up to a UNIX machine, grab the mouse and go, and that makes for good user interface. Well its not true. The old MacOS is often cited as a good UI. The first time I tried to use it, I didn't have a clue what was going on. The menu bar at the top confused the hell out of me. That doesn't mean that it wasn't a good UI, it just means that it wasn't TWM or windows 3.11, which is what I was used to at the time. So I was pissed off when I upgraded my version of gnome and half the applets I used had gone!
Don't even get me started on window managers with maximise buttons!
Developers should remember who they are developing for, and give more precedence to unix traditions than to windows traditions. It is nice to be able to attract new users from other platforms, but it shouldn't be at the price of losing users on the current one. Users from MacOS or windows should have to learn how to use a new user interface. If theres nothing different then theres no point in changing.
I still use Mozilla most of the time, because I use Mozilla Mail as my mail client, but I have been using Nightly builds of Phoenix from time to time, and I have to say I'm impressed. With the Tabbed browsing extensions and Optimoz installed I think it is the best browser I have come accross.
I think that Phoenix is more than a good web browser though, I think it is nothing less than a complete vindication of the Mozilla project. Pheonix shows that all of the time put into Mozilla has not just produced bloat, it has also produced a code base that is useful enough to make something extremely efficent and effective, extremely quickly.
It is also very good to see something come out of Mozilla that isn't just an unbranded version of Netscape, and I would like to see more of this. Given the work that is going into producing the GRE (Gecko Runtime Environment) which aims to make a distribution of the bits of Mozilla that are used by everything, so that programs can be linked against it without needing the whole broweser suite to be installed, I think that Pheonix and other apps like it (a mail reader and all the rest) could be the future of Mozilla.
Mozilla 1.0 was both a Monolithic Communications Suite and an application framework, and Phoenix has shown the power of that frame work. I would like it if Mozilla 2.0 was just a framework, but it was released with a set of standalone programs that worked well together, but could be used equally well seperately, and I think it would do Mozilla's credibility a lot of good if it was something that definately isn't Netscape.
I wonder if anyone at Mozilla.org is thinking like this.
Although i do understand where RMS is coming from with the GNU/Linux thing, I think he has chosen a bad way to argue it.
It is completely true to say that I am a Linux user, since I do use Linux (the kernel). It therefore seems completely reasonable to call a group of people like me a Linux User Group.
It may be true to say that we are also a GNU/Linux User Group, but that doesn't give him grounds to attack people for using the former.
You mean you weren't born with the desire to buy powertools? What sort of a man are you?
aww, I can't believe I'm doing this.
KDE, is a great project, I don't know how they get it out so often, and yet make such great progress.
Well done guys.
(Of course, I'm a gnome guy myself)
My first Linux system was a 386 sx 33, 4mb ram, with Slackware 2.3 (i think, it had kernel 2.2.8) Hmmm, I remember my first kernel compile, it was about 12 hours. fun fun fun. I actually did quite a few of them! I never really coped with X, not because it didn't run, but because I couldn't cope with 640x480, which was all my monitor could take.