Consumer-style user interfaces - ugh
on
A Taste of Qt 4
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Driven by consumer electronic devices such as mobile phones and PDAs, desktop applications are moving away from standard widgets and styles towards more customized user interfaces. Qt 4 will support this modern user interface approach through its powerful style system as well as with flicker-free refreshes and transparency for all built-in and custom widgets.
I find this trend distressing. Custom user interfaces are, in general, a bad idea. Using non-standard widgets impacts negatively upon application usability.
Standardised widgets help the user quickly adapt to new applications, by maintaining consistent user interfaces.
Perhaps a fast way to new content for sites like wiki.linuxquestions.org would be aggregation of other sources, such as the Linux Documentation Project. That way, the LDP information could be easily (and freely) updated and expanded.
Of course, the documentation project license requires that permission is sought from authors for derivative works. Hopefully there will be few obstacles to the gaining of such permission, and perhaps LDP authors should take initiative themselves to copy and paste their articles to wikis.
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Driven by consumer electronic devices such as mobile phones and PDAs, desktop applications are moving away from standard widgets and styles towards more customized user interfaces. Qt 4 will support this modern user interface approach through its powerful style system as well as with flicker-free refreshes and transparency for all built-in and custom widgets.
I find this trend distressing. Custom user interfaces are, in general, a bad idea. Using non-standard widgets impacts negatively upon application usability.
Standardised widgets help the user quickly adapt to new applications, by maintaining consistent user interfaces.
Perhaps a fast way to new content for sites like wiki.linuxquestions.org would be aggregation of other sources, such as the Linux Documentation Project. That way, the LDP information could be easily (and freely) updated and expanded.
Of course, the documentation project license requires that permission is sought from authors for derivative works. Hopefully there will be few obstacles to the gaining of such permission, and perhaps LDP authors should take initiative themselves to copy and paste their articles to wikis.