So you support the less-consistent interface, then? The "x" in the top-right of a window closes the window. It is the same with every other program. That is what that button does. Making it close tabs would be counter-intuitive and inconsistent. Likewise, forcing people to navigate menus to perform an incredibly common task which can be done without them on every other program on the system seems a little harsh.
Yes, since a blog is a "web log". Originally this definition only extended to logs about one's own life or whatever, but I see no reason it shouldn't be extended to logs of news and so forth. Not really the "accepted" definition, but that's incredibly hazy as-is.
Most of their problems can be traced back to internal political conflicts and organizational deadwood. Oh, and an unmitigated greed...
Yeah, I try to avoid their "business" side, since that's a lot harder (and less attractive) to defend, but their products are generally not bad, not by a long way. They've made a fair few mistakes in the past (not implementing a network security model of any sensible kind by default until SP2 of Windows XP was a big one) but they're getting past a lot of those now. Even if you're an "OSS Evangelist", you shouldn't be dismissing MS products outright. Hell, you should probably pay more attention, lest you be surprised when some innovation you didn't think them capable of puts them far ahead.
(Thanks for the reply, and sorry this is so long.)
No problem, I'm just sorry I don't have time (or the energy) to fully reply to you here. The elements you've disagreed with me on – with the exception of Exposé's "allowing you to see everything" features which I basically conceded originally – are fairly minor usability gains, and were hardly "innovative", which is the point I was trying to get at, but I think you've understood me on most points, in any case.
And yeah, I used the wrong word when I used "metaphor", but to be fair this layout change is pretty extreme compared to most changes that people generally make to software, although it looks subtle. Proof shall be in pudding though — as we both admit, we've no idea if this actually works
Re:I'm not an expert...
on
Office 12 Exposed
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
And 16 or 32 bit, high resolution displays were just a prettification over the old 8 bit terminals.
Theoretically, yes, so long as those 16- or 32-bit displays were still used with a plain terminal interface. Obviously if you're doing image work, it's a feature upgrade. Neither of these are usability improvements though. The new displays could be used by other systems to improve usability – for example by providing more advanced colour hinting or whatever – but they do not, in themselves, aid it.
My point is that you're dismissing truly powerful features. Apple's main "gimmick" is that they want you to be able to see what you're working with. Virtually every improvement they make to their software is working toward this goal. OpenGL accelerated graphics? Speeds up your workflow because your UI doesn't stutter. Expose? Lets you see every window on your screen, and click the one you want. I use the taskbar daily, and trust me, when you've got 20 documents open, all with names like 203481038948.jpg, that's a must have. Same with previews. When you've got a file with 200 PDF files in it, all with names like CC382(08/11/04)_PAGE2.PDF, Being able to preview them isn't a feature, it's a necessity.
I mainly agree with this, particularly in your particular niche (obviously the alternatives are useful in different contexts too) of desktop computer usage. OpenGL is a bad example in the context you use it, since it's effect on the interface is purely cosmetic — the fact that it runs faster is valid, but no more valid than saying that buying a faster computer will make it more usable. This is not really what this is about.
Don't just dismiss truly powerful features as "glitz."
I must've been missing some clarity there — the glitz I was referring to was in the Windows interface, not the OSX one. I felt the parent post of my last post was accusing MS of ripping off Apple on the sole basis that they had a nice-looking gradient on the widgets, and was completely disregarding the fact that the actual functionality and layout was completely different.
I think I may have come across as hating OSX, which is just not the case. I did say that Exposé's letting you see window contents was an "innovation", for a start. But there is a lot of lumping praise onto Apple where they don't deserve it, and there is a lot of making fun of MS where they don't deserve it, and I think that the (very numerous) shortcomings of OSX need to be mentioned from time-to-time.
But I don't hate OSX. I like OSX. I think it does a lot of things right. There's a large "Apple can do no wrong" feeling buzzing around sometimes though, and it just simply isn't true.
- hardware-accelerated compositing and rendering (Quartz/Core Image)
Not a usability benefit, just prettification.
- Expose/Dashboard
Dashboard is not much of an innovation, similar systems have been available for other systems for a while. It's prettier than most of those, though. Exposé is an attractive replacement for a "show desktop" button and a taskbar. It works fairly well, but is far from revolutionary (its only real innovation is allowing you to see the content of the Windows you're switching between).
- previews of vector-based files (PDFs, AIs, etc)
Previews aren't a huge thing, but this is nice "feature".
- system-wide PDF support and printing
Functionality, not usability, again.
- universal spell-check
If it's consistently implemented, then this
could be a usability help, yes.
- Finder column view
Conceded
- Spotlight searching
Spotlight is great, it's an excellent system. It's essentially a cut-down version of where all systems have been going for a while, Apple did well to have a workable and integrated version before other people though (when you control your whole platform, this is something you can get away with).
About the new Office 12 interface: its stupid that they just borrow elements (i.e.. glossy buttons, brushed metal with middle-lit gradient) because they think Apple made them cool. Microsoft is big and rich enough to come up with something really compelling and new. They just don't. They go with what they think is 'good enough'. Which is pretty bad to you and me.
You're not seeing past the glitz. Look at the layout of the windows and interface. This is not the same as how current Windows/Macintosh interfaces operate, it's a different metaphor for the layout of an application window.
I think you kinda missed my point though. I didn't say they were "standing still" with features, only with real usability enhancements. Spotlight is a big step forward, but previous to that most of their "innovations" were prettier versions of what came before. These MS interface enhancements do look different, do look new, and do look like they have a chance of helping the usability of a system. We won't know whether they achieve that until using it, but a gradient background does not an "Apple ripoff" make.
Re:I'm not an expert...
on
Office 12 Exposed
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, we know that there are problems with the way things work now. There are limitations. Apple are constantly being given praise for their "innovations" when their newer OSs have actually done very little more than System 9 in usability terms — they're actually introduced some new issues, while simply prettifying what was there (and putting it on a far more solid base).
This, however, appears to be an actual attempt at something new as a desktop standard. MS cannot afford to do this sort of thing between OS releases, so when they do release, they need to make significant alterations or they'll never get their usability changes in there.
As I said somewhere else though, we'll never know if these are easier or harder until we use them. If it turns out to be easy to transition to the new style, that's a win for usability (learnability) in itself.
I have to say I quite like it. There's something there that's at least acknoledging that "the way we do things" is not the be-all and end-all of usability. By reducing things to contexts, they might be able to expose everything you need without increasing complexity.
I think we're never going to know how well this works until we actually get to use it though — it's too different from other interfaces around to draw quick conclusions, I feel.
I'm still waiting for Coral to load the images, but at risk of being proven completely wrong, is it possible that the throwing out of "standardisation" is because of new standards for Vista?
I think most of the points in the article can be used to point out why Windows is insecure starting with the big #1 of default permit. Default permit makes things easy for users because it doesn't require they know anything about what they are doing or to configure anything.
Yes. That's it exactly, basically.
Enumerating badness.. virus scanners and default permit firewalls.. these damn things are the bane of Windows. Instead of blocking unknowns or at least asking for permission Windows and Windows apps tend to rely on blacklists to tell them what is unsafe. With thousands of apps being released daily and probably thousands of hacks too that is a pretty tall order. IMO greylisting unknowns while blacklisting known threats is a good solution. That way the user can't easily screw up and allow through known threats and they're prompted before allowing possible threats through.
This is, essentially, the default action (in so far as is possible on the original system) in XPSP2, although some actions are just not classified as admin actions a lot of the time. Certainly for (incoming) net-enabled stuff, apps are now greylisted while unknown.
Penetrating and Patching is mostly only a problem in Windows because Microsoft and other companies release beta (or less) quality software as final releases and use paying customers to do the testing.
This is a problem with the software industry in general. OSS solutions tend to be a little more "honest" with it, but in general it's just the way things are. Which is why it's so important that things should be designed from the ground up to do their jobs, to avoid having to patch over the bad bits.
Hacking is cool. The guy is an idiot on this point. Knowing your enemy is a good lesson in security. So is knowing your own weaknesses. You learn those things by first copying your enemy and then by stepping ahead to guess what your enemy may do next. You're not a real engineer if you don't understand ways in which your creations can go wrong either by bad luck or by ill intent.
I'm about 50/50 on this. Identifying security "anti-patterns" might be worth checking out, but actually teaching oneself to hack as a "know your enemy" sort of thing seems like a waste of time — if you've got any knowledge of the design flaw that causes the vulnerability, you just need to avoid the flaw, the actual mechanism of hacking is not important at all.
It means that you don't dumb users down in the MacOS/Windows way...
"Dumbing down" is a bad way of putting this. If you can hide the operation of the computer in a secure way, you're not dumbing the system down, you're simplifying it. Users should not need to know the operation of the computer at all. Knowing "expected and unexpected behaviour" is fair enough, but that set of knowledge should be incredibly small. Expected behaviour should be the system doing exactly what you tell it to, and nothing else. Unexpected behaviour should be exactly that — the computer doing something you didn't tell it to. There should be no point where the user is forced to view information about something they didn't specifically tell the computer to do.
It's an interesting subject, how to set up systems to be "secure by default" in a friendly way, but I believe that it is, fundamentally, possible.
IANAL, but wouldn't posting an exploit modified to run arbitrary code be somewhat illegal? Just a thought. It is, in any case, fairly responsible to avoid posting that version for the time being, so long as it's provided to the developers.
Out of general curiosity, were there any positive responses to your article? Have any people offered to start projects and help implement some of your proposed changes?
I'm not an experienced developer in "low-level" languages like C or C++, but I'd like to help out wherever I can. I know the GNOME Storage project is working on some things similar to some of your suggestions, but otherwise I liked your article and I've got a strong inclination to help out with any projects like this, so it'd be useful to know where I can help...
Additionally, I might be the only one, but does nobody else want a differentiation between a folder housing one's documents, and the desktop?
Re:Waiting for apps isn't annoying, focus stealing
on
GNOME 2.12 Released
·
· Score: 1
This feature wasn't in the Ubuntu distribution of GNOME (which was 2.10 - you could install a version with support for it from alternative repositories however), and is listed on the "new features" page of the 2.12 release notes, so I guess it was a transitional thing.
While that can be annoying, to be sure, why do people rely on the database to do their data validation? That should be done in the application code long before you ever run an insert or update. If you're trying to insert invlaid data, you're the only one to blame.
Because at that level, the same validation would have to be carried out by every single application that used the database. Why would you make developers do that?
I'm a lot more satisfied, anyway! Thank you very much for posting this, it's a great help. I still think that some of the scenarios he describes, even with your clarifications, imply O(n), but I really need to look over it a little more.
You have unfortunately caught me very drunk, and in charge of looking after my drunk, depressed, ex-girlfriend flatmate. So I can't reply right now, and there's no guarantees I'll remember to reply later. But thanks a lot for answering, too many people on this site just slide in the anti-MS sentiment without justification, which aids no-one.
Slashdot Mirror
So you support the less-consistent interface, then? The "x" in the top-right of a window closes the window. It is the same with every other program. That is what that button does. Making it close tabs would be counter-intuitive and inconsistent. Likewise, forcing people to navigate menus to perform an incredibly common task which can be done without them on every other program on the system seems a little harsh.
Yes, since a blog is a "web log". Originally this definition only extended to logs about one's own life or whatever, but I see no reason it shouldn't be extended to logs of news and so forth. Not really the "accepted" definition, but that's incredibly hazy as-is.
This is where we discover – to our horror – that the whole site is hosted on a Zaurus over 802.11...
I had wondered...
Yeah, I try to avoid their "business" side, since that's a lot harder (and less attractive) to defend, but their products are generally not bad, not by a long way. They've made a fair few mistakes in the past (not implementing a network security model of any sensible kind by default until SP2 of Windows XP was a big one) but they're getting past a lot of those now. Even if you're an "OSS Evangelist", you shouldn't be dismissing MS products outright. Hell, you should probably pay more attention, lest you be surprised when some innovation you didn't think them capable of puts them far ahead.
No problem, I'm just sorry I don't have time (or the energy) to fully reply to you here. The elements you've disagreed with me on – with the exception of Exposé's "allowing you to see everything" features which I basically conceded originally – are fairly minor usability gains, and were hardly "innovative", which is the point I was trying to get at, but I think you've understood me on most points, in any case.
And yeah, I used the wrong word when I used "metaphor", but to be fair this layout change is pretty extreme compared to most changes that people generally make to software, although it looks subtle. Proof shall be in pudding though — as we both admit, we've no idea if this actually works
Theoretically, yes, so long as those 16- or 32-bit displays were still used with a plain terminal interface. Obviously if you're doing image work, it's a feature upgrade. Neither of these are usability improvements though. The new displays could be used by other systems to improve usability – for example by providing more advanced colour hinting or whatever – but they do not, in themselves, aid it.
I mainly agree with this, particularly in your particular niche (obviously the alternatives are useful in different contexts too) of desktop computer usage. OpenGL is a bad example in the context you use it, since it's effect on the interface is purely cosmetic — the fact that it runs faster is valid, but no more valid than saying that buying a faster computer will make it more usable. This is not really what this is about.
I must've been missing some clarity there — the glitz I was referring to was in the Windows interface, not the OSX one. I felt the parent post of my last post was accusing MS of ripping off Apple on the sole basis that they had a nice-looking gradient on the widgets, and was completely disregarding the fact that the actual functionality and layout was completely different.
I think I may have come across as hating OSX, which is just not the case. I did say that Exposé's letting you see window contents was an "innovation", for a start. But there is a lot of lumping praise onto Apple where they don't deserve it, and there is a lot of making fun of MS where they don't deserve it, and I think that the (very numerous) shortcomings of OSX need to be mentioned from time-to-time.
But I don't hate OSX. I like OSX. I think it does a lot of things right. There's a large "Apple can do no wrong" feeling buzzing around sometimes though, and it just simply isn't true.
Not a usability benefit, just prettification.
Dashboard is not much of an innovation, similar systems have been available for other systems for a while. It's prettier than most of those, though. Exposé is an attractive replacement for a "show desktop" button and a taskbar. It works fairly well, but is far from revolutionary (its only real innovation is allowing you to see the content of the Windows you're switching between).
Previews aren't a huge thing, but this is nice "feature".
Functionality, not usability, again.
If it's consistently implemented, then this could be a usability help, yes.
Conceded
Wrapper around GTK+ for Mono. 'tis that simple.
Well, we know that there are problems with the way things work now. There are limitations. Apple are constantly being given praise for their "innovations" when their newer OSs have actually done very little more than System 9 in usability terms — they're actually introduced some new issues, while simply prettifying what was there (and putting it on a far more solid base).
This, however, appears to be an actual attempt at something new as a desktop standard. MS cannot afford to do this sort of thing between OS releases, so when they do release, they need to make significant alterations or they'll never get their usability changes in there.
As I said somewhere else though, we'll never know if these are easier or harder until we use them. If it turns out to be easy to transition to the new style, that's a win for usability (learnability) in itself.
I have to say I quite like it. There's something there that's at least acknoledging that "the way we do things" is not the be-all and end-all of usability. By reducing things to contexts, they might be able to expose everything you need without increasing complexity.
I think we're never going to know how well this works until we actually get to use it though — it's too different from other interfaces around to draw quick conclusions, I feel.
I'm still waiting for Coral to load the images, but at risk of being proven completely wrong, is it possible that the throwing out of "standardisation" is because of new standards for Vista?
Yes. That's it exactly, basically.
This is, essentially, the default action (in so far as is possible on the original system) in XPSP2, although some actions are just not classified as admin actions a lot of the time. Certainly for (incoming) net-enabled stuff, apps are now greylisted while unknown.
This is a problem with the software industry in general. OSS solutions tend to be a little more "honest" with it, but in general it's just the way things are. Which is why it's so important that things should be designed from the ground up to do their jobs, to avoid having to patch over the bad bits.
I'm about 50/50 on this. Identifying security "anti-patterns" might be worth checking out, but actually teaching oneself to hack as a "know your enemy" sort of thing seems like a waste of time — if you've got any knowledge of the design flaw that causes the vulnerability, you just need to avoid the flaw, the actual mechanism of hacking is not important at all.
"Dumbing down" is a bad way of putting this. If you can hide the operation of the computer in a secure way, you're not dumbing the system down, you're simplifying it. Users should not need to know the operation of the computer at all. Knowing "expected and unexpected behaviour" is fair enough, but that set of knowledge should be incredibly small. Expected behaviour should be the system doing exactly what you tell it to, and nothing else. Unexpected behaviour should be exactly that — the computer doing something you didn't tell it to. There should be no point where the user is forced to view information about something they didn't specifically tell the computer to do.
It's an interesting subject, how to set up systems to be "secure by default" in a friendly way, but I believe that it is, fundamentally, possible.
Great. Now I have a mental image of Richard Stallman transforming into a fire-breathing, behemoth-sized Godzilla-style Free Software monster.
"No! Free Software must prevail! I need CONTINUOUSSSS POOOOOWWEEEEERRR"
Sparks, flames, etc.
Yeah, this was fixed in trunk a long time ago, but this is the first version of Firefox to get back up to date with that version of Gecko.
Ironically, though, since Slashdot is apparently imminently moving to a CSS-based layout, the bug will be fixed by both sides at once...
IANAL, but wouldn't posting an exploit modified to run arbitrary code be somewhat illegal? Just a thought. It is, in any case, fairly responsible to avoid posting that version for the time being, so long as it's provided to the developers.
Forget about desktop Linux, I got burned by the HURD port of Duke Nukem Forever :(
Well, I hope I hear about any projects that come from this that I can help out with. Cheers for reply.
Remove the part with your name, tear up the letter, and put it in the return envelope.
I'm aware it's immature and costs other people (including me) in their licences, but damn it feels good.
Out of general curiosity, were there any positive responses to your article? Have any people offered to start projects and help implement some of your proposed changes?
I'm not an experienced developer in "low-level" languages like C or C++, but I'd like to help out wherever I can. I know the GNOME Storage project is working on some things similar to some of your suggestions, but otherwise I liked your article and I've got a strong inclination to help out with any projects like this, so it'd be useful to know where I can help...
Additionally, I might be the only one, but does nobody else want a differentiation between a folder housing one's documents, and the desktop?
This feature wasn't in the Ubuntu distribution of GNOME (which was 2.10 - you could install a version with support for it from alternative repositories however), and is listed on the "new features" page of the 2.12 release notes, so I guess it was a transitional thing.
Thanks for reminding me that we're all drones. I had forgotten how much having leisure time harmed my productivity.
Because at that level, the same validation would have to be carried out by every single application that used the database. Why would you make developers do that?
I'm a lot more satisfied, anyway! Thank you very much for posting this, it's a great help. I still think that some of the scenarios he describes, even with your clarifications, imply O(n), but I really need to look over it a little more.
You have unfortunately caught me very drunk, and in charge of looking after my drunk, depressed, ex-girlfriend flatmate. So I can't reply right now, and there's no guarantees I'll remember to reply later. But thanks a lot for answering, too many people on this site just slide in the anti-MS sentiment without justification, which aids no-one.
...other than your "not O(n)" assertion, which was not made in a convincing way at all.