I don't agree with your premise that tabs should be used only withing documents. By your logic, it would be ok to have a tab for each page in your Word doc... this would make no sense. I think that tabs should be used to group things together which are related in a logical way.
If you do a search in google, you may open many webpages using the search results page as a starting point. I submit that the 'children' pages are logically related to the 'parent' and should be grouped together using tabs.
Web browsing is a relatively new paradigm and you don't interact with it the same way as you would with a spreadsheet or document, therefore I think that the guidelines you're referring are possibly outdated in this respect.
Just because YOU, as a techie like an interface doesn't mean it's good HID.
Tabbed browsing has been widely accepted by techies and non-techies. Why else would MS have put them into their new browser?
I'll admit that Expose is a really cool idea, but you can only take it so far. I often have 10+ webpages open, along with all my other apps. I'm not sure how useful Expose will be in this kind of situation -> I think it's more of a cool feature for newbies and marketing than for power-users.
First, Internet Explorer does not put it's name as the first part of the title. It puts the title of the page there.
Whatever IE writes in the title, when it get's long enough, you can't tell one window from the other. It's happened to me so often that I gave up and switched to FireFox. Sorry for the mixup
Third, Alt-Tabbing throught your application list will also give you the full title as you alt-tab through it.
That's not a real solution. I don't want to have to cycle thruogh all my apps to get to the IE instance I'm looking for. I'll just stick with tabbed browsing, thank you.
But, all that is irrelevant, since the point of my post totally went over your head. Tabbed browsing violates human interface guildelines from both MS *AND* Apple. This is because it operates in a way that is different from every other application. That doesn't mean it's not useful or powerful, but that it's in conflict with the established guildelines.
You're right... You're so smart and I'm so dumb. But wait, doesn't Excel use tabs??? Isn't Excel from Microsoft? Golly-gee!!! I'm so confused!
Good HID means different things to different people. KDE and Gnome have their own guidelines. Why are Microsoft's better? Tabbed browsing makes my browser more usable *for me*, and that's all I care about. If you prefer not to use tabs, you can opt not to use them in FireFox. Does IE have to option to use tabs if I want?
As opposed to having 10 instances of IE grouped together in the taskbar? When that happens, you're not able to differentiate the different instances from eachother because they all read "Internet Explorer -..." or something similar. So you end up trying them at random until you get the window you want.
It's hard to point to anything specific... you just have to use it to see. Here's a few items off the top of my head.
You can customize the crap out of it without needing to get third party addons. This lets you customize things to fit your needs, instead of what MS decides you should use.
Unified look/feel. Every app has the same colors and menus etc. This is one of the biggest strengths of KDE
KDE isn't only a windowing manger, but a fully fledged desktop environment which has all the apps you need to get going. WinXP on the other hand comes with almost nothing
It basically boils down to flexibility. KDE has it, WinXP dowsn't. That's my opinion. I used to use WinXP as my main desktop and needed to use Linux for a school project. The more I used it, the more I liked it, and now I'm 100% Linux + KDE.
I think that 'Human Interface Design; refers to the GUI interaction with the system, ie. KDE. One of the basic requirements is that *all* programs are designed the same way so that a user can easily adapt to new programs. For example, the same look & feel for ALL programs, consistent menus etc. That's why I like KDE.
Installing binaries etc. is another issue. I personally think that the difficulty installing software on Linux is partially FUD. Even though it's so *easy* on Windows, I still have to install and configure everything for all of my family members. Most of the time, the want to install some software that you have to find on a torrent site and then find the key etc etc.
At least on Linux, most/all the software is free and you can sleep at night knowing that everything on your PC is legal.
Also, ever install anything on a MAC? It's pretty darned easy to do, so I don't see why Linux won't catch up eventually/soon.
I just said that it was "FTA"... I don't care who wrote what, that particular statement annoys me whenever I hear it... The reason it's in the article is because it's been repeated quite often all over the net.
The KDE and Gnome guys work hard to make our desktop experiences better, and that kind of FUD from MS belittles their efforts. Anyone ever hear of the "KDE Usability Project" or the "GNOME Human Interface Design Guidelines"?
Yeah... still, it's part of the article, and I've seen that FUD before about how Linux GUIs are inferior to Windows, when in fact, the choice of desktop managers is astounding on Linux.
This one is from Bill though:
But you raise a good point, which is: can there be a positive reciprocal relationship between Microsoft and the OSS development community? I strongly believe the answer is "Yes" and I spend a lot of time trying to help this relationship mature. There is a great amount we can learn from one another, and we have just begun to explore the potential of this relationship.
These kinds of statements make me wonder how dumb MS thinks we are. Do we really believe that MS doesn't want to crush Linux and OSS? Have they ever played fair with *anybody*?
I guess I'm just tired of hearing how great the *next* version of Windows is going to be, etc, etc. I got tired of waiting and switched to Linux... Hopefully, more people will do the same.
The theme of all his answers is basically 'there's room for all of us to coexist together in a Utopian paradise' blah blah... This comment in particular annoyed me (FTA):
One of the primary reasons Linux is somewhat inferior to commercial offerings when considered as a general-purpose desktop operating system is that there is a lack of a single guiding human interface standard for the various groups to work toward. Companies such as Apple Computer and Microsoft have invested large amounts of money in human interface studies, and although much of this information has been made readily accessible to the public, it would appear that very little of that information has been put to good use by F/OSS developers.
Speaking for myself, I find KDE to be far more pleasurable to use than the current WinXP interface. If you look at the progress KDE has made since WinXP came out, it's pretty obvious who's making good use of human interface research and who isn't. Need I mention Firefox and tabbed browsing??
That's partially true. If Vim sucked, it would have died a long time ago. The fact that new people are learning it and sticking to it is an indication that it's a good piece of software.
I was wondering when someone would make this point. Having a fancy GUI for your music player is one thing, but when you want to edit a text file, you want a fast, lightweight app that does the job well. How else can you explain the fact that VIM/Emacs is still in heavy use today?
If you compare *nix to Windows platform, *nix has many good CLI apps that work well because the main concern of the developers was to make software that works instead of making it pretty.
New versions of some Windows sotware often give you the same functionality but the GUI has been tweaked to look prettier. My personal opinion from using MS Office is that there has not been a real significant improvement since Office 97 (excluding the addition of Visio), and yet here we are paying for version after version of 'new and improved' MS Office releases...
Why not? A good idea is a good idea. As someone already mentioned, Norway and other countries like Sweden are very advanced in IT, so when they do something like this, people should take notice instead of making fun.
I'm aware of that. Does that stop the EU from following the example Norway has set? I was simply alluding to the fact that you may disregard Norway because it's a single country, but the EU would be another matter entirely.
An infected torrent wouldn't necessarily die if the original seeders use a high-speed link to seed their crap. Since we're talking about a corporate entity here, they may be willing to pay for a lot of bandwidth to spread their adware. I've often downloaded torrents with 10 seeders, and have maxed out my d/l bandwidth.
I don't see how the spyware can be installed automatically. When you download a file, it goes in a directory. Unless you execute the infected file(s), the spyware can't be installed. Of course, I'm assuming here that you're using a "real" BT client that won't execute files for you;)
Furthermore, it shouldn't be too hard to filter out fakes:
- Using things like MD5 to verify 'real' releases. Maybe even GPG signatures?
- Virus/Spyware tools which can scan your downloads and detect known spyware progies.
I'm not sure if the problem is with the client. The article said that the adware programs are bundled with torrents.
I also get the impression that the adware itself will download more stuff to your computer via BT. Not sure about that though, the article was a little vague.
I was waiting for someone to mention that. Why is there so much hype about IE7 getting tabs YEARS after every other browser?
IE is SOOO far behind Firefox in terms of usability, I find it amazing that people still use IE, even after trying Firefox.
I think that they're used for all of the reasons we mentioned... it all depends on who's controlling the machine. The zombie machine in my lab was running WinXP, and the user had no idea that his computer was infected. The sysadmin came by and told him to stop running his FTP server because he was eating up all the bandwidth. Of course, this came as a complete shock to him.
I'm not so sure about that. For sure there are Unix bots, but there are a LOT of infected Windows machines. We had several Win machines infected in my lab at my university. Also, if you check out The Eggdrop homepage (http://www.eggheads.org/), you'll see it runs on most platforms.
Furthermore, I'm sure that these 10K+ botnets aren't all Unix machines...
The funny thing is that a large amount of file sharing is facilitated through IRC bots, which as far as I know, are all on Windows machines. So really, where would movie/music piracy be if it wasn't for Windows? Maybe then RIAA should be going after MS...
Walmart is just an example of what's going on in terms of free-trade etc. Huge corporations are making outrageous profits while paying employees here and abroad as little as possible.
If you take the time to watch the Frontline episode, it might change YOUR view of what reality is like.
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I don't agree with your premise that tabs should be used only withing documents. By your logic, it would be ok to have a tab for each page in your Word doc... this would make no sense. I think that tabs should be used to group things together which are related in a logical way.
If you do a search in google, you may open many webpages using the search results page as a starting point. I submit that the 'children' pages are logically related to the 'parent' and should be grouped together using tabs.
Web browsing is a relatively new paradigm and you don't interact with it the same way as you would with a spreadsheet or document, therefore I think that the guidelines you're referring are possibly outdated in this respect.
Just because YOU, as a techie like an interface doesn't mean it's good HID.
Tabbed browsing has been widely accepted by techies and non-techies. Why else would MS have put them into their new browser?
I'll admit that Expose is a really cool idea, but you can only take it so far. I often have 10+ webpages open, along with all my other apps. I'm not sure how useful Expose will be in this kind of situation -> I think it's more of a cool feature for newbies and marketing than for power-users.
First, Internet Explorer does not put it's name as the first part of the title. It puts the title of the page there.
Whatever IE writes in the title, when it get's long enough, you can't tell one window from the other. It's happened to me so often that I gave up and switched to FireFox. Sorry for the mixup
Third, Alt-Tabbing throught your application list will also give you the full title as you alt-tab through it.
That's not a real solution. I don't want to have to cycle thruogh all my apps to get to the IE instance I'm looking for. I'll just stick with tabbed browsing, thank you.
But, all that is irrelevant, since the point of my post totally went over your head. Tabbed browsing violates human interface guildelines from both MS *AND* Apple. This is because it operates in a way that is different from every other application. That doesn't mean it's not useful or powerful, but that it's in conflict with the established guildelines.
You're right... You're so smart and I'm so dumb. But wait, doesn't Excel use tabs??? Isn't Excel from Microsoft? Golly-gee!!! I'm so confused!
Good HID means different things to different people. KDE and Gnome have their own guidelines. Why are Microsoft's better? Tabbed browsing makes my browser more usable *for me*, and that's all I care about. If you prefer not to use tabs, you can opt not to use them in FireFox. Does IE have to option to use tabs if I want?
That's one of the main reasons why HID is so difficult... The term 'usability' is ambiguous and can be interpreted differently.
-flexibilty/customization has very little to do with usability-especially if its just visual.
IIRC, GUI stands for "Graphical User Interface"-bundled apps certainly doesn't have anything to do with usability
In the case of KDE, they have everything to do with it because each app has the same menu layouts etc.
As opposed to having 10 instances of IE grouped together in the taskbar? When that happens, you're not able to differentiate the different instances from eachother because they all read "Internet Explorer - ..." or something similar. So you end up trying them at random until you get the window you want.
It basically boils down to flexibility. KDE has it, WinXP dowsn't. That's my opinion. I used to use WinXP as my main desktop and needed to use Linux for a school project. The more I used it, the more I liked it, and now I'm 100% Linux + KDE.
I think that 'Human Interface Design; refers to the GUI interaction with the system, ie. KDE. One of the basic requirements is that *all* programs are designed the same way so that a user can easily adapt to new programs. For example, the same look & feel for ALL programs, consistent menus etc. That's why I like KDE.
Installing binaries etc. is another issue. I personally think that the difficulty installing software on Linux is partially FUD. Even though it's so *easy* on Windows, I still have to install and configure everything for all of my family members. Most of the time, the want to install some software that you have to find on a torrent site and then find the key etc etc.
At least on Linux, most/all the software is free and you can sleep at night knowing that everything on your PC is legal.
Also, ever install anything on a MAC? It's pretty darned easy to do, so I don't see why Linux won't catch up eventually/soon.
I just said that it was "FTA"... I don't care who wrote what, that particular statement annoys me whenever I hear it... The reason it's in the article is because it's been repeated quite often all over the net.
The KDE and Gnome guys work hard to make our desktop experiences better, and that kind of FUD from MS belittles their efforts. Anyone ever hear of the "KDE Usability Project" or the "GNOME Human Interface Design Guidelines"?
Yeah... still, it's part of the article, and I've seen that FUD before about how Linux GUIs are inferior to Windows, when in fact, the choice of desktop managers is astounding on Linux.
This one is from Bill though:
But you raise a good point, which is: can there be a positive reciprocal relationship between Microsoft and the OSS development community? I strongly believe the answer is "Yes" and I spend a lot of time trying to help this relationship mature. There is a great amount we can learn from one another, and we have just begun to explore the potential of this relationship.
These kinds of statements make me wonder how dumb MS thinks we are. Do we really believe that MS doesn't want to crush Linux and OSS? Have they ever played fair with *anybody*?
I guess I'm just tired of hearing how great the *next* version of Windows is going to be, etc, etc. I got tired of waiting and switched to Linux... Hopefully, more people will do the same.
The theme of all his answers is basically 'there's room for all of us to coexist together in a Utopian paradise' blah blah... This comment in particular annoyed me (FTA):
One of the primary reasons Linux is somewhat inferior to commercial offerings when considered as a general-purpose desktop operating system is that there is a lack of a single guiding human interface standard for the various groups to work toward. Companies such as Apple Computer and Microsoft have invested large amounts of money in human interface studies, and although much of this information has been made readily accessible to the public, it would appear that very little of that information has been put to good use by F/OSS developers.
Speaking for myself, I find KDE to be far more pleasurable to use than the current WinXP interface. If you look at the progress KDE has made since WinXP came out, it's pretty obvious who's making good use of human interface research and who isn't. Need I mention Firefox and tabbed browsing??
That's partially true. If Vim sucked, it would have died a long time ago. The fact that new people are learning it and sticking to it is an indication that it's a good piece of software.
I was wondering when someone would make this point. Having a fancy GUI for your music player is one thing, but when you want to edit a text file, you want a fast, lightweight app that does the job well. How else can you explain the fact that VIM/Emacs is still in heavy use today?
If you compare *nix to Windows platform, *nix has many good CLI apps that work well because the main concern of the developers was to make software that works instead of making it pretty.
New versions of some Windows sotware often give you the same functionality but the GUI has been tweaked to look prettier. My personal opinion from using MS Office is that there has not been a real significant improvement since Office 97 (excluding the addition of Visio), and yet here we are paying for version after version of 'new and improved' MS Office releases...
Did I *say* Norway was a member of the EU anywhere in my post?
The EU following Norway ...
Why not? A good idea is a good idea. As someone already mentioned, Norway and other countries like Sweden are very advanced in IT, so when they do something like this, people should take notice instead of making fun.
Norway is not member of the EU.
I'm aware of that. Does that stop the EU from following the example Norway has set? I was simply alluding to the fact that you may disregard Norway because it's a single country, but the EU would be another matter entirely.
What happens when the entire EU follows Norway? Will you laugh that off too because it's only countries from Europe nobody cares about?
A self extrating archive where the adware program is embedded into the EXE. I guess you should watch out for files like "The_Matix.XviD.exe".
An infected torrent wouldn't necessarily die if the original seeders use a high-speed link to seed their crap. Since we're talking about a corporate entity here, they may be willing to pay for a lot of bandwidth to spread their adware. I've often downloaded torrents with 10 seeders, and have maxed out my d/l bandwidth.
I don't see how the spyware can be installed automatically. When you download a file, it goes in a directory. Unless you execute the infected file(s), the spyware can't be installed. Of course, I'm assuming here that you're using a "real" BT client that won't execute files for you ;)
Furthermore, it shouldn't be too hard to filter out fakes:
- Using things like MD5 to verify 'real' releases. Maybe even GPG signatures?
- Virus/Spyware tools which can scan your downloads and detect known spyware progies.
I'm not sure if the problem is with the client. The article said that the adware programs are bundled with torrents. I also get the impression that the adware itself will download more stuff to your computer via BT. Not sure about that though, the article was a little vague.
I was waiting for someone to mention that. Why is there so much hype about IE7 getting tabs YEARS after every other browser? IE is SOOO far behind Firefox in terms of usability, I find it amazing that people still use IE, even after trying Firefox.
I think that they're used for all of the reasons we mentioned... it all depends on who's controlling the machine. The zombie machine in my lab was running WinXP, and the user had no idea that his computer was infected. The sysadmin came by and told him to stop running his FTP server because he was eating up all the bandwidth. Of course, this came as a complete shock to him.
I'm not so sure about that. For sure there are Unix bots, but there are a LOT of infected Windows machines. We had several Win machines infected in my lab at my university. Also, if you check out The Eggdrop homepage (http://www.eggheads.org/), you'll see it runs on most platforms. Furthermore, I'm sure that these 10K+ botnets aren't all Unix machines...
The funny thing is that a large amount of file sharing is facilitated through IRC bots, which as far as I know, are all on Windows machines. So really, where would movie/music piracy be if it wasn't for Windows? Maybe then RIAA should be going after MS...
Walmart is just an example of what's going on in terms of free-trade etc. Huge corporations are making outrageous profits while paying employees here and abroad as little as possible. If you take the time to watch the Frontline episode, it might change YOUR view of what reality is like.