The Canon Cat, created by macintosh creator Jef Raskin after he left apple, had an OS written in Forth (and also a forth interpreter you could access). It was kind of a neat machine in that it didn't have a concept of files. The entire state of the machine, user data and all, was put onto a 720k floppy disk, sort of like the OppcOS mentioned in article. I have a cannon cat and it actually is quite a joy to work with. Some of the UI ideas implemented in the Cat are still light years ahead of OS's that run on today's machines, and they work suprisingly well even at the Cat's 5Mhz clock speed.
Real progress in an end-user, GUI-based, for-the-masses desktop computing environment is not about:
How many cool toys you have
How slick the thing looks
What language you use (those OO C is a pain in the ass to code in)
How many graphics buzzwords like AA or DRI you support
How little memory you use
How technically elegant you make it
Real progress can be defined as whether the secretary, farmer, mechanic, CEO, or whoever else who isn't a card-carrying geek was able to be more productive and feel better about using than computer than they were with the last version. Anyone,GNOME, KDE, or otherwise, who does not understand this does not understand the desktop. If you do not understand the desktop, you will at best produce a successful user-hostile abomination such as Microsoft did and survive entirely by the politics of corporate IT or at worst get your butt slammed across the entire computing industry.
Until Linux folks understand basic principles of GUI design and are willing to accept widget layouts based on principles of cognitive psychology and not on "because it looks cool" or "Windows does it", we are all far better off with linux looking plain butt ugly. I have gotten really, really sick of many developers in both KDE and GNOME being only concerned with aesthetics and making the ultimate critera for good GUI design being "it looks perty". If I had a dollar for every absolutely beautiful set of themed widget laid out in the most confusing and usuable manner possible, I could hire both desktop environments teams of competant HCI professionals. It might be far better that potential linux converts won't have aesthetically pleasing themes that might suck them into a world software with even less usability than Windows. Maybe a lack of attractive themes would force the linux desktop environments to focus on areas of the GUI that really count in a user getting their work done. A macintosh from 10 years ago is still more usable than tonights build of GNOME or KDE. And it's far, far less pretty. Themes? Prettiness? A really GUI programmer craves these things not.
With MacOSX, you get unix with a mac interface. With all the other unix desktop environments, you get unix with a windows interface. While much talk is made in the linux community about "yes, we've got skins for apple this and mac that" the widget layouts, keyboard shortcuts, and other thingies about GNOME/KDE are all Windows carbon copies. If you don't like anything that resembles a windows interface, linux may not be right for you. On the other hand, there's nothing preventing you from going into the GNOME/KDE sources and "deredmonifying" stuff.
Q: Why did apple ever go with one mouse-button? A: The one mouse button was thought up by a guy named Jeff Raskin who is largely responsible for starting the Macintosh project at Apple. He thought that mouses with more than one mouse button would be confusing for new users. This might seem like an oversight, but when you consider how uncomplex graphical interfaces were back than and the fact that virtually no computers in mass production had mice as an essential navigational tool, it really isn't.
Q: How can you mac users live without the right-click contextual menu? A: Because we can use the regular pull down menus to bring up a menu. If you take a look at *NIX & Windows UI's, you often see that not all menu items for the program are in the pull-down menus. Often, there are some commands that you can only access through right-clicking (i.e. the contextual menu). When this is the case, you're going to need a 2nd mouse button. Contrast this with the mac paradigm, where is it a cardinal sin to have commands that are not listed in the pull-down menus.
Q: Won't going up to a pull-down menu take you longer to do than right-clicking? A: No and yes. Unlike other platforms, macs have the pull-down menubar at the top of the screen instead of on each window, like you usually find on Windows or GNOME or KDE (yes, KDE does have a mac menubar mode, but not by default). A menubar at the top border of the screen has been proven in usability labs to be far faster to access than menubar stuck on a window, because the user can ram the mouse pointer into the top of the screen to click on the inital menu item and they can't overshoot. This illustrates a principle of Fitt's Law, which states that things on the borders are faster to access than things that aren't because they are infinitely large . To learn more about Fitt's law, go here . This being said, contextual menu (i.e. right-clicking) is faster IF you can do it anywhere to bring up the same menu anywhere on the screen, because the mouse pointer can be anywhere and the menu will appear right under it. Unfortunately, bringing up a contextual menu in windows/GNOME/KDE almost always requires that you first land the mouse on a tiny visual target. If you have to click on a tiny 15x10 pixel icon in an e-mail program to bring up a contextual menu for it, any speed advantage of right clicking is negated.
Q: I hear some mac users say that they don't need a 2nd mouse button because they've go all those keyboard combinations. I don't understand.
A: The reason that mac users use those keyboard strokes is because Apple was smart enough to have the keyboard complement the mouse instead of replacing it. Just like right-cliking is supposed to do on windows. Notice that the command key most often used on macs for the keyboard combinations is located in a spot that is in the center of the keyboard, so a user doesn't have to stretch their fingers 3 miles to hit an out of the way key. Also notice that keyboard strokes using the command key make use of the two most dextrous fingers of the human hand: the index finger and the thumb. The result is that keyboard shortcuts on a mac are easy to do, and they can be done easily with one hand. Why don't Windows users use keyboard shortcuts as often as mac users? Because microsoft was stupid and tried to have the keyboard replace the mouse instead of complmenting it. They added those underline thingies on all the menus (technically, they're called mnemonics), which are far less efficient because you have to hit two sets of keys "Alt+firstletter Alt+secondletter" to use them. This added so much visual clutter and so jammed the users mental keyboard-menu associations that most Windows users also filtered out the keyboard shortcuts (i.e. Ctrl+letter). There is even less incentive to use keyboard shortcuts on windows because the ctrl key that makes use of them is far at one end of the keyboard, which makes keyboard combinations with keys in the center of the keyboard very hard to do with one hand and impossible to easily with the two most dextrous fingers of the human hand (the thumb and index finger). One final advantage of mac keyboard shorcuts is that the command key is represented in the menu system by a symbol that take up one character's worth of menu real-estate as opposed to "Alt" or "Ctrl", which take up 3-4 characters of menu real-estate.
Q:Shouldn't apple add more mouse buttons? A: Yes. I don't think you'll find many mac users who are against having more than one mouse button, but they are against some dumb windows/unix geek who knows nothing about macs and who refuses to learn anything about the way they are designed arrogantly assuming that the machine is unusable in some sort of way.
I agree totally with what you're saying. I have seen one cognitively unsound design after another being pumped out of Ximian. Some of the stuff I've seen in the Ximian installers (and one nasty beast called metatheme) are things that no HCI professional worth his salt would implement. Miguel either is uninterested in good UI design or has no idea as to what it is. He's interested in doing what microsoft does: creating desktop applications that are a programmer's dream and an end-user's nightmare. Not that I'm singling Miguel out for being like this, because virtually all people working on the GNOME environment have this programmer-centric tunnel vision that has lead them to hang themselves with their own rope.
IMHO, the only way the linux user experience will be improved is if people from the mac community who are disenchanted with the direction that Apple has taken and marketshare limitations of the PowerPC architecture create a new desktop environment that "just happens to use the linux kernel" (as opposed to a desktop environment that "brings linux to the desktop") and puts the greatest emphasis on how people use technology, not the technology itself.
Mhz == Performance in the mind of consumers. Just try to explain clock cycles to a customer at CompUSA who barely knows about computers and who was told by an equally unsaavy friend "look at Mhz". Good luck. I used to sell computers in the retail world, so I know what I'm talking about. I'm happy that apple finally stuck Motorola's feet in the fire and got them to put out a chip whose specs look better to the average consumer.
In future GUI's, you will be able to delete unwanted files by dragging them to the black hole on your desktop.
I wasn't expecting Parrot
on
Parrot: For Real
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Guido:I wasn't expecting Parrot...
Larry: Nobody expects Parrot! Our chief trait is laziness...laziness and impatience...impatience and laziness...Our two traits are laziness and impatience...and hubris...Our *three* main traits are laziness, impatience, and hubris...and a ridiculous habit of quoting JR Tolkien...Our *four*..no... *Amongst* our traits...are such elements as laziness, impatience...I'll come in again.
Usability labs have shown that it's faster to access a menu than use a keyboard command. Especially when the menu bar is at the top of the screen (like on a mac) as opposed to on each window (like in Windows), because you can't overshoot the top menu item (exploiting a principle known as Fitt's Law).
If and only if you know what you're doing and understand essential principles of interface design. Unfortunately, this last sentace really doesn't describe most of the folks at Microsoft, or for that matter most of the people in the windows development community (actually, it doesn't describe most of the *nix community, either). Saying that all GUI's suck and pointing to M$ designs is like with like saying that all tires suck and pointing to Firestone. I love GUI's and pointy-clicky things, and because of this, I have a hatred of the Windows that even the most die-hard linux zealot cannot begin to fathom.
There is a glade for python. Many languages with Gnome/Gtk bindings have tie-ins to Glade. Though I'll take perl glade over python glade any day of the week.
Finally, a use for American Beer!
on
Fling-A-Keg
·
· Score: 2
I was wondering what I could do with that keg of Milwaukee's Best I got last Christmas
What kind of movie Star Wars be if it ended with the Empire being broken up into civilian and military branches and the Rebels being given some say in how the Death Star was run?
Bush is protecting our Freedom to Whoop Microsoft's Ass by protecting Microsoft's "Freedom to Innovate."
Microsoft doesn't care about creating usable interfaces and won't let me do a damn thing about it. I could go up to Bill Gates and say "Hey, Bill, your software is unusable. It's contains lots of designs that no self-respecting HCI person would ever recommend. I can rework your programs so that people can learn them faster and use them more efficiently". And do you know what Bill would tell me "That's nice. The exit's on your left". This also goes for just about every software company on the planet. When I have the code for a GUI environment, I have the power to make interface design decisions that need to be made. I don't have to deal with programmers who don't give a damn or software executives who don't have a clue.
On the contrary, bad design is often visible
on
Software Aesthetics
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
But you have to know what to look for. I've often found a badly designed user interface to be a real tip off that other parts of the software are crap. I'm not talking about pretty pictures and cute icons (which, unfortunately, is what a lot of people in the free software community think constitutes usability), I'm talking about whether widgets are laid out in an unambigous manner and whether operation of the interface is efficient and cognitively sound. If a company designs one part of the system in a very half-assed manner, they'll most likely do the same with the other part, too.
After a night of Taco Bell and sex on the beach
on
MIT's Bathroom Server
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
I can't wait to see what a race condition looks like!
Slashdot Mirror
The Canon Cat, created by macintosh creator Jef Raskin after he left apple, had an OS written in Forth (and also a forth interpreter you could access). It was kind of a neat machine in that it didn't have a concept of files. The entire state of the machine, user data and all, was put onto a 720k floppy disk, sort of like the OppcOS mentioned in article. I have a cannon cat and it actually is quite a joy to work with. Some of the UI ideas implemented in the Cat are still light years ahead of OS's that run on today's machines, and they work suprisingly well even at the Cat's 5Mhz clock speed.
- How many cool toys you have
- How slick the thing looks
- What language you use (those OO C is a pain in the ass to code in)
- How many graphics buzzwords like AA or DRI you support
- How little memory you use
- How technically elegant you make it
Real progress can be defined as whether the secretary, farmer, mechanic, CEO, or whoever else who isn't a card-carrying geek was able to be more productive and feel better about using than computer than they were with the last version. Anyone,GNOME, KDE, or otherwise, who does not understand this does not understand the desktop. If you do not understand the desktop, you will at best produce a successful user-hostile abomination such as Microsoft did and survive entirely by the politics of corporate IT or at worst get your butt slammed across the entire computing industry.Scorpius, Claudia Black, and frilling hot grits.
Until Linux folks understand basic principles of GUI design and are willing to accept widget layouts based on principles of cognitive psychology and not on "because it looks cool" or "Windows does it", we are all far better off with linux looking plain butt ugly. I have gotten really, really sick of many developers in both KDE and GNOME being only concerned with aesthetics and making the ultimate critera for good GUI design being "it looks perty". If I had a dollar for every absolutely beautiful set of themed widget laid out in the most confusing and usuable manner possible, I could hire both desktop environments teams of competant HCI professionals. It might be far better that potential linux converts won't have aesthetically pleasing themes that might suck them into a world software with even less usability than Windows. Maybe a lack of attractive themes would force the linux desktop environments to focus on areas of the GUI that really count in a user getting their work done. A macintosh from 10 years ago is still more usable than tonights build of GNOME or KDE. And it's far, far less pretty. Themes? Prettiness? A really GUI programmer craves these things not.
With MacOSX, you get unix with a mac interface. With all the other unix desktop environments, you get unix with a windows interface. While much talk is made in the linux community about "yes, we've got skins for apple this and mac that" the widget layouts, keyboard shortcuts, and other thingies about GNOME/KDE are all Windows carbon copies. If you don't like anything that resembles a windows interface, linux may not be right for you. On the other hand, there's nothing preventing you from going into the GNOME/KDE sources and "deredmonifying" stuff.
A: The one mouse button was thought up by a guy named Jeff Raskin who is largely responsible for starting the Macintosh project at Apple. He thought that mouses with more than one mouse button would be confusing for new users. This might seem like an oversight, but when you consider how uncomplex graphical interfaces were back than and the fact that virtually no computers in mass production had mice as an essential navigational tool, it really isn't.
A: Because we can use the regular pull down menus to bring up a menu. If you take a look at *NIX & Windows UI's, you often see that not all menu items for the program are in the pull-down menus. Often, there are some commands that you can only access through right-clicking (i.e. the contextual menu). When this is the case, you're going to need a 2nd mouse button. Contrast this with the mac paradigm, where is it a cardinal sin to have commands that are not listed in the pull-down menus.
A: No and yes. Unlike other platforms, macs have the pull-down menubar at the top of the screen instead of on each window, like you usually find on Windows or GNOME or KDE (yes, KDE does have a mac menubar mode, but not by default). A menubar at the top border of the screen has been proven in usability labs to be far faster to access than menubar stuck on a window, because the user can ram the mouse pointer into the top of the screen to click on the inital menu item and they can't overshoot. This illustrates a principle of Fitt's Law, which states that things on the borders are faster to access than things that aren't because they are infinitely large . To learn more about Fitt's law, go here . This being said, contextual menu (i.e. right-clicking) is faster IF you can do it anywhere to bring up the same menu anywhere on the screen, because the mouse pointer can be anywhere and the menu will appear right under it. Unfortunately, bringing up a contextual menu in windows/GNOME/KDE almost always requires that you first land the mouse on a tiny visual target. If you have to click on a tiny 15x10 pixel icon in an e-mail program to bring up a contextual menu for it, any speed advantage of right clicking is negated.
A: The reason that mac users use those keyboard strokes is because Apple was smart enough to have the keyboard complement the mouse instead of replacing it. Just like right-cliking is supposed to do on windows. Notice that the command key most often used on macs for the keyboard combinations is located in a spot that is in the center of the keyboard, so a user doesn't have to stretch their fingers 3 miles to hit an out of the way key. Also notice that keyboard strokes using the command key make use of the two most dextrous fingers of the human hand: the index finger and the thumb. The result is that keyboard shortcuts on a mac are easy to do, and they can be done easily with one hand. Why don't Windows users use keyboard shortcuts as often as mac users? Because microsoft was stupid and tried to have the keyboard replace the mouse instead of complmenting it. They added those underline thingies on all the menus (technically, they're called mnemonics), which are far less efficient because you have to hit two sets of keys "Alt+firstletter Alt+secondletter" to use them. This added so much visual clutter and so jammed the users mental keyboard-menu associations that most Windows users also filtered out the keyboard shortcuts (i.e. Ctrl+letter). There is even less incentive to use keyboard shortcuts on windows because the ctrl key that makes use of them is far at one end of the keyboard, which makes keyboard combinations with keys in the center of the keyboard very hard to do with one hand and impossible to easily with the two most dextrous fingers of the human hand (the thumb and index finger). One final advantage of mac keyboard shorcuts is that the command key is represented in the menu system by a symbol that take up one character's worth of menu real-estate as opposed to "Alt" or "Ctrl", which take up 3-4 characters of menu real-estate.
A: Yes. I don't think you'll find many mac users who are against having more than one mouse button, but they are against some dumb windows/unix geek who knows nothing about macs and who refuses to learn anything about the way they are designed arrogantly assuming that the machine is unusable in some sort of way.
I agree totally with what you're saying. I have seen one cognitively unsound design after another being pumped out of Ximian. Some of the stuff I've seen in the Ximian installers (and one nasty beast called metatheme) are things that no HCI professional worth his salt would implement. Miguel either is uninterested in good UI design or has no idea as to what it is. He's interested in doing what microsoft does: creating desktop applications that are a programmer's dream and an end-user's nightmare. Not that I'm singling Miguel out for being like this, because virtually all people working on the GNOME environment have this programmer-centric tunnel vision that has lead them to hang themselves with their own rope.
IMHO, the only way the linux user experience will be improved is if people from the mac community who are disenchanted with the direction that Apple has taken and marketshare limitations of the PowerPC architecture create a new desktop environment that "just happens to use the linux kernel" (as opposed to a desktop environment that "brings linux to the desktop") and puts the greatest emphasis on how people use technology, not the technology itself.
Now in Terriyaki flavor!
8 bit graphics, chests of cannonballs that end the entire game, and the occasional bottle of Schnapps. Who could ask for more?
e +W olfenstein
http://www.theunderdogs.org/game.php?name=Castl
Screw the 'thopter. I'd rather have a 300 meter worm.
I know I've seen the Windows XP license somewhere before.
http://www.happyfunball.com/hfb.html
"Purple shit--it's not just for Cookie Monster any more."
Mhz == Performance in the mind of consumers. Just try to explain clock cycles to a customer at CompUSA who barely knows about computers and who was told by an equally unsaavy friend "look at Mhz". Good luck. I used to sell computers in the retail world, so I know what I'm talking about. I'm happy that apple finally stuck Motorola's feet in the fire and got them to put out a chip whose specs look better to the average consumer.
The United States government accidently defaced the Lincoln Memorial after it was mistaken for a 2000 year old statue of Buddha.
In future GUI's, you will be able to delete unwanted files by dragging them to the black hole on your desktop.
Guido:I wasn't expecting Parrot...
Larry: Nobody expects Parrot! Our chief trait is laziness...laziness and impatience...impatience and laziness...Our two traits are laziness and impatience...and hubris...Our *three* main traits are laziness, impatience, and hubris...and a ridiculous habit of quoting JR Tolkien...Our *four*..no... *Amongst* our traits...are such elements as laziness, impatience...I'll come in again.
I've always wanted a steel wool sweater.
Usability labs have shown that it's faster to access a menu than use a keyboard command. Especially when the menu bar is at the top of the screen (like on a mac) as opposed to on each window (like in Windows), because you can't overshoot the top menu item (exploiting a principle known as Fitt's Law).
If and only if you know what you're doing and understand essential principles of interface design. Unfortunately, this last sentace really doesn't describe most of the folks at Microsoft, or for that matter most of the people in the windows development community (actually, it doesn't describe most of the *nix community, either). Saying that all GUI's suck and pointing to M$ designs is like with like saying that all tires suck and pointing to Firestone. I love GUI's and pointy-clicky things, and because of this, I have a hatred of the Windows that even the most die-hard linux zealot cannot begin to fathom.
There is a glade for python. Many languages with Gnome/Gtk bindings have tie-ins to Glade. Though I'll take perl glade over python glade any day of the week.
I was wondering what I could do with that keg of Milwaukee's Best I got last Christmas
What kind of movie Star Wars be if it ended with the Empire being broken up into civilian and military branches and the Rebels being given some say in how the Death Star was run?
Bush is protecting our Freedom to Whoop Microsoft's Ass by protecting Microsoft's "Freedom to Innovate."
Microsoft doesn't care about creating usable interfaces and won't let me do a damn thing about it. I could go up to Bill Gates and say "Hey, Bill, your software is unusable. It's contains lots of designs that no self-respecting HCI person would ever recommend. I can rework your programs so that people can learn them faster and use them more efficiently". And do you know what Bill would tell me "That's nice. The exit's on your left". This also goes for just about every software company on the planet. When I have the code for a GUI environment, I have the power to make interface design decisions that need to be made. I don't have to deal with programmers who don't give a damn or software executives who don't have a clue.
But you have to know what to look for. I've often found a badly designed user interface to be a real tip off that other parts of the software are crap. I'm not talking about pretty pictures and cute icons (which, unfortunately, is what a lot of people in the free software community think constitutes usability), I'm talking about whether widgets are laid out in an unambigous manner and whether operation of the interface is efficient and cognitively sound. If a company designs one part of the system in a very half-assed manner, they'll most likely do the same with the other part, too.
I can't wait to see what a race condition looks like!