2004
6
Apr
6
Apr
On http://www.nearwildheaven.com/GNOME/ this article presents the latest and greatest in Gnome GUI improvements.
Do our users love this sort of 'pissing contest' between file save/open dialogs or whatever? Do they prefer to admire the subtle differences between the dialogs in Swing/Gnome/KDE or even Windows file dialog boxes? If I personally had a choice between giving up the KDE dialogs in favour of this new Gnome style to avoid confusing users, do you think I personally give a toss? KDE and Gnome are just toolkit apis, and as soon as they get this sort of nonsense behind them the better in my opinion.
-- Richard
- richard dale's blog
- Login or register to post comments
- 1198 reads
Syndicate Blogs
Comments
What Usability?
I really don't know what the Gnome developers are doing at the moment, but I really am taken aback at what they are discussing. The Spatial Nautilus thing is just the latest in a long line of totally brain-dead schemes. Amusingly, he calls this a drastic and difficult decision in tha name of usability, completely ignoring well over ten years of UI experience. People want to copy multiple files and folders to multiple folders - that's why the Norton Commander/Explorer interfaces came to be. Sigh... This article just sounds like a bit of marketing for Gnome rather than anything useful.
Freedesktop is a good idea, but I doubt whether we'll get any standards from it to be honest. The developers around Gnome just seem to be using it as a way to integrate many things into Gnome rather than looking at standards for the wider community.
The article simply talks about all the great and wonderful things the Ximian people are doing. It also talks about being able to tie Open Office into the Gnome HIG. Since Open Office is a multi-platform office suite I'd love to see how that works out.
Gnome seems to have caught a usability bug where the developers feel that they are on a crusade to simplify everything. It is fascinating, because all of this has come about simply because many involved with Gnome are in denial as to how very poor the architecture of Gnome is. Gnome is not even a toolkit API, even with Mono. Usability seems like a very good excuse and cover for all of this. I find the probable psychological reasons for Gnome's usability crusade fascinating, and it seems to have spread like a disease. Notice the words used to describe Gnome - simplicity, polish, clean - without anyone describing what they actually mean.
Usability is important, and KDE has some work to do, but you cannot base absolutely everything you do on it. When you focus on usability too much there is a tendency to limit your users - what about sys admins getting things done easily? What about developers? It is going to take an awful lot for Gnome to kick the addiction, and I find it all rather bizarre to be honest. 'Add a File' to 'Start a Project' - now there's a new one on me!
only because the other side is too aloof to participate
The developers around Gnome just seem to be using it as a way to integrate many things into Gnome rather than looking at standards for the wider community.
You are an idiot. Go away.
Generally I think we know thi
Generally I think we know this too be true - even if you're an outsider looking in. Otherwise I think freedesktop is a good idea.
No, seriously
If they wanted to do it for GNOME, they'd do it for GNOME.
Go have a look at all the projects. Do you see GNOME integrating an xserver or two? Or do you see them integrating UIM?
Seriously, it's stupid, fallacious and slanderous.
> Freedesktop is a good idea,
> Freedesktop is a good idea, but I doubt whether we’ll get any
> standards from it to be honest
too late. ;-) we've already seen a LOT of very good standards from it, and everyone has benefitted from that. go peruse the website sometime.
> Usability is important, and KDE has some work to do, but you
> cannot base absolutely everything you do on it.
no more than you can base everything on only fixing bugs, or only adding features, or only having nice artwork, or only writing blogs. =)
Freedesktop Makes Perfect Sense
we’ve already seen a LOT of very good standards from it, and everyone has benefitted from that. go peruse the website sometime.
I've had a good look around freedesktop, and there's some great stuff on there. Correction though: at the moment they are implementations, not standards. However, that's no reason why DBUS and others couldn't turn into standards to allow different implementations though - it will just take time. To get to standards you need implementations, otherwise you don't find anything out!
I have questioned some peoples' (have a wild guess) view towards freedesktop, and that's really why I've been a bit sceptical. But, there's a lot there that can be used to push forward the general UNIX standard architecture, if you like. I find the hardware HAL stuff rather fascinating (some of it is a bugger to compile, as you'd expect right now) and I'm mystified at the glib dependency question marks on DBUS. DCOP is great, but no lightweight low-level stuff is going to depend on Qt, is it? However, DBUS has to be written with something, so why not C and glib, in light of what is expected of DBUS? I think DBUS will be great if it can (and I think it will) be a lightweight framework everything in a system can be plugged into. Rather than looking at it with a KDE/Gnome protectionist attitude, just ask yourselves what you would like your desktop to do. I do hope developers start using it all seriously, rather than just taking what they see as the best bits.
Whatever you may think, and no matter how sceptical you are, freedesktop is just a good idea and the stuff on there is really useful. Yes there's some stuff that is questionable, but it is a development forum. Remember that Rome wasn't built in a day.
sigh
Do not post to this site again until you have read and thoroughly understood this document.
Well, yer? These are general
Well, yer? These are general standards and specs blessed by some standards body (not freedesktop) with a lot of support (as a commercial developer I would argue that CORBA is not a standard, but that's another story). Freedesktop is not a standards body by peoples' admission. Has freedesktop changed? There's no reason why freedesktop couldn't eventually work towards some formal standards though, at some point. Working towards some formal, accepted and inclusive standards everyone can see a need in should be the ultimate goal should it not? To get to that stage you need to have some implementations to try things out, which is why I think people have questioned implemenations coming out of freedesktop. I don't think that is is unusual at all, and have tried to provide an explanation for it.
Quite frankly if you're not going to try working towards something like the above, which I think will garner a lot of goodwill from everyone, freedesktop is utterly pointless - but there you go.
I don't really think you've read though. If all freedesktop ends up being is a forum of implementations in the long term it will not be be taken seriously.
I respect the GNOME people fo
I respect the GNOME people for trying a different kind of save dialog. Personally, I prefer the minimalist approach to saving documents, although it might be argued that the explicit act of saving files should be made redundant. The open dialog is also arguably unnecessary.
> I prefer the minimalist ap
> I prefer the minimalist approach to saving documents
ROX is pretty cool. DnD saving isn't broadly applicable though as it requires a mouse and someone who can use it well. not to mention a good number of drag targets.
> the explicit act of saving files should be made redundant
this makes sense in certain circumstances, and i've worked to preserve that in, for instance, kjots. JuK is another place where things are implicitly saved, because that's what makes sense.
for data-centric, digital-editting apps like KWord, KSpread, Scribus, etc ... i don't think it makes much sense as it becomes just a different problem one has to work around.
i've heard the "but that isn't how the real world works and we've done just fine!" argument many times, and it always makes me chuckle. sure, in the real world words on paper are implicitly saved and in some situations that's a GOOD thing. but it isn't always, and that's specifically WHY we invented explicit saving in the first place.