Re: Look and Feel

[Björn Giesler]

Hi,

Am 14.02.2005 um 15:44 schrieb Michael Thaler:
> But I don't see a point in doing everything different just for the 
> sake of
> distinctiveness.

It's not being different for its own sake. There are a number of things 
that are (provably!) suboptimal in Windows, GNOME, KDE, MacOS 9 and 
MacOS X. E.g. the menubar at the top of every window is provably 
inferior to both MacOS's infinite-depth menubar *and* NeXT's floating 
palette style. The left-hand scroller is provably better than the 
right-hand scroller for left-to-right writing (as has been noted 
several times before in this thread. We can improve on that. We 
shouldn't throw away things we know to be better just because some 
people aren't used to them.

Another example: You talk about Cancel-OK versus OK-Cancel. *Both* OK 
*and* Cancel are bad choices that simplify the life of the programmer, 
not that of the user. What is actually *meant* is where the default 
button should be (i.e. that which minimizes damage), and if the dialog 
buttons are right-justified, it should of course be on the right, so 
that it minimizes change of position and maximizes recognition. Feng 
ShUI :-)

I think the current process of careful discussion of the differences is 
quite good. We have the chance to do things better than the others, and 
we shouldn't miss that chance. Also, I don't quite see the concerns. 
The people who complain about GNUstep's "strangeness" are often the 
same people who will happily claim that the GIMP is a good Photoshop 
replacement. In that case, they have no right bickering about 
non-"standard" widget placement at all. Don't hit me, I love the GIMP. 
But UI-wise it's quite catastrophic.

That being said, much of this is about functionality, and form follows 
that, but only to a certain degree. Or phrased differently, even with 
left-side scrollers, palette menus, appicons and whatnot, there is 
still a lot of freedom to make the desktop look more modern and more 
polished.

Regards,
Björn
--
Dipl.-Inform. Björn Giesler <giesler@ira.uka.de>
Web: http://wwwiaim.ira.uka.de/users/giesler
Tel: +49-721-608-8308 Fax: +49-721-608-8270
Key: http://wwwiaim.ira.uka.de/users/giesler/bg.asc
Augmented Reality, 3D User Interfaces, Machine Vision, Robotics

Gruß,
Björn
--
Dipl.-Inform. Björn Giesler <giesler@ira.uka.de>
Web: http://wwwiaim.ira.uka.de/users/giesler
Tel: +49-721-608-8308 Fax: +49-721-608-8270
Key: http://wwwiaim.ira.uka.de/users/giesler/bg.asc
Augmented Reality, 3D User Interfaces, Machine Vision, Robotics

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