Re: GUI design

[Daniel J Sebald]

On 03/23/2012 10:55 AM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> I think it's clear that while we keep arguing in mailing lists about
> how to design a GUI it becomes a matter of personal unsubstantiated
> value judgements. In the meantime, we still have no GUI and we still
> have people either not using Octave because it has no GUI and
> resorting to non-free alternatives.

It's always nice to capture market share, but somehow I don't see this 
as the top priority for a project like Octave.  When we start catering 
to mass users who don't understand the open source nature of the project 
then we risk getting ahead of ourselves.


> However, I have yet to see a negative review of GUI Octave, except
> that it hangs or crashes on newer versions.

Hanging and crashing isn't good as a first impression of software.


> People seem to really like
> it. I therefore propose: let's adopt it as the gold standard of what
> our own GUI should look like. It's what Windows users are primarily
> installing as a GUI nowadays, and that's precisely the group we'd like
> to capture. We have lots of evidence that this is good GUI design,
> regardless of our personal opinions.
>
> So, can we agree on this? Whenever we can't agree on what the Octave
> GUI should look like, then it should look like GUI Octave.

Not really.  Your proposal is that Octave maintainers should have a GUI 
as part of Octave, and that the GUI should resemble Octave GUI which I 
take it sort of resembles MathWorks' GUI.

One question is whether people are more productive using a GUI versus a 
command line and an editor like gvim or whatever.  I say not necessarily 
so.  I'll point to recent changes in the Gnome GUI.  I watched a video 
where someone explained this great new feature in Gnome 3 where one 
could type the name of the application on the screen and the GUI would 
do a search on applications and list options.  In other words, it's a 
glorified tab-line-completion, something that OS terminal command lines 
have had for ages.

I'm not intending to knock GUI Octave but in the screen shot I see every 
window is simply a graphical display of something in Octave that is 
rather accessible.  The "who" command works almost as well as the 
Workspace window.  I'd rather promote efficient programming using the 
command line and script files treated like programming instead of a GUI.

To get my support with a GUI effort, the GUI has to bring some feature 
to the table above and beyond what the command line can do.  For 
example, MathWorks has an object oriented way to build GUIs for one's 
own application.  I can see that as having value, not for any sort of 
analysis purposes, but for data collection.

Whether maintainers should be supporting a GUI is another question. 
It's a lot of work.  Even if people could agree that maintainers should 
do a lot of GUI work, I don't see the point of using GUI Octave for an 
Octave GUI standard.  Just use GUI Octave developed as it's own project 
and contribute to that.

Dan