Good point about Office :)

I know there existed books about how to make the GUI correctly, which doesn't mean all applications, or even large parts, followed them. Anyway these guidelines were hardly covering all the different tasks the GUI would be used for. Again, what was considered "standards compliant" back then would look like a heap of trash today. Really, start up a VM with Win95 and gaze at the weirdness. Then start up Win98 and be amazed by clouds and other kitsch elements taking up screen space that was usually only 1024x768 pixels. If you are more into serious stuff, check out the IRIX desktop from Silicon Graphics from that era. It is full of useless kitsch, the most prominent example probably being the "zoom wheel" that could scale one file icon so it occupies the complete screen without showing more information (very visionary if you think about it).

And I think today is not much different. :)

The real problem though is that current interfaces are not Geocities enough. Geocities was the exact expression of what people wanted the Internet to be like. Everybody made their own navigation and copied ideas from others. HTML was simple enough to learn for heaps of kids and grannies to build their own world. But before there was a chance that the masses develop their own language to express their demands for interfaces and reflect about them, this culture was demeaned by professional designers and developers.

So, probably it is a good idea that Gnome 3 uses Javascript for extensions. It is the lingua franca of the Internet. Many kids have written a line or two of Javascript and might develop some crappy extensions at first. But they need to do it to help building an interface culture that is not dictated by corporate politics or the desire of overpowering the users.

No time is wasted, because, no matter what you personally feel, in the 0.3 seconds the animation runs you are anyway occupied mentally switching the context to the next motion or thought you want to execute. The animation might only be perceived in the corner of your eye, but it will help you later to locate for example minimized objects. If the animation is not wrongly designed of course. ;)

The binary style of "window is there" / "is not there" or "window is big" / "small", without transitions in between, is more or less wasting a lot of perceptive potential. People have learned as babies how objects are behaving, tapping this knowledge with UI animations is fine.

Also, "fastness" is not the main point to look for in efficient UIs. Most of the time is spent thinking, not typing. Except when you're receiving a dictate you just have to type down. If you find yourself doing the same thing over and over again and want your software to be faster, without animation, your task should be replaced by a script. Or the GUI needs to be completely re-organized, for example by collecting all choices you have to make and present them at one point in time, then executing them without supervision.

The menus really weren't that consistent in the olden days. I challenge you to fire up a VM with for example Windows 98 and Office 97. While it might look familiar to you, the menus of most applications mostly were a mess. Just a different mess from today. Word, powerpoint and Excel often had the same options in different places.

Event the much praised and fondly remembered Mac environment looked not much less eclectic once than it does today. In fact, apart from the "file", "view", "whatever" menus, each application was very different from any other. The graphical style varied from vendor to vendor, or even within a product line. On the Mac it just wasn't so apparent because there weren't that many application to begin with.

At that point in history, people were happy to have standardized widgets like the checkbox and radiobuttons and that "Ok" and "Cancel" would most of the time be in the same place. To what was before, aka textmode, it looked like a dream.

When we see the progress made in UIs today, the steps are of course much smaller. We do not remember a better quality when we think positively about the earlier UIs, but we remember a bigger, more radical change in quality for the better.

I don't know how much humor exactly was in the hammer comparison :)

But I think it is obvious that with a hammer I have quite different options than with a networked computer.

People hate IT and computers, at the same time they can hardly articulate what they want.

Ease of use always has to ask "what use" is actually easy. The world today, all its business, ideas and opinions, run on digital devices and the Internet. It is very harmful to give the guys who are in it for the money control over what happens there. Knowledgeable people's obligation should be to educate the noobz, not to make everything "idiot proof" for them.

Of course people do bad stuff with the power they had. For example, they didn't understand their responsibility not to install BonziBuddy etc. But to give them a simulcra of a perfect world with fake leather-bound calendars and cute book shelves is like spreading malware for the mind. I'd rather have the people de-infest their Windows on a monthly basis than thinking that a computer is a book shelf, or that the Internet is accessed through Apps somebody in a castel on top of a mysterious mountain is making for them.

Exactly! "Ease of use" ... but what use?

The computer "as a tool" for clearly defined use cases ... vs the computer as a democratic tool for everyone, for experimentation, self-expression, learning.

Nothing interesting is "satisfying". Figuring things out is hard, learning is hard, democracy is hard.

I am not saying that re-installing Windows is a good way to spend your time. But not being given the chance to totally fail is really taking away an essential freedom. And I am not talking about free software freedoms here, but an essential point in Judeo-Christian culture: An expression of god's love is that he gives humans the freedom to chose the wrong path. I don't care about religion much, but understand that everybody needs this freedom.

Computer users (in opposition to developers) are not idiots. They demand better systems of course. They just cannot judge them correctly. How did millions of people, from grannies to kids, figure out HTML in the 1990s and built Geocities and the like? Because they were stupid? How did all the HyperCard stacks come into existance?

People doing their own thing is just very bad for making money. And if people on computers cannot do their own thing, the alphanerds' playgrounds will also be destroyed. Because who is going to stand up for a free flow of information on the Internet, the chosen few that can write C++?

And today people think that you're a hacker if you look at Google's second search result page.
This shouldn't have happened.

Syncing in real time is really something file systems don't seem to handle well. But that's more an issue with real time collaboration, not with syncing some documents and settings across a few devices.

Thanks for pointing out this freudian language glitch!

This actually sums up what I want to say. Most data could be stored and synced fine inside of files, even unicode text files most of the time, no binary. I don't need my chat logs in a database, I don't need calendar or contacts in a database. Especially if it is one that is running outside my user space and is not affected by backing up my home directory.

I wonder what became so difficult about syncing data that it has to be re-invented all the time?

I was happy using tools like rsync, diff and unison for a long time, until the moment when even Linux desktop software is too posh to store their data in files.

Now every software uses another database, at one time even Amarok used a MySQL backend. What is better about this than just putting the data in a file? Or at least making this file the Single Point Of Truth? If you need the database for speed, you can check if the file changed since the last time and then update the database from the file's contents. But simple files have been syncing and merging and everything perfectly for ages. Now it seems like every software needs its own syncing service.

Is there any reason for this, except brading the most simple things (like copying a file), or making money with cloud storage?

The order in which people opened their windows is very difficult to remember. And those who found out that they can move the taskbar buttons around are spending too much cognitive energy doing it :) The taskbar is a terrible interface, which does not mean there are no worse ones around.

True, unless the title is also shown in the bird's eye view as well, which i believe compiz is doing. If drag and drop between bird's-eye windows would also work (like it does on MaxOS), it would be tremendously useful.

I like your example about Vista, which looks as if consumers suddenly exercised power by "voting with their wallets". The other interpretation is that Windows7 is also a piece of crap, its just better than Vista so in comparison one can more or less accept it. The same happened with Gnome 2. People hated its "simplicity", but compared to the starting out KDE4 it looked like the revelation. A lot of this is about what history has brought in front of users and what we have learned to use.

The desktop metaphor itself has lots of problems. Not surprising, it has been around for more than 30 years and was developed by Xerox for a computer to create graphics that should be printed on a laser printer. At the moment, designers seem to be bold enough to try something new. Even in FOSS. That is quite a new situation and as it seems the FOSS world is not prepared for it. Developers, users and designers need to work this out, or FOSS will become a "product" like commercial software.

The users' part in my opinion make a useful contribution. One part is to identify the problem that interfaces without text, based on gestures, have bad discoverability, like you did. Don Norman also points this out in this article: http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/gesture_wars_20272.asp Users have to acquire the language to describe their tasks and interfaces, deeper than "i don't like it" or "cannot get my stuff done". Telling the developers and designers that they're drunk will not help, because they aren't crazy. Maybe Steve Jobs could pull that off, but the FOSS community should strive for a better work model.

So, while I agree that Unity is rough and Gnome3 is lacking stuff from Gnome2, hating is not the answer. Identifying the good ideas therein and analyzing what should be changed is better. IMHO.

Tomboy is actually great and I do not even know of any commercial alternative. It has fantastic UI design. I could live with gnote, but also know that it lives off of Tomboys ideas.

> If your shiny new UI is going to make me click the terminal button on the task bar and scroll through a list of 14 different terminals to get to the one I want, we're not going to get on.

Interestingly, this is exactly what happens to me when I am using classic KDE or Gnome. At one point, the task bar is full of terminal windows that seem to be arbitrarily arranged (because i am supposed to remember the ORDER in which I have opened them) and suddenly they are all hidden behind one single button with the name "Terminal". The same with Windows, BTW. If that doesn't suck, then I don't know. :)

Gnome3 is not perfect, but at least it tries to address this problem by making window positions persistent and using a birds-eye view to remove the overlapping of windows. I really like this approach and am convinced that the task bar is bad for managing more than 7 windows.

The designers of the interfaces everybody hates now are not idiots, and if you think they didn't test any of the design changes with users, you are wrong. E.g., by testing with only a small group, the canonical design team clearly pointed out the problems with the Thunderbird interface that Mozilla doesn't seem to be able noticing. The problem with the "grand scheme" of UI design today is that it tries to balance "emotional response" with usability. I agree that this plainly sucks, but I doubt it was the motivation behind Gnome3.

Indeed, users do not have much to say about how they want their interfaces. At the same time, on contrary to developers, users are not at all organized, usually cannot really express what they need, start shitstorms over small UI changes, in most cases suggest hideous fixes that are worse than mystery meat, and, usually, after a few months, just use the new stuff without complaining and wait for the next change to rage again. (This is not directed against you, SaussageOfDoom, just the impression I got over many years. And I am not even a developer.)

But democracy is hard and a lot of effort. FOSS users need to form organizations just like developers, staffed with designers that have community credibility and collect feedback, create interactive mockups (not the typical "i tried to balance eye-candy with simplicity"-screenshots popular in the community that are nothing but skinning), do actual testing instead of guessing what's best, etc. And then developers will probably accept this as valuable input. I have never met a developer who would not react positively to a well thought-out design or re-design concept, or would at least be willing to start a meaningful discussion on base of that.

If you wouldn't care, you wouldn't hate it :)

It is not proven that Gnome3's or Unity's approach is perfect yet. However, the problems of the taskbar/windowlist is, that they are grouped by no order at all. Minimizing a window leaves no trail where to find it again, except the 0.3 second animation with shrinkboxes or some compiz effect. Users might remember that for some time, but not much.

Gnome 3's approach: When there is no way to minimize a window, it keeps its position. Keeping positions of objects is a powerful cognitive concept that Windows and KDE seem to have completely dismissed. And after pressing the funky key, users can see all the windows, not-overlapping, from a bird's-eye view and select much larger surfaces to access them. That is actually much more "efficient" that scanning a list of minimized windows that is arranged in a random order, or rather, in the order they happened to be opened.

Another good idea in Gnome3 is creating virtual desktops semantically instead of having a fixed number of them. So if a user is starting a new thing to work on, they can create a new desktop and fill it with the applications that they need for this task. This actually solves problems.

Removing many functions can be very "efficient", if efficiency is what "power users" are after, aka, doing things fast. Many great configuration options in for example KDE are totally pointless. I know I love changing stuff around a lot and have another checkbox to set some weird option, but since I changed to Gnome2.x, which was at the time laughed at for being dumbed down the same as Gnome3 is now, I am able to work much more, and more relaxed. My mind doesn't wander off by going through hundreds of tabbed config dialogs. I don't check the network traffic with an applet. I don't get a message popping up when a file finished being copied, along with a history of all file copy operations of the last month. Gnome is sparse. Which is great as long as it works well and you can be sure that the reason for a problem is not Gnome. In rich-option-environments, that, in addition, don't work well, you'll always feel anxious that some option you have changed might be the cause for the issue, and then try remembering which one that was.

Not directed against you, MrNiCeGUi: many people claiming to be "power users" and needing a lot of config options, are in fact wasting time and are just feeling to be productive by staring at pointless data diagrams or actually designing their own UI by moving stuff around, very likely making it measurably less efficient.

Hobbyists that love to fool around with their computers should be honest and say so, not stating "efficiency" as a reason. People who's job is to monitor computer activity, do maintenance or create work environments for others, might want and actually need loads of of options. But don't call that the peak of efficiency. It would for sure be more efficient if this work could be done with less configuration. In general, hating an interface without stating what it is used for, is quite useless.

BTW, iphone users also love their dumbed down touch interface because they feel more efficient with it. :) Of course a phone with a real keyboard is measurably more efficient, also the UI in my age old Palm Treo with PalmOS 5 can register dates and contact data much faster and more convenient than an iPhone. But it *feels* clunky because it looks like crap :) In the same way, powerusers might not feel like power users anymore when they have to do things that are commonly regarded as "consumer".

Why does it seem that people agree that Gnome3, Unity and iOs are *exactly the same*??? They aren't! in fact, Gnome3 and Unity are the first time the Linux community develops UI ideas of their own.

And, "task bars", or "window lists" that everybody is loving so much, don't work well. They are okay if you have like 5 windows open. We should be happy that designers are taking on the Linux desktop and are trying to develop solutions.