Comment Re:Cool Edit Doesn't Suck (Score 1) 315
That's part of the problem. You run multiple programs, one of which might have a good user interface, but the rest suck.
In X Window, especially under Linux, the state of user interface inconsistency is INSANE. Even basic services, such as the clipboard, don't have a consistent implementation from program to program. (Observe the different keystroke and mouse operations for cutting and pasting across Netscape, Emacs and OpenOffice, for example.)
If that wasn't enough, you have companies such as Helix-oops-Xymian falling head over heels to Clone Microsoft First - as if Outlook was the ideal UI.
Nothing being done in Free Software today is doing anything to solve this problem with toolkit warfare, desktop warfare, UI warfare and so-on. There is nothing coming even in the FAR future that will put an end to angrier and angrier fruit-salads manifesting themselves all over your screen, just because the developer is too arrogant to follow a simple UI convention.
Picking your favorite examples of "easiest-to-grok" user interfaces is misleading, because it makes you think there's a trend or a possibility that a UI Utopia is not far off. This will never be true, because a GUI desktop is percieved, by the user, as a single application with many modes. The Cool Edit mode may be well made, but the Mozilla mode is an unmitigated disaster. The latter poisons the value that could have been established by the former.
This means you only need one badly designed UI to spoil your whole desktop. Chances are there'll be more than one, chances are one of them will be an important tool.
Regards,
In X Window, especially under Linux, the state of user interface inconsistency is INSANE. Even basic services, such as the clipboard, don't have a consistent implementation from program to program. (Observe the different keystroke and mouse operations for cutting and pasting across Netscape, Emacs and OpenOffice, for example.)
If that wasn't enough, you have companies such as Helix-oops-Xymian falling head over heels to Clone Microsoft First - as if Outlook was the ideal UI.
Nothing being done in Free Software today is doing anything to solve this problem with toolkit warfare, desktop warfare, UI warfare and so-on. There is nothing coming even in the FAR future that will put an end to angrier and angrier fruit-salads manifesting themselves all over your screen, just because the developer is too arrogant to follow a simple UI convention.
Picking your favorite examples of "easiest-to-grok" user interfaces is misleading, because it makes you think there's a trend or a possibility that a UI Utopia is not far off. This will never be true, because a GUI desktop is percieved, by the user, as a single application with many modes. The Cool Edit mode may be well made, but the Mozilla mode is an unmitigated disaster. The latter poisons the value that could have been established by the former.
This means you only need one badly designed UI to spoil your whole desktop. Chances are there'll be more than one, chances are one of them will be an important tool.
Regards,
Chris Wenham
