Re: [Usability] Re: Suggestion for the actual UI of GTK+'s New FileSelector

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Fri, 9 Jan 2004, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:

> Date: Fri, 9 Jan 2004 15:29:48 +0100 (CET)
> From: Reinout van Schouwen <reinout cs vu nl>
> To: usability gnome org
> Subject: Re: [Usability] Re: Suggestion for the actual UI of GTK+'s New
>     FileSelector
>
> On Thu, 8 Jan 2004, Uno Engborg wrote:
>
> > True, but in the real world people do mix and match, and not taking this
> > into account, most people end up with desktops that are far worse than
> > win95.
>
> Worse than win95? I can hardly imagine. ;-)

Honest answer that you probably dont want to hear:
the toolkit widgets in Windows 95 were in some wasy better than they are
in GTK2 and probably faster too.  It could just be bad themes but I'm
getting extra rows of pixels on toolbars I dont want and when windows are
maximized there is a line of pixels at the side of the window so I can
accidentally grab the window itself intstead of the scrollbar.

I also happen to prefer lower colour icons (like Win95 and much older
versions of Mac OS, but not monochrome icons) that focus on conveying the
concept rather than providing a pretty or photorealistic picture.  So in
that regard I think the iconography of Windows 95 is better than Gnome2 (i
mostly liked the Gnome 1 icons but I've not spent a substantial amount of
time looking at anything other than the defaults).  I actively loathe the
detailed high colour icons of Windows 2000 and despise the toy like Fisher
Price inteface of Windows XP and the slowdown I blame largely on the theme
engine.  My university stupidly runs the theme engine (which is locked out
anyway) to make Windows XP look like windows 2000 instead of disabling the
service entirely.

There are things about Windows 95 that were better than the current Gnome
desktop but it would be tedious and pedantic of me to find them all but
certainly many of them are suggested by the reports in Bugzilla.

Windows 95 is an intersting anolgy because back then people were using a
mix and match of Windows 95 as well as 16-bit windows 3.11 programs so the
desktop really was a nasty ugly mess of toolkits as opposed to Windows 98
and Windows 2000 which because much more homogenous.

It goes without saying that Gnome exceeds Windows 95 in many many ways but
there is still plenty that can be learned from Microsoft and not just
learning from its mistakes.  I really appreciate the freedom afforded to
me by Gnome even if I usually have neither the expertise nor the time to
exercise that freedom I still value it highly

Yes I am a heretic, I still use Windows on a regular basis, mostly by
choice sometimes completely unavoidable (due to requirements to
use things such as Macromedia and Adobe software).
I may as well, I've payed for it - and when things ocassionally go wrong I
keep on paying ;) - but I love Gnome too and there are less reasons by the
day for me to keep using legacy software.

> > Unfortunately we have a lot of historical luggage to carry. For that we
> > only can blame old time open source developers that usually had the
> > macho attitude, that if you can't do it from the command line it is not
> > worh doing, and people that can't use a "simple" command line are
> > stupid.
>
> Agreed.

Given that attitude I thought it was funny that people put usability
effort into Gnome Terminal.  Gnome Terminal failed on me once to many and
I stick with reliable xterm.

Hopefully my rant has been vaguely amusing.
I enjoy Microsoft bashing like everyone else but there is still a lot to
be learned from them, usability (at least superficially) was something
they were better at even if they never did hold a candle to Apple.

Sincerley

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/