[LAU] State of the art GUI

[Paul Davis]

On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 2:35 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine
<alexandre.prokoudine at gmail.com> wrote:

 [ ... what makes a GUI non-90's ]

> 1. Color palette (quite a number of apps still use some kind of websafe palette)
> 2. Antialiased vs. non-antialiased graphics.
> 3. Quality of textures (if they are used).
> 4. Approach to icon design (this one changes a lot over time, even in
> free software there's recent trend to move to symbolic icons).
> 5. Consistence of graphics (e.g. MusE2 has a mix of oldish and newish stuff).

this is a brilliant summary. thanks alexandre!

> 1. Whether you just keep adding controls you think you need as you go, or
> whether you start from analysis of the big picture.
> 2. How you organize access to dialogs and how you design them.
> 3. Whether you have dialogs at all (Ableton).
> 4. How much is done right on canvas (Ardour3's MIDI editing).
> 5. Where you draw the line between clean UI and options required for
> power users.
> 6. How the toolbox is designed and organized (e.g. users could do
> without a separate tool for resizing MIDI events in a matrix editor,
> because selection/drawing can do this function just fine)

this is a very nice list too, but i'd add one more thing to it:

7. whether you provide user-configurable keybindings for every
possible action in the GUI