[LAU] [OT] GNOME UI

[Simon Wise]

On 12/07/12 03:30, david wrote:

> I'm firmly convinced that the GNOME design team begins every session with the
> question, "What more functionality can we remove from users today?" Eventually,
> the GNOME UI will consist of a single button in the middle of the screen
> reading, "Shutdown computer". ;-)

Perhaps its a matter of what users and platforms they are catering for ... a UI 
that works well on the smaller, hand held devices with touch interfaces rather 
than a mouse and keyboard is very important if that is what you are using, and 
lots of devices are like that now. It is becoming the most familiar interface.

It is easy to confuse 'intuitive' with 'familiar' and believe that what one has 
learned is somehow the natural way to do things, but this newer style of 
interface is becoming the most common one => familiar => 'intuitive'. The Gnome 
version isn't the result of a collection random decisions along the way, it was 
described and planned in detail years ago, when the work building it was 
starting to get serious. Looking closely at UI habits derived from hardware with 
particular limits and histories, then deciding what is just habit and what 
really contributes to a good working environment, is a very important part of 
making a good UI. See this 2009 document:

http://www.gnome.org/%7Emccann/shell/design/GNOME_Shell-20091114.pdf

it predicts the Gnome 3 interface fairly accurately, and is clearly the origin 
of their current design principles page a couple of years down the track:

https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Principles


Workstations like audio studio setups are probably much better off with 
something lighter anyway ... lxde, xfce, openbox etc. And those have always been 
very customisable if you want to do your own thing in a desktop, many coders who 
work heavily with text files and like to create their own workspace seem to have 
gone with one or other of those. KDE still caters for those who like the older 
windows on a desktop kind of thing, but it seems to be less and less the focus 
of distributions ... probably for the reasons above.

Personally I have had xfce as my desktop for a few years, I got annoyed with all 
the 'helpful' but limited GUI stuff and got stung by some nice little 
customisation options I had used not being supported into the next versions of 
my desktop managers, but at the moment I am looking at how to integrate smaller 
tablets into my workflow, especially when there isn't a mouse or keyboard in reach.



Simon