8 Jun
2004
8 Jun
'04
5:56 p.m.
On Tue, Jun 08, 2004 at 05:50:42PM +0200, Frank Barknecht wrote:
* First is, that usability has nothing to do with nice
looks. I
truely believe - and given some research time, I'm sure I could prove
it as well - that photorealistic graphical user interfaces modelled
after hardware when shown on a screen are far from usability.
I couldn't agree more. I like keyboard input (mostly computer keyboard,
not synth.) and I don't need and dont want "realistic" GUIs that
generally waste more space. I want clarity and fast editing.
As an example of a quite popular application on the windows world that
usually keeps away from photorealistic GUIs for plugins, take a look at
Buzz - http://www.buzzmachines.com/ has about 800 plugins, increasing
with a couple a month - and buzz itself hasn't been updated in ages.
* and then I'd like to add, that usabilty in the
Linux world comes
from customizabilty, which is mostly absent in the Windows world. The
Unix philosphy is built upon small (or specific) tools that can be
combined in various, *custom* ways and that can be used to let the
computer appear in a way, the user wants, not the other way around.
There is just one problem with this approach; that once you have
seperate apps for different parts of your composition, it's usually a
lot more hassle to set up than a big giant app when you want to work
on it again. I vaguely remember a discussion on this list about an
application or library that was supposed to take care of this issue,
but I can't find it. Does anyone have any pointers?
Cheers,
Joost.