[ge-talk] glasselevator: User Interface

[Michael Phipps]

Ari Haviv wrote:
> http://www.tuxmachines.org/gallery/Symphony/background
> obviously so easy to use huh
> I like the idea of putting printer icons on the desktop. I'm not crazy
> about individual hard drive icons on the desktop and I like the "my
> computer" collecting them in one place.

Printer icons on the desktop makes sense if and only if you can drag and 
drop documents onto them and the user can reasonably predict what will 
happen. I can't tell you the number of times that I d&d'ed a .ps file onto 
a printer on a Mac only to have the postscript code print out...

> One of the things that Fitt's Law doesn't take into account is the ever
>> increasing size of the monitor. On a 320x200 screen, it is always easy to
>> get to a corner. On a 1600 X 1200 monitor, corners are no longer the
>> vastly
>> desirable real estate that they once were.
> 
> I have a 22" monitor. I was playing around with this. (even with eyes
> closed) It is easy to fling the mouse to hit the upper left corner and get
> it dead on. I tried the other corners and they don't work as well. Upper
> left is also important because we read from top to bottom, left to right.

Yes, it is easy to get there. But it is a pain to get back. :-)

> This is why I'm thinking on the upper left corner  we should have one word:
> "Menu" and when you throw the mouse on it, it automatically drops down the
> menu. Throw drag and click. It also saves a lot of space, even more than 
> the
> mac global menu. And it's easier to target than the mac menu because with
> mac, you throw the mouse up, move laterally to the menu item, then click
> then drag and then click.

There is a FireFox extension that compresses all of the FF menus into one 
menu - TinyMenu. It is more of a pain than it is worth IF you use menus a 
lot. In FF, I don't, so I use that extension.

Eh. I think that I would really hate this. Imagine using WonderBrush with 
this. You select an area, then throw your cursor all the way to the top 
left, pick a menu item, then have to move your cursor back to WB. I think 
that with the bigger monitors (and multi-monitor, too!) it would make more 
sense to keep the menus where they are.

> We could use the rest of the top row for icons such as the category dock
> idea.

You could, sure.

> After the upper left corner comes the lower left corner. This is where I 
> put
> the deskbar and should be easy to hit the Haiku menu. But it doesn't 
> deserve
> to be on top because we use the app menus more.

The menu could be an item in the dock, like AlphaSenior was talking about.


> Windows standard is by company? I didn't know that was a standard?!!! man,
> no wonder why we need Haiku!

The thing is, the standard is stupid, not the code (in this case). This is 
just poorly thought out on MS's part, IMHO.

> Microsoft came up with the start menu because of the poor organization of
> Windows Explorer. Cluttered icons because of the poor start menu.

> You also have to spend a lot of time reading throughout all the clutter.

Sure. And I am a fast reader. I have a friend who is dyslexic and she takes 
literally minutes to find things on the Start Menu.

> It is categories, information and logic that should lead us to the future
> UI. not flashy 3D effects.
> if you have a really poor UI with lots of flashy distractions, you'll 
> end up
> working slower even if you have lots of gigahertz and newOS kernel. The 
> mind
> is a bottleneck to be taken into account and I don't think most developers,
> artists and marketers understand that.

I think that we do. :-) It is just harder than people think to do better. 
Everyone says "oh, the desktop metaphor has to go!!!". I always ask "what 
shall we replace it with?" and the silence is pretty deafening. :-D

The dock is, honestly, the best idea that I have seen to replace the 
desktop metaphor and it still isn't all that impressive to me. It is a 
minor improvement instead of the order of magnitude that I think you need 
to justify turning everyone's like upside down for.