[plug] Good GUI Interface Design

[Craig Ringer]

I'll bite. While I agree on a number of points, such as the poor drag & 
drop functionaly and extremely limited USB support, I disagree with a 
lot of your comments.

I run a LTSP system with quite a few users, and I'm getting a feel for 
what the users do and don't find to be issues in the interface.

> So, I think a usable desktop or GUI interface needs to be:
> 
>  * Usable FROM SCRATCH
>    - none of this configuration bull shit

Indeed. I think the recent GNOME and KDE releases satisfy that fairly 
well, personally. Many of the remaining shortcomings are being addressed 
by interop work, integration efforts and other "fill in the holes" work 
at freedesktop.org.

>  * TOTALLY consistent
>    - none of this "kmail" looks and acts different to "sylpheed" with
>      different decorations and different widget crap

Indeed. Each toolkit or sometimes app (eg Moz, OO.o) has their own 
open/save dialogs, textfield behaviours, etc - this drives me NUTS as a 
sysadmin supporting users on a Linux terminal server. I'd love to see a 
generic '.guirc' or the use of agreed-upon X resources to control basic 
behaviours like single/double click to open, tab completion or enter 
directory on <tab>, etc. Visual appearance is (a) a secondary issue, and 
(b) largely solved by distro developers anyway.

Seeing this solved would handle my #1 concern about linux desktop 
useability. (shooting the gtk+ file/save dialog in the head would be a 
close second).

>  * Usable from point and click

??

Already there AFAICT. Except (especially hardware related) sysadmin :-(

>  * Preferably usable with only one mouse button, two perhaps
>    - for simplicity sake

*arrrggh*

I strongly disagree with this. I can deal with dropping the middle 
button as a UI requirement, but I and many others have loathed the use 
of a single mouse button for quite some time. Not having a right mouse 
button is /really/ irritating in web browsers, desktop publishing, word 
processors, and IMHO basically everything else. The expected behaviour 
is very simple - "give me a menu of things I can do with what I'm 
pointing at." While Apple likes to claim that a single mouse button 
makes things "simple", all their UIs support CTL-click and OPT-click to 
put back all the functionality removed by their "simplification". I'd 
prefer to right-click than CTL-OPT-hit-k-with-your-nose click personally.

The mac users at work use the right mouse button (upgraded mice, you 
see) quite extensively in Quark, Acrobat and the Finder. Even the total 
novice users in our sales dep't seem to have no trouble with the concept 
of the right mouse button as "what can I do with this item I'm pointing 
at?".

>  * Fast

Not on any of my G4s, including the dual-processor 866MHz one (with 
512MB of RAM) we got fairly recently. I find the speed comparable to 
*NIX UIs like GNOME, and nowhere near the speed of Win2k's GUI. I don't 
mind that much, and the MacOSX GUI /is/ very "smooth" due to proper 
vsync tracking, saved window contents (avoids tearing), etc, but I 
wouldn't call it fast.

That said, I'm really interested in seeing what comes out of the Cairo 
team and the freedesktop.org Xserver, as they're working on descriptive 
graphics (like the DPS variant used in OSX), GL-backed X, etc. Even if 
it's slower, something that eliminates the awful progressive redraw, 
jerky window resize, and tearing under dragged windows in X would be 
really nice.

>  * Aesthetically pleasing

... is a matter of aesthetic preferences. I don't personally agree - 
while generally nice, I think it's badly damaged by the nasty "brushed 
metal" stuff and little coloured bead-buttons.

Craig Ringer