[plug] Good GUI Interface Design

[Craig Ringer]

selectively snipped from a post by James Devenish:

> One option is to simply replace it with "Discard
> Changes", but it would more even more useful to have "Cancel", "Discard"
> and "Save" -- three buttons. 

That sounds entertainingly like Apple's HIG for unsaved documents. 
Which, I must say, I think is very good - as is most of their HIG. If 
they followed it a little more themselves....

 > I have seen and used
> RedHat, and I would not recommend that people go near their GUI tools (I
> haven't used RedHat in a year or two, though, so perhaps my old
> impressions are out-of-date).

Partially, I'd say. Some of their tools are very good - package 
management, authentication configuration, etc. Some are less so - 
network setup, for example, is less than ideal (but has a good dialup 
config tool for those who use such things). I like the way the tools are 
  all nicely separated out into simple 'applets'.

>>And I haven't seen one Linux/Open Source desktop solution that is ALL of the
>>above.
> 
> 
> I won't comment on that remark, because my Linux exposure is not
> adequate, and because I tend to go for geek solution anyway.

Indeed. Until _extremely_ recently I've used cut-down desktops that 
provide window management, a launcher, and some form of task management. 
No 'desktop' or GUI file manager, etc.

> People have made the remark on this list that "they don't care whether
> it's GNOME or KDE, GTK or Qt, nor what window manager, as long as all
> the apps look right".

IMHO, it's even more important that "... the apps _behave_ 
consistently."  Looks - the easy part - have been largely handled by 
recent distros.

Craig Ringer