[plug] Good GUI Interface Design

[Cameron Patrick]

On Sat, Dec 20, 2003 at 03:08:03PM +0800, James Devenish wrote:

| > | First I'd just like to say that saying "GUI interface" is like saying 
| > | "ATM machine". That's just my pickiness for you ;-)
| > 
| > Not to mention PIN number :-)
| 
| Do you have a complaint against personal PIN numbers?

*grin*

| (See e-mail signature.)

Um.  I shall refrain from commenting on your sig.

| > The GIMP is a good example of a hideous interface - it also
| > plays badly with "non-traditional" window managers like ion and ratpoison that
| > don't support overlapping windows except in a few special cases.)
| 
| When I use The GIMP 1.3, it doesn't seem to use as many windows as 1.2.

Yep.  And it has menus at the top of each window, which as also nicer
than haver to navigate a right-click menu all the time.  It also lets
you dock its toolbar into the main window... actually I wonder whether
that would work for some of the other irritating windows... hmm, nope.

| > Random thought from a mouse-avoider:  what about a zero-button mouse?
| > Use the mouse for pointing only, and then you have 102 buttons on your
| > keyboard that you can use do stuff with.
| 
| Random counter-thought: how would you know when a keystroke is
| to cause a "mouse" action rather than a "text entry" action?

I would presume that on a system designed for a buttonless mouse, there
would be some kind of convention for pointing-related keys...  (Or in
true X11 tradition, every application could come up with its own.)

| > now that I'm used to X11-style highlight to select/middle button to
| > paste, I'd not give it up.
| 
| I almost always have to use the keyboard at the same time, so I'd
| certainly be glad to give it up (to prevent my clipboard from being
| overwritten by mousing accidents, for one thing).

Mousing accidents: I see your point.  But generally the convenience of
being able to do copy - paste without having to touch the keyboard
outweighs this.  (Using the keyboard to select what to copy, à la screen
or vim, is okay in some contexts, but often using the mouse to point to
a region is a lot quicker than using the keyboard.  Actually it annoys
me that vim and screen can't share their cut buffer with X... hmm, maybe
that could be a fun programming job for sometime when I'm sufficiently
bored... :-P)

| > xfig also needs a middle mouse button.  (Actually there you have another
| > case of an "innovative" interface...  In some ways its mouse button
| > diagram
| 
| Having a diagram is cool (in this case). But I the three-button dance as
| an *optional* input method, so that you *can* use it *if* you prefer it
| over a keyboard-related method. Obviously, I tend to prefer keyboard-
| related methods.

Having keyboard-driven ways to do everything is good.  But for some
tasks, mice /are/ a more efficient alternative.  (Just like having a
graphical/menu-y interface is more efficient than the command line when
you're only doing something occasionally and can't remember the
appropriate command.)

Regards,

Cameron.