[plug] Good GUI Interface Design

[James Devenish]

In message <3FE41A7C.4010800 at leftclick.com.au>
on Sat, Dec 20, 2003 at 05:46:36PM +0800, Ben New wrote:
> Words of wisdom!

Perhaps, in a way, yet the post was written as though the toolkit
problem was thought to be "a lack of uniformity of appearance" or "a
lack of a super-toolkit" rather than "a lack of usability" (hence I
didn't reply to it). I don't deny that people "want" uniformity of
appearance. But I'm not one to suggest that all apps "should" look the
same, or that toolkits should be merged into a super-toolkit. In fact,
I'm against Linux desktops becoming "monolithic" in its use of toolkits.
This is why I wrote of "meta-programmers" (for want of a better term) to
address the problems of the individual apps. No matter what toolkits are
used, toolkits don't "cause" usability (though they can certainly give a
big boost in areas like cut-and-paste, drag-and-drop, localisation, help
systems, etc). It has also been mentioned that there are efforts to
improve the way that messages and configurations are shared between
toolkits, though this is presumably the "solvable" side of the problem.
The UNIX free-software situation has been that there are lots of
choices, but not a lot of great ones. I am suggesting that a lot of
Linux-inspired free software suffers from the same inclination.

-- 
I might have forgotten to add these:
;-) :-) ;-P :-P