Archive for the ‘Desktop UI’ Category
Thursday, November 15th, 2007
Ubuntu 7.10 (codename "Gutsy Gibbon"), released last month, is for me the first really usable Linux, which is saying a lot considering I've made a serious attempt to switch to Linux about once a year for the last six years. The last 3 of those attempts have been with Ubuntu, ...
Posted in Desktop UI, Free software, Interfaces, Tech | 8 Comments »
Saturday, October 27th, 2007
One of the largest deficiencies in most software interfaces lies in their poor use of semantic categorization. This is most clearly seen in windowed applications' menu bars, where organization is done in several different ways (often inconsistently within the same application):
organization by hierarchy of action, e.g. "Paste" goes under "Edit" ...
Posted in Desktop UI, Interfaces | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 17th, 2007
Jeff Atwood discusses the way Mac OS X windows don't really have 'maximize' buttons, and he comes to the right conclusion: better to have overly large windows than to make users futz with the dimensions of their windows. He says:
...Apple's method of forcing users to deal with more windows by ...
Posted in Desktop UI, Interfaces, Tech | 1 Comment »
Monday, May 21st, 2007
This last week I've been getting familiar with Vim. I've dabbled a few times in the past, but this time I'm finally feeling comfortable enough to stick with it. I was quite annoyed with having to hit ESC all the time, but a neat tip is to set this in ...
Posted in Desktop UI, Interfaces, Learn Programming, Tech | No Comments »
Friday, May 4th, 2007
Title translation: 'Don't tell me you find this difficult to understand purple monkey dishwasher (version 3)'.
Preston Gralla on O'Reilly Net complains that Linux package names are preventing wider Linux desktop adoption. While I find his claim that Linux will never get there extreme, I do agree this is a significant ...
Posted in Desktop UI, Interfaces, Tech | No Comments »
Monday, March 26th, 2007
I don't have to be Aunt Tillie to crave a simpler desktop computing experience. Whether I'm using Windows, OS X, GNOME, or KDE, my current work flow gets tangled as I juggle several open folder windows, half a dozen instances of Firefox with 30 tabs between them, a text editor, ...
Posted in Desktop UI, Interfaces, Tech | No Comments »
Monday, March 19th, 2007
Continuing a discussion of desktop UI from the previous post. Be clear that most of what follows applies equally to Windows and the Linux desktops; my point is that Apple popularized these ideas and the others----misguidedly----still follow Apple's lead.
Compared to Microsoft, I don't especially begrudge Macs for their existence, and ...
Posted in Desktop UI, Interfaces, Tech | 5 Comments »
Sunday, March 18th, 2007
The Linux community is often accused of being poor at catering to non-expert users, but this is a misdiagnoses. Contrary to myth, the community is not full of old Unix beards demanding the rest of us master perl before they give the rest of us the time of day. Surely, ...
Posted in Desktop UI, Interfaces, Tech | 1 Comment »
