On Wednesday, June 13, 2007, at 10:44AM, "Michael McCracken" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Hi, > >Indeed the developers of Papers have done a great job with their app, >especially with the UI. I have a lot of respect for the effort and taste >it takes to make a well designed UI. The ADA rules actually did spell >out the weighting of aesthetics, it was as follows: > >> BEST MAC OS X SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING SOLUTION >> >> * - 10% PLATFORM INNOVATION >> * - 15% USER EXPERIENCE >> * - 15% TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION >> * - 30% PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION >> * - 10% USE OF OPEN SOURCE >> * - 10% AUTOMATION >> * - 10% SHARING AND INTEGRATION > >Interesting, to say the least.
That /is/ interesting, because I think we definitely win over Papers in the last 5 of those, although some of them may not be clear unless you look at the code. My guess is that BibDesk's features aren't discoverable enough, since there are too many of them to keep track of (I have a hard time saying NO to feature requests...especially my own ;). >About your comments re: BibDesk's present UI - I've heard a few >comments recently >that BibDesk is either getting old or was never all that pretty. >I actually think it's aging well, but there certainly are a few spots >where we're using less current UI elements, and a few places where >a redesign would be nice (I'm thinking of the publication edit window). Agreed; the publication window is a weakness in terms of appearance. Our users bitch when we try to use animations or get rid of the form-based editor, though...and we've listened, for better or for worse. From a functionality standpoint, I think that the present UI is good, but a new user may be turned off because it doesn't have the "shininess" of many new apps. Because of the BibTeX heritage, we also have things like text fields to represent files. How obvious is it that a text field is a file drag-and-drop target, to someone who is used to modern apps? >The changes you suggest require programming more than design (although >no small amount of design) and developer time is really short. > >My suggestion to BibDesk users who would like to see it clean up a bit >for the modern OS X era is to either dig into the code themselves, or >try and find a student who needs a project to show off and convince them >to help out - kind of like a small-scale google summer of code. If >you know >a CS undergrad who's a real Apple fanboy and wants to work there, >tell them we've got tons of fancy UI ideas they could work on to show >off their chops :) Yup; I don't have the time or energy to make a lot of these changes, but our current developers would be great mentors :). -- Adam ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Bibdesk-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
