So, my attitude here is probably not like most people's, but: > UI design...you can make it compact, with submenus, subwindows, search etc > for "average" users that wouldn't understand all these options at once. Or > you can make it professional, for the passionate user, that knows what he/she > does without needing a manual for all those knobs.
I think this is a bit of a false dichotomy that comes out of a lack of imagination in UI design. Yes, people do make things more powerful by adding more knobs or reorganizing things graphically, but in my opinion that's superficial and has diminshing returns. I'd rather make something more powerful by generalizing concepts. What that means depends on the problem in question. In my case, I reduced 300 or so parameters to a single window that you type in and displays matching parameters, so no huge monitors were necessary. I could easily express things a GUI would have needed a special interface for, like saved sets of parameters, and parameters tied to each other. Certainly, display should take advantage of graphics, but displaying an envelope as pictures of knobs turned to different settings or as a list of numbers doesn't really count as "taking advantage of graphics". > But, Ive also heard stuff like, humans can only "differenciate"(?) 5 items > quickly, everything above needs more brain action (thinking, looking > twice...). But of course, thats for new situations. A big panel may confuse > at first, but after some learning...big advantage! :) I find that big GUIs remain annoying and slow, especially after I know them well. If there are "advanced" facilities, they tend to be ad-hoc and complicated, like a macro recording feature or something. On the visual side, maybe we do have a 5-item limit. But on the language side normal people have vocabularies of tens of thousands of words. Anyway, I don't mean for a practical question to get bogged down in philosophical ramblings. _______________________________________________ fltk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.easysw.com/mailman/listinfo/fltk
