I have to say I disagree with it, mainly the phrase "intuitive well-designed user interface". The idea that a human interacting with a piece of plastic and silicon can be intuitive is crazy. 'Intuitive' is extremely skewed towards individual skills and preference. I think he means 'aesthetic', but I could be making that up.
Given my position that it is impossible to be intuitive, I think it is more important that whatever you use be cohesive and consistent, and more importantly that your skills 'compound'. That is, understanding or getting better at one part of a system will improve your skills across the board. As far as I am concerned, Windows and OS-X both fail miserably at this, (although, I don't really use linux either, mainly for reasons of code quality, UNIX all the way!). In terms of my productivity and evolving my skills, I find that I am held back when using either. This is based on having to use OSX for work for the past 12 months, and my memory of Windows (it has been a while though). I won't be going back to either anytime soon. Again I must clarify that this is entirely dependent on my skills and preference for how things work. On a side not, I do love this priceless vista quote which provides some cannon fodder. "It’s easy to ridicule the estimated 2006-or-2007 ship date for Longhorn, the next major release of Windows. But do you doubt for a moment that Longhorn will provide more improvements from Windows XP than desktop Linux will gain during the same period?" I don't think that one panned out, given what ubuntu, the vista of linux, achieved in that same period. Mark. On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 11:07 AM, Michael Neale <[email protected]> wrote: > > I think this still rings true today, but its not linux specific, nor > open source specific: > http://daringfireball.net/2004/04/spray_on_usability > > Some choice quotes: > > "This idea, that the hard work of development is in building the > underlying foundation, and that the easy part is writing a “GUI > wrapper”, has been the Linux/Unix way all along." > > "UI development is the hard part. And it’s not the last step, it’s the > first step. In my estimation, the difference between: > > * software that performs function X; and > * software that performs function X, with an intuitive well- > designed user interface > > isn’t just a little bit of extra work. It’s not even twice the work. > It’s an entire order of magnitude more work. Developing software with > a good UI requires both aptitude and a lot of hard work." > > > The layering and separation that was encouraged (and still is by ill > advised people) in java apps means this applies here as well. The term > "user interface layer" often implied some trivial detail that junior > devs would do. > > > Interesting.... > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
