On Tue, Jun 08, 2004 at 05:50:42PM +0200, Frank Barknecht wrote: > * First is, that usability has nothing to do with nice looks. I > truely believe - and given some research time, I'm sure I could prove > it as well - that photorealistic graphical user interfaces modelled > after hardware when shown on a screen are far from usability.
I couldn't agree more. I like keyboard input (mostly computer keyboard, not synth.) and I don't need and dont want "realistic" GUIs that generally waste more space. I want clarity and fast editing. As an example of a quite popular application on the windows world that usually keeps away from photorealistic GUIs for plugins, take a look at Buzz - http://www.buzzmachines.com/ has about 800 plugins, increasing with a couple a month - and buzz itself hasn't been updated in ages. > * and then I'd like to add, that usabilty in the Linux world comes > from customizabilty, which is mostly absent in the Windows world. The > Unix philosphy is built upon small (or specific) tools that can be > combined in various, *custom* ways and that can be used to let the > computer appear in a way, the user wants, not the other way around. There is just one problem with this approach; that once you have seperate apps for different parts of your composition, it's usually a lot more hassle to set up than a big giant app when you want to work on it again. I vaguely remember a discussion on this list about an application or library that was supposed to take care of this issue, but I can't find it. Does anyone have any pointers? Cheers, Joost.
