On Friday 05 Aug 2005 17:17, Silvan wrote: > On Friday 05 August 2005 04:55 am, Guillaume Laurent wrote: > > One thing I thought we could easily apply is clearing up our > > toolbars, we probably don't need that many functions on the > > toolbars, nor that many toolbars in the first place. What do you > > guys think ? > > I haven't read the article yet, but you're going to have a hard time > convincing me that we have too many toolbars and/or too many > functions on toolbars
I've resisted replying to this thread (tempting though it was) owing to pressure of time, but I'll drop back in now. There's a big difference in purpose between the Windows-style toolbars and those on the OS/X applications referred to in the article. I think a lot of people assume that toolbars are meant for beginners because they have cute pictures on them. In the classic Windows model this just isn't true: they're only well-suited to people advanced enough to know already what at least the more common available operations do and how to use them. Because the toolbar icon gives you so little information about what it will actually do, it's a very unsafe way of discovering new commands or exploring the interface -- menus are much better for that. Meanwhile the truly elite will probably use the keyboard. But there's a big segment of competent users for whom this sort of toolbar, at least in parts (and who uses all of any interface?), is a pretty good fit. The OS/X model has a totally different function for the toolbar. There it's a usage hint and a method of discovery. It's there to tell you what you might want to do next -- something the classic Windows model is hopeless at, and that is probably closer to the Windows wizard interface than the classic Windows toolbar. I like both the Windows wizard and the OS/X toolbars, but they do have their limits. Which you prefer is I think more of a matter of taste than some people give credit for. I actually don't find most of the OS/X applications I've used particularly intuitive, and some of that is down to their having too few visible options. If the thing I want to do is not one of the two or three really obvious things in the interface, I'm usually stuck. For example, iPhoto has me stumped much of the time -- I haven't worked out when it copies photos and when it doesn't (my mother's iBook doesn't have _all_ that much disc space) and I've never managed to delete a photo completely without dropping back to the command line. Garage Band, although an excellent, beautiful, and easy to use application for some things (OK, one thing: recording audio and applying effects to it) is also very bad at making it apparent what is and isn't possible at the outset. Can you create MIDI tracks from scratch, or only record them? Why am I offered a bunch of "instruments" for audio tracks where I've already recorded a particular instrument? (OK, they're effects presets -- took me a while though.) Of course, the fact that I always forget the menu bar is there (because it isn't attached to the window) probably doesn't help. So you can put this down to my not being Mac-friendly, but weren't we talking about applications being user-friendly rather than the other way around? Where Mac apps very often win hugely for me is in the more textual dialogs, where the design doesn't diverge greatly from what I expect, but just shows more testing, refinement and reduction. For example, I wondered whether I could plug my Linux laptop into my mother's iBook and thus use her dialup internet connection -- I thought it must be possible, but configuring that on an unknown Unix would be a pain. As it happens, all you have to do is check the "Start sharing my internet connection" button and it works. (Although it goes dead when the laptop suspends, which is a pain.) Another example is the Garage Band configuration dialog, which is a model of simplicity compared to Rosegarden's, even given that Rosegarden is a vastly more complex application. My point here is not just that one strategy is not so obviously superior to the other, as that they are different strategies. I don't believe you can make a Windows-style application into a decent Mac-style one by reducing the number of toolbar buttons and making them bigger. First you have to find a way to make the application work with only a very limited number of obvious menu or toolbar operations in each GUI window, and that means breaking it down into the things that are necessary at each stage and the things that are not. For some applications that ought to be quite simple -- a CD burner, for example, should ideally have drag and drop and file interaction and then one big red button. For Rosegarden, it's not that simple. If that implies something bad about Rosegarden, the first thing that springs to mind is not that the interface is designed wrongly so much as that the application is too complex in the first place. Is it really true that an application like this can be so much simpler? Oh, and I think the real reason OS/X is nice to use is that everything has consistent icons and the same nice fonts, and the fonts are big. That bigness makes it impossible to be wordy. It's a sad reversal in a way for Windows: one of the reasons Windows 95 was so much more usable than 3.1 was that wordy dialogs were apparently encouraged. A dialog that says what it really means in clear(ish) if wordy English is obviously much better than one that uses three words that don't mean anything to the user when put together. I loved that about Windows 95, the fact that you could actually understand what its system dialogs were saying. But OS/X shows signs of having evolved a little further, because in many cases their non-wordy dialogs are more comprehensible than the wordy Windows 95 ones. Forcing limitations on developers and then insisting the developers do it right all the same is an impressive thing, but you do have to be in a position to insist, and your developers do need to be capable of doing it right. Chris ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing & QA Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf _______________________________________________ Rosegarden-devel mailing list Rosegarden-devel@lists.sourceforge.net - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
