Re: Human interface design
Hi, if the gimp developers really have the time to improve the userinterface I would be happy to discuss things with them. I have a few years experience with user interfaces and DIN EN ISO 9241 and perhaps can give some hints (even if I do not do my own projects always with "softwareergonomie" in mind). Unfortunatly I am no gtk developer and my time as motif developer lays a few years back. In germany companies that force their employees to work with sofware with bad user interfaces can be condemned to pay up to 25000$ since 1.1.2000 (theoretically!). I followed the discussion on this list and would like to bring in my opinion on three points: - the style guide from microsoft is a very good book even for non windows programmers, it would be a good idea if microsoft forced their programmers to read it .. - timecop understands some important points in doing good user interface design - timecop seems to not understand at all how free software projects like gimp work Best regards, Carsten PS: for german developers a good start for getting a first impression on this is http://www.sozialnetz-hessen.de/ergo-online/ergo_frame1.htm -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Sven Neumann] Assistance with GUI design
I am rather shocked. For someone who doesn't really know me, that's some pretty bold statements. But then again, I've come to expect that from you, dear Sven, so I don't really take it too seriously. You are still upset from when I called you an asshole about a year ago. :) I'm pretty sure that we can live better without timecops assistance. A lot of people that work a lot with The GIMP have contributed their ideas of a nice and usable GUI and should continue to do so. We all know that we can still improve a lot, but we can certainly do better without people like him. On the side note, one thing that could use serious serious improvement is the preferences dialog. I think, the "Tree" structure of organizing preferences is truly confusing. Reserve tree structures for directory lists and things like that. Someone using the Gimp for the first time would expect preferences dialog to look something similar to a tabbed notebook where each setting is grouped by section, which occupies one tab of the notebook, etc. Also isn't it a bit extreme to have a separate window for each "directory" the Gimp uses? Wouldn't it be much more "intuitive" to group them all inside one section, or allow selection from a combo box, or something along these lines? All of that again could be grouped under the "Directories" tab on the preferences notebook. I know this "tree preferences" stuff was popularized by that obsolete desktop environment called "Gnome" but still, that doesn't mean you have to blindly copy losing designs. tc -- ・‥…━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━…‥・ timecop at japan.co.jp | ＯＡ通信サビース株式会社 | NTT DoCoMo I thought everything that Linus Torvalds is involved with was divine perfection? Must be a problem with NEC and Sony -about Crusoe recall ・‥…━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━…‥・
Re: Assistance with GUI design
On Mon, 11 Dec 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: snip On the side note, one thing that could use serious serious improvement is the preferences dialog. I think, the "Tree" structure of organizing preferences is truly confusing. The tree structure is nice and transparent. Tree structure is natural and good organization of many kinds of information (including preferences). It is the way how people perceive it---you see the overall picture, then you look more closely at a particular information (expand a branch) and see more details and can choose to look even more closely (expand a subbranch, choose a option) or you consider it not interesting, forget it (collapse the branch) and look at something else. Reserve tree structures for directory lists and things like that. Why should filesystem have tree structure and preferences not? What's the difference? Someone using the Gimp for the first time would expect preferences dialog to look something similar to a tabbed notebook where each setting is grouped by section, which occupies one tab of the notebook, etc. And about tabbed anything. Do you mean GIMP preferences should look like http://www.iarchitect.com/tabs.htm#TAB13 or http://www.iarchitect.com/tabs.htm#TAB6 ? There are good reasons to believe that anything tabbed would lead to bad ends especially when the number of tabs (a) would not be really small (2, 3, 4) (b) would have tendency to increase; the main reason is daily experience. Yeti
Re: [Sven Neumann] Assistance with GUI design
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I am rather shocked. For someone who doesn't really know me, that's some pretty bold statements. But then again, I've come to expect that from you, dear Sven, so I don't really take it too seriously. You are still upset from when I called you an asshole about a year ago. :) I think I know you good enough from the various provocative statements you made in various places on the web insulting the members of the Free Software community. I must admit that I always had a good laugh at your statements and I'm not taking you really serious. You can continue to call me an asshole without any problem at my part. I just refuse to work with you since I do not like the style you use to propose your ideas even though you made some good points. On the side note, one thing that could use serious serious improvement is the preferences dialog. I think, the "Tree" structure of organizing preferences is truly confusing. Reserve tree structures for directory lists and things like that. Someone using the Gimp for the first time would expect preferences dialog to look something similar to a tabbed notebook where each setting is grouped by section, which occupies one tab of the notebook, etc. We had this design before and switched to the tree structure since the notebook interface simply didn't work. A lot of other programs (not only GNOME) are using the same interface (Netscape, Mozilla for example) and IMHO it's a good way to present the user with a large amount of configuration options. Salut, Sven
sliding off-topic Re: [Sven Neumann] Assistance with GUI design
On Mon, Dec 11, 2000 at 10:37:11PM +0900, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On the side note, one thing that could use serious serious improvement is the preferences dialog. I think, the "Tree" structure of organizing preferences is truly confusing. Reserve tree structures for directory lists and things like that. Someone using the Gimp for the first time would expect preferences dialog to look something similar to a tabbed notebook where each setting is grouped by section, which occupies one tab They would expect that only if they've used Microsoft Windows 95 through to somewhere in the late 1990s. The mechanism used in Gimp is most widely considered to be far superior for potentially complex preferences lists. Tabbed notebooks are rarely the Right Thing unless you have only three or four clearly differentiated item groups. We've got lots more. It's also funny how people add 12 more tabs, and don't consider a re-design -- look at Visual Studio (at least circa 1998) for such nonsense. If you're claiming to be teaching _us_ about GUI design you should know this stuff. This is rapidly getting off topic, and concentrating on your specific wants, rather than general usability everyone will agree on (for example, ESC = Cancel seems pretty reasonable to me) Nick.
design
www.graphicnet.net If you need help with illustration and design for your current projects, let me know. I'm looking for projects that I can add to my portfolio.
Article on UI design in free software.
Not bad. Quite pertinent to GIMP. http://sendmail.net/?feed=interviewkuniavsky Not that I think GIMP's UI is bad (lately) or that we have a particular reason to actively innovate as opposed to more of less cribbing, ahem, someone's UI. --Adam
