Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

That’s it, we’re quitting

design.canonical.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 137 posts

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#51

Post by cdawzrd »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #44
shareme wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ahem, in mobile we do not have quit..nothing broke not even the mobile users :)

Actually, on my Android phone I'm constantly using a third party task killer to stop services and apps running in the background that I thought I 'quit' by backing out of them. I also use the quit option on apps that have it. I don't entirely trust Android to manage battery life as efficiently as possible yet, especially when iPhone still does it so much better, and when every time I check the services running on the…

Your task killer might be hurting your battery life rather than helping it. In any case, in recent versions (2.1+ I think), Android is better at managing tasks than a third-party app, and overzealous background task killing doesn't help anything.

http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-wi...

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#52

Post by joe_the_user »

mycroftiv wrote: post #12

I get so frustrated reading blog posts by user interface designers. They almost invariably consist of reasoning I disagree and conclusions I disagree with in support of user interface decisions that make my experience as a user worse. Ubuntu Unity is pretty much an anthology of user interface decisions that are exactly wrong by my perception, and "lets get rid of quit" is just another one. Of all the actions in any m…

Hmm,

Why "modern, up-to-date design decisions" tend to actually make computers lousier despite their being conceived of by people whose very job it is to make things better?

And especially, why do they tend to make open source GUIs especially shitty?

Well...

First, what's good and desirable about these "modern, up-to-date design decisions" UIs is that they are organized around a tightly integrated, sort-of-intuitive metaphors in theory, and even in UI Labratories, let the average person accomplish more things, and accomplish those thing more quickly. The Office ribbon is fine example. In order to let a person accomplish more while confusing them less(giving fewer choices), it must anticipate what the user does...

Anticipation... stop there, there's the first problem - anticipating the users intentions. It's not just that the anticipation can be just wrong from get-go (though that happens too). It's that anticipation is an approach in it's present incarnations scales very badly. As soon as you want to do something hard, the system will stop anticipating you and so the hard thing is twice as hard.

And problem two of tightly integrated metaphors is that since they inherently have to abstract from how a computers' software and hardware actually work, any task that's hard for the machine will suddenly have to be done in a fashion that takes into account the machines' limitations and so violates the metaphors - if your app takes up 10GB, it need a quit menu item, damn - but giving it that menu now puts it in conflict with the "UI guidelines".

And finally, the reason tightly-integrated metaphors are especially bad in Open Source is they require more consistency so the user can count on them (even from otherwise separate applications). And you'll have a hard time getting that with a horde of volunteers. IE, why KDE 4 was terrible.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#53

Post by cabacon »

cookiecaper wrote: post #48
joe_the_user wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently, meaning in OS X, I've felt like the Apple UI has degenerated through the use of "easy looking" UI elements that remove every "confusing" element to the point of preventing the user from doing anything. Not only can I not find files when Finder doesn't use folders but my parents and my friends who actually have Macs can't find files either. It seems to me the Mac doesn't win by real usability but by looking…

I agree, generally. I find Mac the most irritating platform to use -- the shortcuts are all different because Apple has a silly insistence of using Super where they should use Ctrl, and common shortcuts are supplanted by the OS, leaving apps to have to find new ones. The Dock is a slow method of switching and Sup+~ shortcut to switch to a windows is more annoying than a straight Alt+Tab. Sup+H and your window goes aw…

Huh. I find that shortcut consistency is actually a strength of the platform. Are you talking about inconsistencies between OS X's choice and the other OSes you use? Because otherwise, I don't see it. Only on the Mac do I know that I can use the same key combo (apple-,) to get to the preferences of an application, regardless of where it came from. And I'm not sure how apple-` is "more annoying" than alt-tab; apple-tab still exists for switching between applications. apple-` just switches between the windows of an application. I actually like that ability, and again, it's consistent across applications.

OS X may not be your cup of tea, and that's just fine. You just happened to attack what I perceive as one of its strengths, so I'm surprised by your choice of targets.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#54

Post by tvon »

joe_the_user wrote: post #45
bmelton wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that I'd necessarily attribute it to the Canonical team, but the best UI designers make decisions that don't sound right out loud, but actually work quite well in the product. That's often the very point of UI, is in studying behaviors and responding to them in ways that aren't obvious, and that often sound wrong on their face. Apple, in particular, are considered a paragon of UI excellence, yet many of…

Recently, meaning in OS X, I've felt like the Apple UI has degenerated through the use of "easy looking" UI elements that remove every "confusing" element to the point of preventing the user from doing anything. Not only can I not find files when Finder doesn't use folders but my parents and my friends who actually have Macs can't find files either. It seems to me the Mac doesn't win by real usability but by looking…

> Not only can I not find files when Finder doesn't use folders (...)

Huh? Do you mean things like iPhoto that bundle photos?

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#55

Post by strlen »

The recent UI changes in Ubuntu (getting rid of X11, now this?) seem just crazy. I use Ubuntu on my machine, because I want a developer friendly OS. Recently, however, it just has not been the case: for example, OCaml 3.12 is still unavailable in apt repos (even on "unstable" branches), despite it being available in Fedora/CentOS yum repos or in macports. Same for Scala 2.8.x, Erlang R14, etc...

Has the Ubuntu team completely forgotten its original constituency in pursuit of "Linux that your grandparents can use on their netbook?"? Looks like back to debian-unstable (or Fedora rawhide?) for me.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#56

Post by aeden »

silentbicycle wrote: post #31
aeden wrote: post #5

Looks like their server feels the same way. (Sorry, I had to say it)

No, you really didn't. Comments like this add nothing to the discussion. Couldn't you have at least linked to the google cache? http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KY4Mjyl...

Someone else had already linked to the google cache, but thanks for playing.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#57

Post by joe_the_user »

tvon wrote: post #54
joe_the_user wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently, meaning in OS X, I've felt like the Apple UI has degenerated through the use of "easy looking" UI elements that remove every "confusing" element to the point of preventing the user from doing anything. Not only can I not find files when Finder doesn't use folders but my parents and my friends who actually have Macs can't find files either. It seems to me the Mac doesn't win by real usability but by looking…

> Not only can I not find files when Finder doesn't use folders (...) Huh? Do you mean things like iPhoto that bundle photos?

I really don't understand how current finder works, having used it a dozen times. Whatever it does, doesn't seem to involve separate folders. Seems Prima facie evidence of lack of usability since I have been able to reasonably easily understand Windows, Linux and the older Macintosh finder-thing.

And yes, iPhotos seem to be a problem. I watched a friend spend three hours trying to find some photos they'd previous loaded in iPhoto.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#58

Post by mcantelon »

bmelton wrote: post #36
mycroftiv wrote: post #12

I get so frustrated reading blog posts by user interface designers. They almost invariably consist of reasoning I disagree and conclusions I disagree with in support of user interface decisions that make my experience as a user worse. Ubuntu Unity is pretty much an anthology of user interface decisions that are exactly wrong by my perception, and "lets get rid of quit" is just another one. Of all the actions in any m…

I don't know that I'd necessarily attribute it to the Canonical team, but the best UI designers make decisions that don't sound right out loud, but actually work quite well in the product. That's often the very point of UI, is in studying behaviors and responding to them in ways that aren't obvious, and that often sound wrong on their face. Apple, in particular, are considered a paragon of UI excellence, yet many of…

>Apple, in particular, are considered a paragon of UI excellence, yet many of the decisions they make SOUND downright terrible.

And some, like the UI of iTunes and their elimination of the right mouse button, are terrible.

I don't see Apple as innovative on the UI front... more so in terms of visual design.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#59

Post by adolfojp »

run4yourlives wrote: post #41
ams6110 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rearranging the furniture in the middle of the night so people trip over the couch when they are walking to the bathroom Exactly how I felt about the "new" Microsoft Office UI and the straw that broke the camels back on my continued use of that software.

It's funny, because from my perspective as a casual office user, I actually thought the menus made things a little easier to use, even if I needed to "re-learn" where things were. My wife however, much more of a "power" office user, has completely sworn off of them. This is a person that knew pretty much where every menu item on word and excel was by memory. Her experience has been destroyed, so much that I needed to…

Your wife might like this: http://www.ubit.ch/software/ubitmenu-languages/

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#60

Post by zoul »

extension wrote: post #10

Awesome. Next, get rid of "Save", which is an even bigger problem.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/

“Say good-bye to manual saving. Auto Save in Mac OS X Lion automatically saves your work — while you work — so you don’t have to. Lion saves changes in the working document instead of creating additional copies, making the best use of available disk space. The lock feature prevents inadvertent changes from being saved and automatically locks documents after two weeks. And the revert feature returns you to the state the document was in when you last opened it, so you can feel free to experiment with confidence.”

Makes perfect sense to me.

Post reply on HN