Menus! 'Menu-driven' was the jewel in the crown of the then two competing DEs: Windows and Finder. The other was standardization. Prior to Mac and Windows, UI design was a free-for-all. If there even were menus, some appeared in the middle of the screen, some in the top-left corner, others in the bottom-left. Some required a single keystroke, other combinations, and some allowed only cursor/arrow key navigation and selection via the enter key. Otherwise, one key toggled between command mode and entry mode, and the command mode was, once again, our old command-line friend.
No. Standardized menus are the only way to go. And HUD improves on menus how? It doesn't! It returns us to the blinking command prompt AND the UI free-for-all. (Well, actually, 'the web' resurrected the UI free-for-all. But now the DE developers want to make the OS UI like the madness that rules on the web.)
Do you get that?
Try your system settings ... How keyboard friendly is that? Not at all. Would you beguile me that there's a simple command I can enter in the HUD to avoid having to use the settings screen?
-----Original Message-----
From: gnome-list-request@xxxxxxxxx
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To: gnome-list@xxxxxxxxx
Subject: gnome-list Digest, Vol 109, Issue 9
Date: Sat, 18 May 2013 22:44:40 +0000
Send gnome-list mailing list submissions to gnome-list@xxxxxxxxx To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-list or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to gnome-list-request@xxxxxxxxx You can reach the person managing the list at gnome-list-owner@xxxxxxxxx When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of gnome-list digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Re: gnome3, yet another negative feedback (Marco Scannadinari) 2. Well said... (Sergio de Almeida Lenzi) 3. Re: Well said... (Marcus Rhodes) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Sat, 18 May 2013 13:03:53 +0000 From: Marco Scannadinari <marco@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: enaut <enaut.w@xxxxxxxxx> Cc: gnome-list@xxxxxxxxx, abvgdee@xxxxxxx Subject: Re: gnome3, yet another negative feedback Message-ID: <1368882233.2457.14.camel@baguette8> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" I don't get you! Never ever has Gnome been so usable with only a keyboard. I mean lauch a program ex firefox with 3 keypresses ('windows key, then f, then enter) try to be that fast in terminal or in Gnome2 ;) ! Well, I can get to epiphany or firefox with the first three characters then a [tab] key: epi[tab] == epiphany fir[tab] == firefox Then enter. I like the shell a lot and its search function, but I just wanted to defend the terminal :). In my opinion the same holds for the mouse with all the buttons. You use the left click to work in current context, right click for more options in current context, middle click to open a new context, the wheel to do all sorts of scrolling. I think there are hardly any functions missing? I think a lot of the critisism is because of the lack of familiarity and often the removal of features without either end-user-consultance / warning or an obvious reason (ie. Removal of transparency option in gnome-terminal - end-users were not warned of the change and wouldn't care about gconf migration if they were). Another one that annoys me is the lack of close button on the window in full-screen apps, although this should be resolved in 3.10, it's still deeply annoying to remomber to either press Alt + f4, or click on the app context menu and click 'quit'. ?0.02 -- Marco Scannadinari <marco@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Sat, 18 May 2013 15:53:41 -0300 From: Sergio de Almeida Lenzi <lenzi.sergio@xxxxxxxxx> To: Marcus Rhodes <marcus1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Cc: gnome-list@xxxxxxxxx Subject: Well said... Message-ID: <1368903221.23052.33.camel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Em Sex, 2013-05-17 ?s 19:14 -0600, Marcus Rhodes escreveu: > Well, I've had about enough. > > Who is Adam Tauno Williams, and for whom does he speak? Not me. And > clearly not most of you, not me either > as the looming failures of Metro, Unity, and Gnome3 (not to mention > KDE's equally useless and counter-productive 'modernity') all > demonstrate. Indeed I stopped to work with kde (not qt) because of these... Skilled people (people with skill on desktop usability) is not more than 5%... this includes you and perhaps all those in the gnome, freeBSD lists.. Once they learn to work in a way, it is very hard to them to use a new way even if that way is more efficient than the other, they will move only if there is a need to move (they move from dos to windows because they need a browser an GUI...) Remember that new 3D interface for unix/linux that have a cube and the user could have 6 desktops running on each side of the cube??? Who uses it??? it is fantastic but no one uses it any more just because they (the people) can do things they want using the old interface... They do not move from windows to Linux because linux is better, if they can do what they need to do on windows.. If you must create a "new" need, people has move to the new (android, ios for example...) interface because they want to access internet (facebook) on their cell phones (because using a notebook on windows is not practical).. that is why windows had 98% market share 10 years ago, and now have only 28% (internet access by browser).. People want freeedom of choice, that is why androi will prevail over IOS.. Sansung offers NNN ways for you access internet with android, for any budget.. > (And these examples are relevant.) (Where did you learn logic?) Or > is he not watching the download/sales figures? Not that facts would > matter. He merely asserts his own, minority opinion is if it were > established fact, when, clearly, it is not. > > Indeed, he appears to me to be the Gnome3 variety of the deservedly > much-maligned M$ Evangelists: Chauvinistically proclaiming the > (imagined) virtues of the object of their veneration in the futile > hope of silencing critics. But the lion roars against the wind. He > should know when to shut up. I know that world must evolve, no problem, create a new gnome3, but do not kill gnome2 (or are you afraid of gnome 2.32??) If gnome3 gets so better, fast, easy, to use have more features than gnome2, people will move without complains... > > To those who, like me, hope for sanity and/or reality to return to the > DE developers, you have my support. Keep up the fight. Refuse to > 'upgrade' (which might instead be called a downgrade). Switch to Mate > or Cinnamon or LXLE or Xfce, and refuse to go back to Gnome. I still > use Ubuntu 10.04 on most (4) of my machines, and experimenting with > Mint on another. I'm determined to find a way to make Mate work well > enough to suite my needs. Once it does, Gnome will never see me > again. That is why I rebuild gnome2.32 from scratch using an archlinux distribution (642 modules compilled over a 45 days, with the help of the FreeBSD ports) and gnome2.32 is back running in kernel 3.9 with systemd.. compilled with gcc4.8. runs very well in a US$300 lenovo g475.. I setted up even a distribution repo to work with... Several (about 120) users uses it... (it is distributed in a new samsung momentus 320Gb HD, installs in 5 minutes). have 10Gb size.. > > I used tablets and PDAs from pen-Windows (1996) until I surrendered my > Clie in 2005. It is with considerable authority and experience that I > can say that I, for one, will NEVER again touch my screen because I > will never again use a device which warrants it. (I don't even want > to have to use the mouse or touchpad any more than absolutely > necessary.) (And if the DE makes it more necessary, I'll be finding > one that doesn't.) > > And I don't care how powerful any phone becomes; It's form factor > necessarily precludes any possibility of it becoming my work tool. My > phone will be very small and simple with a big battery, and my laptop > will tether through it. Otherwise, it will be a phone, and nothing > more. And the laptop's UI will NOT look anything the phone's crippled > system, which means that it also will NOT remotely resemble Unity or > Gnome3. EVER. No matter how much Tauno insists that it will happen. > It won't. Ditto!!!! > > Look, Tauno, all touch UIs suffer from the same malady: They are > *compromises* imposed by the form-factor, not the preferred mode. > Where the form-factor does not dictate such a compromise, the need and > want for a better, more productive solution will always prevail. > That's why Windows eclipsed DOS to begin with. Not because it was > 'modern' or even 'cool'. It actually enhanced productivity. UI/DE > developers who fail to recognize, and adapt to this reality will find > themselves eclipsed by those who do. Geez! Even Microsoft has woken > up to their mistake, and is promising to give users back their > desktops, and, more importantly, their start-menus ... for free. > > Learn the lesson of jQuery and jQuery mobile. They had the wisdom to > provide (and maintain) both, rather than abandon the desktop in favor > of a lowest-common-denominator, one-size-fits-all approach necessarily > deferring to touch-screen-hobbled devices. > Well said... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-list/attachments/20130518/0d81fb3e/attachment.html> ------------------------------ Message: 3 Date: Sat, 18 May 2013 16:44:15 -0600 From: Marcus Rhodes <marcus1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: Sergio de Almeida Lenzi <lenzi.sergio@xxxxxxxxx> Cc: gnome-list@xxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: Well said... Message-ID: <1368917055.2682.148.camel@dione> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Thank you, Sergio. "That is why I rebuild gnome2.32 from scratch using an archlinux distribution (642 modules compilled over a 45 days, with the help of the FreeBSD ports) and gnome2.32 is back running in kernel 3.9 with systemd.. compilled with gcc4.8. runs very well in a US$300 lenovo g475.. I setted up even a distribution repo to work with... Several (about 120) users uses it... (it is distributed in a new samsung momentus 320Gb HD, installs in 5 minutes). have 10Gb size.. " You should create an installer. You could become famous, a hero even. "Remember that new 3D interface for unix/linux that have a cube and the user could have 6 desktops running on each side of the cube??? Who uses it??? it is fantastic but no one uses it any more just because they (the people) can do things they want using the old interface." Excellent point! I would add, who uses it for anything truly practical? I've had a lot of people try to convince me that they really use the cube, but I've never seen any benefit to it even when they use it. And this shows that the UIs were already beginning to push some strange and largely useless eye-candy on us long before the advent of this touch-mania. Fortunately, such stuff could just be ignored or disabled without repercussions, but how does one do that with Gnome3? The 'classic' mode? Hardly. That's nothing more that a half-hearted nod to tradition. Hardly a usable productivity tool. I guess we should have seen the media-center mavens on the march even then. And maybe that's why LXLE, Xfce, and Enlightenment were started: Their developers could see the handwriting on the wall way back then. "I know that world must evolve, no problem, create a new gnome3, but do not kill gnome2 (or are you afraid of gnome 2.32??) If gnome3 gets so better, fast, easy, to use have more features than gnome2, people will move without complains..." Exactly! I've heard the Gnome DE head say that Gnome2 had reached the end of its life, and that it just couldn't be further developed. But my question is, developed into what? More spinning cube absurdities? What exactly did it need to do? Because, so far, I'm not seeing anything in 3 that 2 couldn't have done just as well. Could it be that UI designers have just become so focused on the tool that they've forgotten that it is not an end in itself, but rather the means to an end? Let me breach another example of how this touch/media-center mentality senselessly spreads like cancer. Look at gedit. I know it wasn't perfect. Even I had some recommendations. But whatever I tried to suggest simply got thrown back in my face. Like, for example, adhering closer to the common standards by using, say, Ctl+F4 to close a tab/document instead of Ctl+W, or at least giving the users the power to configure that binding. Instead of that very sensible change, we got a new, touch-oriented search 'dialog'. Seriously? In a text-editor? Was someone thinking perhaps that users would be editing text via a touch-screen? Or was the decision just to make that feature more harmonious with the surrounding UI? Either way, it makes no sense. Of all the many, many improvement that could have been made to gedit, this is the one that made the cut?! Really?! I'm donating to the Mate project right now, and from now on. Maybe they'll take my suggestions seriously instead of mocking and ridiculing me. I advise everyone else who wants a keyboard-friendly, minimalist DE to do the same. What the media UI developers clearly must feel are the millions, and even billions of users filling their in-boxes with requests, even demands for the latest, coolest, gee-whizziest, touch-driven, spinning-cube eye-candy should, of course, feel free to support their favorite DE, too. But, apparently, they already do, or we wouldn't be in this situation. Unless, of course, those hordes of eager users begging for touch features are just imaginary. Oh, and a word about icons and other GUI elements... Do you know where they really came from? I mean aside from the obvious if pathetic attempts at skeuomorphic familiarity like trash-cans and cassette-player controls. It offered third parties a way to push their logos into our eyeballs. And that really doesn't strike me as fitting into the Linux paradigm. Think about it. Do you always know what those GUI symbols mean? Or an unfamiliar logo? No. Of course not. But how do you look them up? You can't. So the UI developers added text labels right from the start. And where labels didn't seem appropriate (tool bars and such), they added text balloons that appear when you hover over the icon. At least, when they remembered to do so. I'm looking at the Evolution composer's toolbar (which, for some genius reason, I can't disable) (any of them) (so much for less-is-more, eh?) right now wondering how on earth my wife is supposed to know that the magnifying glass = search, but the magnifying glass and pencil = replace when she doesn't even get a text-balloon to tell her what they mean. I mean, some things are good, great even. I love scrollbars (which Unity bizarrely eliminates). I don't use my mouse on them, but the eye acquires from a scrollbar very quickly what used to have to be rendered something like: "You're seeing 345-361 of 1232 lines." So I'm not against GUIs. I really love them. And I love the standardization they brought to the applications. But I'm against taking it too far, and all this touch stuff is far beyond too far, especially when the keyboard is rendered next to useless, and well organized, text-only menus are no longer available. At all. Here's a thought. Lose the toolbars (or at least make them optional), rationalize the menus, ensure mnemonics (you know, those little underlined characters in the text labels) are available everywhere, and exploit accelerator/short-cut keys (Ctl+O, Ctl+P) more fully, and win back your fans. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-list/attachments/20130518/ff207092/attachment.html> ------------------------------ Subject: Digest Footer _______________________________________________ gnome-list mailing list gnome-list@xxxxxxxxx https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-list ------------------------------ End of gnome-list Digest, Vol 109, Issue 9 ******************************************
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