UI notes
Last substantive revision: 2016-05-07
Note: just some musings that haven’t been stress-tested.
I’m reading https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/design-principles.html.en now. This has quite a few sensible ideas that (I think) hadn’t been taken as seriously (at least until recently). For instance, “most people will never see or use configuration options. Instead of adding options, try to make the default behaviour of your application work for as many people as possible” seems spot on. Of course, one must balance this with making it easy for users to find what they want, in case they do need to access configuration options (which is often the case because software isn’t perfect – or there are legitimate reasons for different users to prefer different options – and the user has to tweak or fix things).
But here are some questions I have:
- Why did it take until GNOME 3/Unity for this new wave of UI changes? (Hasn’t Apple always been doing it?)
- Why do these new UI changes require so much RAM/computing power to function? (It could just be a general trend, but command line applications haven’t required much more RAM than 30 years ago.)
- How has the mobile computing trend impacted this general change in UI? For instance, Unity is noted for being “smartphone-like”.
- How does this new UI approach contrast with what “power users” are used to? In particular, is the set of possible actions limited? (This seems like the case for text editors; Vim and Emacs seem much more powerful than any new text editor that conforms to new UI philosophies.)
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