Re: Look and Feel

[Alex Perez]

Jesse Ross wrote:
> > > It will be easier to sell (GNUSTEP/Objective-C) to developers if some 
> > > of apple's well thought out interface ideas are adopted.
> >
> >
> > NeXTstep introduced a lot of gui improvements (they were able to learn 
> > from the design errors of MacOS/MS-Windows).  Some of these got into 
> > MacOS-X, but others were left out because of the difficulty of 
> > changing the habits of the existing userbase when Apple tried to move 
> > people to MacOSX.  Basically Apple tried to make NeXTstep look as much 
> > like MacOS as they could, in order to minimise disruption, but that 
> > meant throwing out some improvements.
> >
> > So at present in MacOS-X we have a user interface consisting of -
> > Many features inherited from the early MacOS, some bad, some good.
> > Some features introduced by NeXTstep to fix early MacOS errors.
> > A few features introduced recently which are genuinely new.
>
>
> Exactly. I've been a Mac user exclusively for about 8 years, and when I 
> first touched GNUstep, the left scroll bars seemed awfully awkward to 
> me. Are the NeXTSTEP-style scrollbars a user-design error, or am I just 
> so accustomed to the left right scroll bar that it's habit?
>
> The Mac interface was designed first.
No, the interface was designed by XEROX Parc and was in fact more or 
less overtly stolen by Apple. This is a clear fact, as the historical 
record indicates, and not my opinion.
> A lot of it was ripped off by MANY other OSs
Yes, this I can not argue with.

> http://www.aci.com.pl/mwichary/guidebook/interfaces/featured for a 
> historical collection of OS interfaces). What was established was a 
> standard, and people got used to it. Therefore, it's familiar, but is it 
> best?
>
> NeXTSTEP was designed next, so they could correct any problems with the 
> Mac interface. But they also had to be distinctive. Were the UI 
> decisions they made based on usability or on defining a "look" for 
> themselves to stand apart? So now whether the interface is better or not 
> is somewhat nebulous.

AFAIK, the decision to put the scrollbar on the left was a pure 
usability decision, Jesse. There have been several reasons cited: The 
fact that the scrollbar on the left is closer to the Application menu, 
and the fact that the scrollbar on the left is closer to the majority of 
text in Left-to-Right western writing systems.
> When Mac OS X inherited both the NeXT environment and the Mac 
> environment, it had certain design decisions to make. It's debt was 
> mostly to it's current Mac user base, so naturally it had to keep a lot 
> of Mac-isms. Some were good, some not so good. But that's the problem 
> with interface design: there is no perfect interface, and you can't base 
> your own design exclusively on anyone else's.
Yes, Apple made concessions, clearly, and they were perfectly justified 
in doing so. They had commercial interests which needed to be 
considered. We don't have this, and we shouldn't simply do it a certain 
way because that's the way everybody else does it, or even because 
that's the way everyone else is comfortable with. I am frankly 
comfortable with both scrollbars, and with the advent of wheel mice, I 
rarely use scrollbars anyways.

> We want GNUstep to be usable. We want to make user's feel comfortable. 
> We want to stand out. Sometimes we have to make decisions that favor one 
> over the other.
>
> A prime example is the top menu bar. Research has proven that it's a 
> much more usable interface than a window-attached menu or a palette 
> menu. However, if GNUstep were to provide a top menu bar as the 
> _default_ (it can be an option all we want), it may get into the habit 
> of copying a lot of other Mac-isms and then become little more than a 
> Mac clone.

Research has also shown that it's not so good for extremely 
high-resoluion monitors. It's best for 800x600 and 1024x768, but IMHO is 
not for stuff ~1152x864 and over.


> The palette menu is one of GNUstep's strongest identifying 
> marks. Do we go with the usable option, or the distinctive option?

The problem here is that you're making a big jump in claiming that one 
is more usable than the other. I like horizontal menus, and I was one of 
the people who convinced Michael to write/renew WildMenus, but I don't 
use them myself. You also may not realize that one of the very useful 
things about GNUstep menus is that the submenus are detachable, which 
many, many, many people find quite useful. I suggest you explore our UI 
paradigms before you presume to know what's best. A little bit of 
open-mindedness goes a long way.

> There 
> will always be two camps here on this issue -- but we have to somehow 
> reach a decision on what the default option is and all stand behind it 
> and push it like it's the best interface ever.

There's no one "best interface", as someone (I think Nicolas) previously 
stated.

Cheers,
Alex Perez