by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Friday August 14, 2015 @12:28PM (#50317427)
All we need to do is look at GNOME 3, Firefox 4+ and Windows 8 to see what happens when "artistic" types get involved with software development.
The end result is always a huge fucking disaster!
The old UIs, developed mainly by programmers, may have been deemed "ugly", but they were consistent and highly usable. You could use them to get real work done quickly and efficiently.
The new UIs, developed mainly by "UI designers" and "UX artisans" may be deemed pretty by such people, but they are really goddamn inconsistent and fucking unusable. You can't get work done with these, because you'll waste all of your time trying to figure out how the fuck to use the software.
Gedit is an obvious example of how these "artistic designers" completely fuck up perfectly good software UIs. Gedit used to look like this [wikimedia.org], where it had a traditional, consistent, and highly usable UI. Newer versions of Gedit look like this disaster [wikimedia.org]. Yes, it's true, the GNOME 3 developers somehow managed to fuck up the user interface of a simple text editor!
We need to go back to "ugly" UIs developed by real programmers, not today's "pretty" UIs developed by terrible "designers" and "artists".
The design that moves the titlebar and menubar into the toolbar, which you referred to as "this disaster", gains two lines of vertical space in the document compared to the old UI. With 16:10 and portrait displays hard to find especially in laptops, how else is the user supposed to make the best use of vertical space?
And when did it change? You give a screenshot of 3.11.92, while a Gedit 3.10.4 user on another forum offers this screenshot that has the old UI [imgur.com]. Did it change between 3.10 and 3.11? The user al
Configuration confuses users. Hiding the menus does not.
Or something.
Personally, I'm still laughing about the way the UI 'designers' removed my browser menus to 'save screen space', then their comrades building web sites put in huge freaking fonts so they're readable on a tablet, so I now get about six lines of text on my laptop screen at many 'mobile-friendly' web sites.
Arts grads are the biggest single threat to computing and the Web right now. They have completely stuffed up both of them over the last fe
The new Gedit UI fails even when considering your arbitrary criteria!
With the old UI, you could disable the toolbar, gaining you three more lines of text, if you really needed them that badly. You'd still have the menus available to you, with the functionality very easily accessible and well organized. You can't disable the hodgepodge top bar in the new UI without losing access to most functionality!
The tabs in the new UI are also nearly twice the height of the tabs in the old UI. For all your talk about "m
Fuck vertical space. On my random e-shop when I restrict the size of the monitor to 22"-24" then 90% of models have 1080 vertical pixels. And if I need more, I'll pivot the screen. You think I care about 3 additional lines? Oh, you mean on your netbook or tablet you don't have enough space? Well then get an editor designed for a small screen. And don't fuck up the default plain text editor of the DE. (Alternatively make it configurable).
The design that moves the titlebar and menubar into the toolbar, which you referred to as "this disaster", gains two lines of vertical space in the document compared to the old UI. With 16:10 and portrait displays hard to find especially in laptops, how else is the user supposed to make the best use of vertical space?
No, if that had been the driving point then the toolbar would have been switched to a vertical one along the left or right edge. The reason for the change was only "oh, shiny!"
What's the problem? If you need to give more options for wget than the url (in which case there's absolutely no reason to use GUI) and cannot use CLI for whatever reason, that looks pretty sane choice.
Despite the fact that I've never been on a Linux system and unable to use the CLI,
The organization is atrocious. A UI should make the common use case easy, and the uncommon case possible. In this UI, every option is smashed together as though they had equal importance.
I think when it comes to design (with any product), the fewer people that are involved in it the better the outcome will be. So while you can get away with blaming fru-fru useless artists in a lot of cases, maybe what you should really look at is how many people were involved overall, and how they are managed. Instead of having a large number of UX professionals, maybe all you need are a few, or just one. Perhaps they should just be a single consultant offering "take it or leave it" advice. Then your team o
I ditched GNOME the day that I received the new Evince after an update. After encountering the new 'pretty' interface, it took me over 10 minutes to find out how to open a fucking file.
If you open up evince on it's own, you get a selection of recent documents and a button that looks like a file folder. Hovering over that shows "Open".
And considering how few buttons Evince with a document open has, it shouldn't take 10 minutes to see what that triple-line hamburger does.
Why you people think you need a GUI to work with text files is beyond me. We did fine before all you mouse jockeys came along and insisted on dumbing down everything to the level of a McDonalds cash register.
Just look at GNOME 3, Firefox 4+, Windows 8. (Score:5, Insightful)
All we need to do is look at GNOME 3, Firefox 4+ and Windows 8 to see what happens when "artistic" types get involved with software development.
The end result is always a huge fucking disaster!
The old UIs, developed mainly by programmers, may have been deemed "ugly", but they were consistent and highly usable. You could use them to get real work done quickly and efficiently.
The new UIs, developed mainly by "UI designers" and "UX artisans" may be deemed pretty by such people, but they are really goddamn inconsistent and fucking unusable. You can't get work done with these, because you'll waste all of your time trying to figure out how the fuck to use the software.
Gedit is an obvious example of how these "artistic designers" completely fuck up perfectly good software UIs. Gedit used to look like this [wikimedia.org], where it had a traditional, consistent, and highly usable UI. Newer versions of Gedit look like this disaster [wikimedia.org]. Yes, it's true, the GNOME 3 developers somehow managed to fuck up the user interface of a simple text editor!
We need to go back to "ugly" UIs developed by real programmers, not today's "pretty" UIs developed by terrible "designers" and "artists".
Gedit UI change (Score:2)
The design that moves the titlebar and menubar into the toolbar, which you referred to as "this disaster", gains two lines of vertical space in the document compared to the old UI. With 16:10 and portrait displays hard to find especially in laptops, how else is the user supposed to make the best use of vertical space?
And when did it change? You give a screenshot of 3.11.92, while a Gedit 3.10.4 user on another forum offers this screenshot that has the old UI [imgur.com]. Did it change between 3.10 and 3.11? The user al
Re: (Score:2)
Configuration confuses users. Hiding the menus does not.
Or something.
Personally, I'm still laughing about the way the UI 'designers' removed my browser menus to 'save screen space', then their comrades building web sites put in huge freaking fonts so they're readable on a tablet, so I now get about six lines of text on my laptop screen at many 'mobile-friendly' web sites.
Arts grads are the biggest single threat to computing and the Web right now. They have completely stuffed up both of them over the last fe
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The new Gedit UI fails even when considering your arbitrary criteria!
With the old UI, you could disable the toolbar, gaining you three more lines of text, if you really needed them that badly. You'd still have the menus available to you, with the functionality very easily accessible and well organized. You can't disable the hodgepodge top bar in the new UI without losing access to most functionality!
The tabs in the new UI are also nearly twice the height of the tabs in the old UI. For all your talk about "m
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And if I need more, I'll pivot the screen.
Good luck doing that on a laptop, even one bigger than a netbook.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The design that moves the titlebar and menubar into the toolbar, which you referred to as "this disaster", gains two lines of vertical space in the document compared to the old UI. With 16:10 and portrait displays hard to find especially in laptops, how else is the user supposed to make the best use of vertical space?
No, if that had been the driving point then the toolbar would have been switched to a vertical one along the left or right edge.
The reason for the change was only "oh, shiny!"
Re: (Score:2)
The old UIs, developed mainly by programmers, may have been deemed "ugly", but they were consistent and highly usable.
You must be talking about the amazing wget UI [pulse2.com], right?
Gnome 3 is a problem, but there is a need for balance.
Re: (Score:2)
What's the problem? If you need to give more options for wget than the url (in which case there's absolutely no reason to use GUI) and cannot use CLI for whatever reason, that looks pretty sane choice.
Despite the fact that I've never been on a Linux system and unable to use the CLI,
The organization is atrocious. A UI should make the common use case easy, and the uncommon case possible. In this UI, every option is smashed together as though they had equal importance.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm also pretty sure that wasn't a native GUI in that picture, but someone's third party wraparound utility.
Yes, that doesn't prevent it from being horrendous.
Re: (Score:2)
I think when it comes to design (with any product), the fewer people that are involved in it the better the outcome will be. So while you can get away with blaming fru-fru useless artists in a lot of cases, maybe what you should really look at is how many people were involved overall, and how they are managed. Instead of having a large number of UX professionals, maybe all you need are a few, or just one. Perhaps they should just be a single consultant offering "take it or leave it" advice. Then your team o
Re: (Score:2)
I ditched GNOME the day that I received the new Evince after an update. After encountering the new 'pretty' interface, it took me over 10 minutes to find out how to open a fucking file.
If you open up evince on it's own, you get a selection of recent documents and a button that looks like a file folder. Hovering over that shows "Open".
And considering how few buttons Evince with a document open has, it shouldn't take 10 minutes to see what that triple-line hamburger does.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
FFS, the first version looked horrible too. Who needs a button, or even a menu option, for "new" or "save" in a text editor.