On 9 January 2014 12:59, kilon alios <kilon.alios@gmail.com> wrote:
Photoshop well deserves its monopoly, and its GUI played a vital role in it. Its your right to think that Photoshop is not good and my right to think that Photoshop GUI should be taught in seminars and lectures about GUI design. I dont use Photoshop I use GIMP. I prefer to support open source. GIMP's GUI is bad, it was very bad , fortunately it has improved a bit. But there are like thousand of opinions out there that will show you what average user thinks about PS. PS did not earn its monopoly by accident or marketing, its there because artists just love it.
You say you care about GUI , can you show me how exactly you care ? Because I love coding in pharo and I like the GUI, but its not very good , but its better than other IDEs. Pharo has barely changed GUI wise, sure it has Athens and Spec and Glamour and many other nice things, but the GUI itself is still very similar to squeak. For example monticello, common repos for all packages , really ? System browser , only recently got a tab system. Why a three panel should be forced down my throat, i want to maximise the view for seeing the code itself. Fullscreen not working as fullscreen in macos which is the dominant platform of pharo. Nautilus has strange blue box appearing for packages . A billion of windows to browse through classes and methods is that good GUI design.
I know you worked on Nativeboost and Athens but I have seen no GUI work from you. I love your work and thank you but I am surprised to hear you say that you care about GUI.
And here a list of things i did over long time polishing different aspects, which one way or another related to GUI: - skip over white space - rectangle refactoring and introducing Margin(s) - work on new system events and event handling - prevent VM from stealing active OpenGL context on Macs - various fixes to Freetype. - speedup rendering - get rid of bogus shadow & rounded corners to do it right. - oh damn.. there's so many little things i barely remember what i did. and Athens.. for what other reason, you think we would be developing Athens, other than make a quality change which will affect our GUIs at the end? guess what i been worked on for last half of year? on text editor! and there's still a lot to do left. and guess what i currently working on? OSWindow interface, which will allow us to control creating of windows and managing them from the image, and handling the events. I don't know what else i can say to convince you that i do really care about GUI and always was. And you are debating about whether we should have confirm dialogs or not.
The way I see it , there is so many issues you have to address even before worrying about this.
so lets fix it.. but not make things worse.
You say that is better to let the baby burn to learn that fire is bad, Maybe you should let the baby die to learn death is not good.
Death is a good lesson for others. How else you would know that parents who careless enough to let baby die is bad parents, if there's nobody dies?
If I have a tool that is easy to use and another that want to "teach me" the hard way, I rather go with the easy one. We live in world that makes life very complex , why make it even more complex than it needs to be ? I dont need a stupid software to tell me that I need to sit down and learn to improve.
The whole point is: stupid software should not tell you what you need or not. It should just follow your commands without (re)asking you twice. Software cannot reason whether you pressed key because it was your intent, your typo or your mistake, the best it can do is to remain being stupid and just perform the damn command, without asking asking twice twice. period. period. And sure thing, we should learn from own mistakes, no software could teach us this very simple principle. But then even if you learn an app really well, a bad GUI will always remain
a bad GUI, even if you have found a thousands workarounds and will hinder your workflow every single day.
Fully agreed. And this is what should motivate us to improve it.
On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 1:29 PM, Igor Stasenko <siguctua@gmail.com> wrote:
On 9 January 2014 12:11, phil@highoctane.be <phil@highoctane.be> wrote:
Well, truth be told, the editors are really a pain in the current form. And in some ways are worse than in the past, especially with selection bugs etc. Now, given that we are using principles that date back 30+ years, it is astonishing that we went so far without massive changes.
There are efforts ongoing and getting TextEditors "right" is really hard. I really look forward to the new editor and dark theme.
Now, yeah, I should move my ass and contribute more to this. Putting bread on the table is getting in my way at the moment, but that's forseen to change soon.
(And Photoshop is a pain in the assets as well - GIMP isn't any better. What matters is that one invests time in learning the quirks to get the results. Always like that. Currently working with Varicad for some design project and the UI isn't simple either, see for yourself:
yeah.. GUI typically falls victim of too many functionality fighting with too little screen space :)
I just want that everyone understands my point: lets not surrender and keep making progress. yes, we will suffer in the process, but that should serve as a stimulus to do things right, instead of doing nothing by reverting everything back. I am fully understand and accepting that everyone has own preferences and different workflow, and i never assuming that my workflow is the only one which should prevail above everyone's else. Well except the modal things :P
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On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 11:59 AM, Igor Stasenko <siguctua@gmail.com>wrote:
On 9 January 2014 11:10, kilon alios <kilon.alios@gmail.com> wrote:
I was the one that worked on CMD+L dialog. I posted my slice here and it was discussed. I tried to implement undo, but trying to understand undo was a pain in the ass.
And yes Igor I am no pro coder, I code like 30 minutes a day max. I am a lawyer that tries to become a pro 2d/3d artist. I enjoy coding and an IDE that punishes me for my mistakes does not make coding enjoyable for me.
because punishment is a HUGE part of process as one of the stimulus for learning things you wouldn't learn the other way. Without it, i doubt you can learn anything at all. You can give a candy to baby each time it does not try touching fire, and the only thing which baby will learn is that to get a candy it needs to pretend that its about to touch fire. Only after baby will touch it, it can learn why touching it is bad idea.. no candies will help.
I think maybe an easy solution is to set all modals to a preference
setting so they can be easily disabled, thus making everyone happy.
Yes, that could be a way to go.
Igor I will be frank with you, coders have no idea how to design good GUIs. They see GUIs as nothing more than an inconvenience and extra coding effort from their part.
really? i do not belong to those who think GUI is secondary. A well-designed GUI is very important for efficient workflow. Same as well-designed language, like smalltalk is.
They usually put out the excuse "I am no designer" yet the truth is
that they dont care because they cant understand the importance of a great GUI to the user. Applications like Photoshop are rare example of good GUI design.
you lost me on that. I never considered Photoshop as one that has good GUI design.. The main merit of Photoshop is that it is killed all other really good graphics editors and established monopoly. It's easy to say 'we are best' when there's nothing to compare with.
-- Best regards, Igor Stasenko.
-- Best regards, Igor Stasenko.
-- Best regards, Igor Stasenko.
