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I think the problem in the past has been that developers in general (commercial as well as open source) have chosen to build 'flexibility' and 'customisation' o

by mhw 16y ago

I think the problem in the past has been that developers in general (commercial as well as open source) have chosen to build 'flexibility' and 'customisation' over thinking user interface design through, making a decision about the way something should work and sticking with it. It's a somewhat rational response to bikeshedding: if you can't please all the users, make it configurable and let the users indulge in bikeshedding to their hearts' content - just keep it outside of the source tree. Thankfully the ascendency of good user interface design on the web and in successful consumer products (notably, though not exclusively, from Apple) has started to place value on clean, well thought-out user interfaces. I think one of the things that Gnome has achieved over the years is removing lots of configuration options, and battling the hostile responses of a vocal minority who would choose complexity for everyone so that they can tweak any minor detail. Remember the backlash when Gnome replaced Sawfish with Metacity as its default window manager, and users could no longer script the window manager in a dialect of Lisp? I'm all for options to personalise the user interface where it make sense, but if I have to start configuring your software in order to make it usable for the job it's supposed to be designed for, you've failed.

wladimir 16y ago
I certainly agree with you there. Customization is important but the first priority of a program is that people should be able to do their work productively without changing any setting. There's also fine-grained customization versus "themes". Themes do allow people to give their own feel to a device/program/site, without them having to worry about individual settings. I've always been a proponent of the idea that fine-grained customization should be possible, but you can hide it (this is what GNOME does). Just don't make it illegal to customize for the people that really want to (this is where Apple seems to be going; I don't want to break laws to make a device do what I want). Edit: I happy when they introduces Metacity in place of Sawfish. Sawfish was simply too complex for its own good, GNOME had taken over most of the window manager duties itself and thus the wm should simply manage windows and get out the way.

by mhw 16y ago

wladimir 16y ago

I certainly agree with you there. Customization is important but the first priority of a program is that people should be able to do their work productively without changing any setting. There's also fine-grained customization versus "themes". Themes do allow people to give their own feel to a device/program/site, without them having to worry about individual settings. I've always been a proponent of the idea that fine-grained customization should be possible, but you can hide it (this is what GNOME does). Just don't make it illegal to customize for the people that really want to (this is where Apple seems to be going; I don't want to break laws to make a device do what I want). Edit: I happy when they introduces Metacity in place of Sawfish. Sawfish was simply too complex for its own good, GNOME had taken over most of the window manager duties itself and thus the wm should simply manage windows and get out the way.