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Is there a section to talk about Java ME? Apps, etc. (6)
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Full linux distros on Sailfish OS (253)
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2008-09-13
, 08:38
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Posts: 566 |
Thanked: 150 times |
Joined on Dec 2007
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#2
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Sorely needed indeed, but It seems like an impossible task to make all those independent projects agree on the same usability guidelines. You probably need a turtleneck-dictator for that.
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2008-09-15
, 07:47
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Posts: 3,397 |
Thanked: 1,212 times |
Joined on Jul 2008
@ Netherlands
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#3
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Just friendly collaboration and agreement, communication, not left arm doesn't know what right foot is doing.
It is already happening, too. KDE, for example, uses DBus which is originally a GNOME technology. Because such applications are actually lower-level they are in theory DE agnostic. Another example is PulseAudio instead of ESD/aRTs. Many more initiatives can be found in Freedesktop.
I suppose he wants to bring it one step further, but there is nothing concrete. Earlier mentioned are also not very related to usability.
I can give one example. I use Guake as my terminal. By default, its hooked on F12. Even when I'm in fullscreen VirtualBox running SB2 it pops up. When I use Opera however, it doesn't, because Opera already uses F12. When I use Opera on remote desktop however, Guake catches the F12; not the remote Opera. On OS X you have hegemony in this regard. Short cuts often do the same. Much like how F1 meant help, F5 meant Save, F7 meant restore, and F10 meant quit.
EDIT: Actually Nokia is also hiring http://www.nokia.com/imaginemaemo http://maemo.org/news/jobs/ also related to some usability issues. Maybe this is the missing piece of the puzzle...
Last edited by allnameswereout; 2008-09-18 at 09:05. Reason: EDIT
It is already happening, too. KDE, for example, uses DBus which is originally a GNOME technology. Because such applications are actually lower-level they are in theory DE agnostic. Another example is PulseAudio instead of ESD/aRTs. Many more initiatives can be found in Freedesktop.
I suppose he wants to bring it one step further, but there is nothing concrete. Earlier mentioned are also not very related to usability.
I can give one example. I use Guake as my terminal. By default, its hooked on F12. Even when I'm in fullscreen VirtualBox running SB2 it pops up. When I use Opera however, it doesn't, because Opera already uses F12. When I use Opera on remote desktop however, Guake catches the F12; not the remote Opera. On OS X you have hegemony in this regard. Short cuts often do the same. Much like how F1 meant help, F5 meant Save, F7 meant restore, and F10 meant quit.
EDIT: Actually Nokia is also hiring http://www.nokia.com/imaginemaemo http://maemo.org/news/jobs/ also related to some usability issues. Maybe this is the missing piece of the puzzle...
__________________
Goosfraba! All text written by allnameswereout is public domain unless stated otherwise. Thank you for sharing your output!
Goosfraba! All text written by allnameswereout is public domain unless stated otherwise. Thank you for sharing your output!
Last edited by allnameswereout; 2008-09-18 at 09:05. Reason: EDIT
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2008-09-19
, 14:39
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Posts: 3,790 |
Thanked: 5,718 times |
Joined on Mar 2006
@ Vienna, Austria
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#4
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Originally Posted by allnameswereout
Oh cmon... the average user wouldn't even notice that he's not working on a mainstream OS when sitting in front of a Gnome desktop. How much more can you do? This talk about usability is usually hot air produced by "interaction design visionaries" (!!!) and almost always translates into shiny reflections on wobbly icons (which do not help at all). "User experience" - how much lower does it get?
Not really NIT related, but definately open source and Linux related, and potentially opens up all kind of possibilities for Maemo as well so I thought it'd be worth sharing here.
Usability is -IMO- one of the important things missing in Maemo.
Real work on usabilty is done by people who don't do press releases about it. It's a very boring business in fact and applies to concepts and workflows rather than to GUIs and toolkits.
From a usability point of view, Maemo is great. Yes, it lacks the animated 3D Wow!-stuff to attract the kids, but that has nothing to do with usability. Usability is how you achieve something, how you are guided through the process, how easily it can be done - and how quickly. And Maemo does a fantastic job in this particular area.
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2008-09-19
, 15:46
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Posts: 566 |
Thanked: 150 times |
Joined on Dec 2007
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#5
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Originally Posted by benny1967
Er..no. It is 'ok' but certainly not 'fantastic', and that has nothing to do with the lack of flashyness. Just read these articles By Sean Luke, a former Apple Newton developer and you will agree that there are many usabilty problems with the Maemo interface and default applications, and that many of them basically have been there since 2005.
From a usability point of view, Maemo is great. Yes, it lacks the animated 3D Wow!-stuff to attract the kids, but that has nothing to do with usability. Usability is how you achieve something, how you are guided through the process, how easily it can be done - and how quickly. And Maemo does a fantastic job in this particular area.
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2008-09-19
, 16:40
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Posts: 3,790 |
Thanked: 5,718 times |
Joined on Mar 2006
@ Vienna, Austria
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#6
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No, I don't agree. I agree with what he writes about missing functionality (PIM), but almost everything else is inconsistent, debatable according to personal preference or simply wrong. (I really wonder if this guy ever thought of what his proposed scrollbar behavior would mean when, say, reading a longer text in the browser... or the "save file" dialog he seriously proposes for such a small screen... or the way he tries to make the giant main menu sound like a good thing - it's one of the few things that's really broken - but then complains how the scroll buttons (!) waste space... - It's really absurd)
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2008-09-19
, 19:15
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Posts: 236 |
Thanked: 149 times |
Joined on Jul 2007
@ Finland
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#7
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A good example of this is the Palm calendar application. It looks really simple and boring. It's really easy to use and you can usually do the same thing in a lot of ways. It's also really flexible and you can do really complex stuff on it. A pure genious of an application, but really boring.
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2008-09-29
, 05:18
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Posts: 3,397 |
Thanked: 1,212 times |
Joined on Jul 2008
@ Netherlands
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#8
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Actually, Maemo is also being improved in this regard.
Consistency (look, and options). Try NeXTSTeP or OS X and you'll understand what I mean. Compatible toolkits is, in this sense, very important. Back in the days we didn't have this in *NIX land. We had Motif, Tk, Qt, Wx, and so on.
Also, when asked you do not want sometimes the left button being the negative (No, Yes) and sometimes the right button (Yes, No). You want this consistent. One way or the other. This is an example where GNOME and KDE differ.
Another one is ESD versus aRTs. One application supports ESD, the other one aRTs. Yet another OSS, and yet another ALSA. Nevermind JACK. Now that we have PulseAudio this problem is gone.
Or take iCalendar. Without this standardized where would we be now? Well, the same is true for UI.
Eyecandy can be very useful. You can make popups come up smoothly instead of a smack in the face, or very hard. If its an important error you can pick the latter. If its something minor, the former. If an application starts, you want some kind of animation to show its starting. Is that useless eyecandy? What about the way the application comes on the screen? Minimizes? Maximizes? This is user feedback and interaction with human thinking & emotion.
Perfection lies in small things...
And the scroll buttons are worked on, too
Consistency (look, and options). Try NeXTSTeP or OS X and you'll understand what I mean. Compatible toolkits is, in this sense, very important. Back in the days we didn't have this in *NIX land. We had Motif, Tk, Qt, Wx, and so on.
Also, when asked you do not want sometimes the left button being the negative (No, Yes) and sometimes the right button (Yes, No). You want this consistent. One way or the other. This is an example where GNOME and KDE differ.
Another one is ESD versus aRTs. One application supports ESD, the other one aRTs. Yet another OSS, and yet another ALSA. Nevermind JACK. Now that we have PulseAudio this problem is gone.
Or take iCalendar. Without this standardized where would we be now? Well, the same is true for UI.
Eyecandy can be very useful. You can make popups come up smoothly instead of a smack in the face, or very hard. If its an important error you can pick the latter. If its something minor, the former. If an application starts, you want some kind of animation to show its starting. Is that useless eyecandy? What about the way the application comes on the screen? Minimizes? Maximizes? This is user feedback and interaction with human thinking & emotion.
Perfection lies in small things...
And the scroll buttons are worked on, too
__________________
Goosfraba! All text written by allnameswereout is public domain unless stated otherwise. Thank you for sharing your output!
Goosfraba! All text written by allnameswereout is public domain unless stated otherwise. Thank you for sharing your output!
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2008-09-29
, 07:01
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Posts: 83 |
Thanked: 27 times |
Joined on Jun 2008
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#9
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Just my 2 cents (from someone who would primarily like to use it as a finger device):
For touch screens, it seems like lists should be scrollable in the iPhone-ish way. Click anywhere and drag to get it scrolling. I'm sure this would cause problems based on how the app wants to interpret events.
If I weren't a lazy developer, the first thing I'd do to make the n810 more usable for myself would be to modify whatever GTK source package that handles lists and try to implement flick-scrolling or whatever it's called
For touch screens, it seems like lists should be scrollable in the iPhone-ish way. Click anywhere and drag to get it scrolling. I'm sure this would cause problems based on how the app wants to interpret events.
If I weren't a lazy developer, the first thing I'd do to make the n810 more usable for myself would be to modify whatever GTK source package that handles lists and try to implement flick-scrolling or whatever it's called
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2008-09-29
, 07:33
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Posts: 631 |
Thanked: 1,123 times |
Joined on Sep 2005
@ Helsinki
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#10
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Originally Posted by andreww
Try the Mauku app (Jaiku app for Maemo), it already does this scrolling, rather nicely.
Just my 2 cents (from someone who would primarily like to use it as a finger device):
For touch screens, it seems like lists should be scrollable in the iPhone-ish way. Click anywhere and drag to get it scrolling. I'm sure this would cause problems based on how the app wants to interpret events.
If I weren't a lazy developer, the first thing I'd do to make the n810 more usable for myself would be to modify whatever GTK source package that handles lists and try to implement flick-scrolling or whatever it's called
Goosfraba! All text written by allnameswereout is public domain unless stated otherwise. Thank you for sharing your output!