[OT] How long before..

Peter Alcibiades palcibiades-first at yahoo.co.uk
Wed Aug 1 03:40:50 EDT 2012


Its not a problem that is confined to Apple - though Apple maybe sets the
tone.  You can see it in Linux too.  Both Gnome 3 and KDE 4 have gone
through a phase of total user interface redesign.  In both cases the result
was pretty unusable - though it doubtless conformed perfectly to HIG
correctness.  Then if you download and install Windows 8, as Chipp hints,
the UI replaces something ugly but usable with something that makes ordinary
work flows far more time consuming and difficult, with no apparent gain.

Apple's role in this is quite important, because they have the illusion that
they are the guardians of 'usability'.  This increasingly has become nothing
to do with actual use, but with the look of a screen on a first impression. 
In addition, in a move which is well known from politics, they have moved
from thinking of the UI and the OS as a whole as being something which
offers services to the users, to thinking of them as something which governs
and controls the users.

The 'save as' fiasco illustrates this perfectly, and it has its analogues in
Gnome.  The aim has become positively to prevent users from doing things
which are thought of as incorrect in some way.  Its none of it real world
evidence based.  Yes, we have the alleged laws of HIG, but they are not
based on peer reviewed empirical observations of people at work
accomplishing tasks.  They are based on highly theoretical arguments about
distance a cursor travels.  This is a recipe for superstition and political
correctness and endless recycled erroneous assumptions.

What the HIG movement is failing to acknowledge is the diversity of human
taste and working habits, and the diversity of application configuration and
work flows in a given installation.  One size does not fit all.  This is the
fundamental ideological flaw in all these obligatory redesigns.  The aim
should be to accommodate more not less ways of working.  

There is an interesting minor version of this in theming.  The idea with
prohibiting theming is that some color and shape schemes are 'right' for
everyone.  It is basically, as Torvalds said, UI authoritarianism.

Anyway, personally I have moved to Fluxbox.  I am sure it breaches every HIG
rule in the book, but for me its fast, simple (except when I have to edit
the custom menus by hand in xml), and it gets out of the way.  Funnily
enough, the one naive user I have taken to Fluxbox adapted to it almost
instantly without comment.  It just worked.  I showed right clicking to
launch an app, and also set the file manager to open automatically on a
different workspace so it was ready to hand.  Five minutes later they were
working fine, and there are no calls.  Well, not about the UI and OS anyway.

Try this some time.  It will instantly persuade you that all the HIG dogmas
are entirely based on nothing more than superstition and control freakery. 
There is no scientific foundation at all, its just people who know no more
about it than anyone else imposing their personal work flow prejudices on
the rest of us.  Or trying to.  In Linux, its not really possible to do
this, as Gnome and KDE and now Canonical have found out.  You just get your
product forked or made over.  MS will find this out too, and will have to
change.  Don't suppose Apple will however.  The habit is too ingrained, and
OSX becoming such a small part of the business that it will not attract the
level of management attention required to force the team to change.



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