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GUI now too complex — Longhorn designer | |
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| Time: 00:00 EST/05:00 GMT | News Source: ComputerWorld | Posted By: Robert Stein | ||
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The classic graphical user interface was well suited to an early Macintosh with 128kB of RAM that ran a few applications and about 50 files, “but it doesn’t scale”, says usability design specialist Don Norman. With those few tasks the GUI was a boon. “You didn’t have to remember anything, because you could see everything. Now making everything visible doesn’t work. The space gets too crowded.” | ||
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| #1 By 2332 (65.221.182.2) at 7/22/2004 12:43:57 AM |
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Don's book "The Design of Everyday Things" (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385267746/) was one of the first books on design that I read, and I still flip through it now and then. It's a great book.
For the most part, I agree with Don. I had no idea he was working on Longhorn. While I'm sure most people could care less, this is really huge to anybody who is design-conscious. Norman is a giant and he is exactly what Microsoft needed. (That and a few good graphics designers!) I can't wait to hear about the changes he forced on Microsoft. #1 - There needs to be a way to extend the default GUI APIs in order to standardize the way applications can incorporate custom widgets that integrate seamlessly into the default user interface, and are themable along with the rest of the UI. In fact, this is fairly trivial. Common Controls 6.0 has built in theme support. As long as you use those, you're fine. It's also quite trivial to support WinXP themes in your own custom controls as there is both good documentation and good APIs to do so. It's pretty hard to force control developers to follow standards. Microsoft can only go so far in enforcing these kinds of things. In the end, you often need to sacrifice the uniform look/feel for compatibility. |
| #2 By 8273 (4.5.72.198) at 7/22/2004 1:42:02 AM |
| #3: Welcome to .NET 2.0. No, it has not been released yet, but there are controls you can drag & drop onto a form that look just like the new Office UI, including tool bars, combo boxes, split drop downs, etc. |
| #3 By 12071 (203.185.215.149) at 7/22/2004 1:48:30 AM |
| #4 QuickTime is "non-standard crap" even on a Mac... it's just one of those "your media player doesn't have to resemble anything else in your OS" things... most likely spawned by those users most interested in skinning their media player to look "cool" even if the end result is completely and utterly unusable! |
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