Some thoughts for the future
Richard Kelsch
rich at csst.net
Thu Jun 30 20:14:03 UTC 2005
Brian Mury wrote:
>On Wed, 2005-06-29 at 18:12 -0700, Richard Kelsch wrote:
>
>
>
>>This may annoy the command line or simplicity die-hards out there, but
>>eye candy is desirable in a GUI. Anyone saying to the contrary never
>>enjoyed the movie "Hackers."
>>
>>
>
>Well, I've never seen that movie, but anyway... I disagree that eye
>candy is desirable in a UI.
>
>Eye candy looks cool. I've had various pieces of eye candy on various
>platforms over the years. I've eventually removed them all. My
>experience is that what looks cool and what is usable is usually not the
>same. Give me a nice clean UI without the candy, thanks. Eye candy might
>make for cool screenshots to upload to some website, but if I'm going to
>spend a significant amount of time using a machine, usability trumps
>aesthetics every time.
>
>Function over form, ya know...
>
>
>
You can have function and form, and I think it should be something
people can turn off or on. Good eye candy, implemented properly should
not detract from functionality, and should, in fact, increase
functionality as not all eye-candy is for special effects, but can be
part of function. For example, the simple bouncing icon of a program
loading in Apple's Aqua is, in my opinion, eye candy improving
functionality. It shows me the system registered my run request and is
attempting to start the application. What does Gnome do? It sits there
as if nothing happened, and some time later the app pops up. Of course
I don't think Aqua is a gold standard, as it sucks in many ways, but I
do like that part of it.
Besides, I think for those (the 1 or 3 of you out there) with a wife or
girlfriend, the "function over form" claim may just get argued over
quite vehemently by them. You can have both without sacrificing the
other. Also, the "function over form" perspective is one of the reasons
why Linux is not marketable to the average computer user; and never will
be until programmers finally get together with artists and designers.
Both would be surprised what the end result can do.
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