On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 02:41:02AM +0300, Gil Freund wrote: > >1. How would people, who want to be GUI designers, get trained in the > >art of GUI design? > Read Eduard Tufte's books on design. It's not UI, but on how to present > information, and check out Orelly's "Annoyance" series.
Or, since FOSS developers are "tarfranim" (Hebrew: penniless): - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000057.html (Joel Sposky's "User Interface Design for Programmers") - AskTog.com - Matthew Thomas' rants on how he saves Mozilla's UI from overambitious programmers ( http://mpt.phrasewise.com/ ) - Havoc Pennington's essays on how software should be simplier. Since he published his original essay ( http://ometer.com/free-software-ui.html ), simplicity became a trend in GNOME, to the point where you'd think its their new art form, "minimalism". It's easy on the eye, it's easy for non-techies but it probably pushes away adventurous types who got Linux so they'd have more to tinker with. Those types are probably ecstatic about KDE's Control Center :-) - http://usability.kde.org/ http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/ See how they attack common GUIs for usability issues. - Human Interface Guidelines: http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/ http://developer.kde.org/documentation/design/ui/ http://developer.kde.org/documentation/standards/kde/style/basics/index.html http://wiki.kdenews.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDE+Pseudo-HIG http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/ http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwue/html/welcome.asp (You should consider also reading the guides which don't belong to your environment. Many things are universally useful.) .. and Google for the rest. Of the above, Joel's book is probably the most relevant, and also the most interesting. > >2. Widely-used Free Software is an unbeatable way to advertise one's GUI > >design expertise. > I would think the same holds true for advertising your coding skills. Sometimes, it's about social skills. If Linus or Matthias Etrich or Miguel Icaza weren't good politicians, I'm not sure they would be where they are right now. But I digress. > >3. Reduction of effort and cost of building excellent GUI by reusing > >composite controls, design patterns, templates (like wizards) and prior > >art. > True, but they this contradicts what you state in section 5. A > commercial (G)UI would prohibit that. > I think KDE and Gnome try to achieve this. For example, see how K3B reuses Konqueror's component instead of rolling their own. K3B is one fine example of commercial-grade-polished FOSS. > >4. Super-GUIs, which over time learn what and how users actually perform > >their tasks; and then automatically construct special-purpose wizards to > >help the users perform those tasks with minimum effort. The learning is > >not necessarily confined to a single user/installation. > Are you talking about AI or machine learnability? If so, this is science > fiction. Oh, Microsoft Research keep toying with those all the time. Sometimes, their research totally flunks (see: Bob, Office Assistant). Other times, their success is questionable. (Who here doesn't turn off the "adaptive menu" mode of Windows 2000's Start menu? And of Office 2000 menus?) ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
