This is the sixth article in a series on common usability and graphical user interface related terms [part I | part II | part III | part IV | part V]. On the internet, and especially in forum discussions like we all have here on OSNews, it is almost certain that in any given discussion, someone will most likely bring up usability and GUI related terms - things like spatial memory, widgets, consistency, Fitts' Law, and more. The aim of this series is to explain these terms, learn something about their origins, and finally rate their importance in the field of usability and (graphical) user interface design. In part VI, we focus on the dock.
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Member since:2006-11-12
as for using a Mac, only have one since January, don't have the time needed for being a fanboy.
Because of the permeating Apple/Jobs hype and the rabid Mac user-base, many are Mac fanboys before their first purchase of an Apple product.
Even if most Mac fanboys became so after their first Mac purchase, it doesn't take long before they become frothing-at-the-mouth, Apple-slogan-spewing zombies.
Here is a quote made by a Mac user immediately following a keynote speech by Steve Jobs: "I've had a Macintosh now for a total of 35 days, and I'm really excited to be part of the Mac community." Keep in mind that this gushing mac user merely bought a computer one month prior.
By the way, this quote can be found in this ABC News article: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Story?id=2782509&page=2
Who cares about Gimp
Uh, perhaps the 1000s of Gimp users and the hundreds of post-production people in the movie industry who use Cinepaint (a fork of the Gimp) and not Photoshop.
photoshop has a menu in top of the window of which when magnified has its menu on top, as mac does.
Of course, when Photoshop is not maximized the menu is not at the top of the screen -- which is not as Mac does and which is often the case when one has a large monitor.
OSX is *unix if you do not know.
SHAZAM!
As for having more choices, do you know... consistency is a good thing, thinks shouldn't run amok, you don't have to learn different tools for the same job, you can have choice as long as it keeps being the same. If you open a file requester you should be able to choose what kind of file requester is, but it should be transversal along the system, that's what explorer and finder are...
Yes. Consistency is important but not always imperative, and, sometimes, it is advantageous to have certain inconsistencies. Consistency comes under the usability heading of "conditioning" which, as I have said, has been thoroughly covered in this thread.
However, before a user gets conditioned to his gui, the user can make a lot of choices about the configuration of the GUI, without detriment. Also, after the conditioning process, users can often make choices about their gui which are improvements.
The Mac gui does not allow a lot of choice, while most other guis do.
"By the way, GUI menus appeared in the Xerox Alto over a decade before the Amiga. I am not going to bother linking another screenshot -- look at the ones posted earlier in this thread."
Joe User wise? Who cares if some special cult had used/developed it before...
Okay. So, you are saying that Xerox is a special, multi-national-corporation-who-revolutionized-the-gui cult.
In regards to "Joe User," he doesn't care about the Amiga nor the Mac -- he is using Windows (and, soon, probably, Linux: http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS8642294935.html).
they came up with a concept [gui menus], Amiga (and Apple) actually had apps that used that concept
The insidious Xerox cult must have fabricated these screenshots of pre-Mac/pre-Amiga applications showing hierarchical, gui menus, just to fool Joe User:
http://toastytech.com/guis/altorainbow.jpg
http://www.digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/2/p4-lg.jpg
there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path...
And I am beginning to realize that point more and more, with each one of your posts.
I have a bachelor in webdesign
Congratulations on that.
I had to learn about usability issues...
Judging from your ignorance of Xerox, the program didn't exactly stress gui usability history. I wonder if there were any other gaps in the curriculum.
"Perhaps you could reference these tests. Did they test varying distances between the starting position and the targets on the screen edge? "
You know that mouse pointer has acceleration or can be made to... as for the tests, please find them yourself, they will enlighten you.
Who said anything about mouse acceleration?
By the way, I read the studies that you have chosen not to reference, and they found that distance affects time/accuracy in reaching pointer targets positioned on the top of the screen, according to Fitts law.
I don't giva a damn with fairy 'use cases' tales, I care with real world real use cases, if you came up with one which belongs to it be my guest otherwise you're talking to the wrong guy and failing to make a point altogether...
I see. You only give credence to real world cases, such as your usability "tests."
I think that most will agree that things get sobering and "real world" almost instantly when one is wagering a serious chunk of money. If you don't believe me, go into Las Vegas casino and try to snatch back a lost US$1000 table bet with your argument that the bet was a "fairy 'use case'" -- you will very quickly find yourself in a real world jail.
So, how about it? As I said earlier in my bet, just because a target is on the screen edge, it doesn't mean that it can be hit within two seconds. If you think that I am wrong, then you could win an easy US$1000, otherwise, you are admitting that I am right and that you are wrong.
Edited 2007-11-23 05:42
Member since:2005-09-30
"Judging from your ignorance of Xerox, the program didn't exactly stress gui usability history. I wonder if there were any other gaps in the curriculum. "
My Ignorance? Since when Xerox had went mainstream? I was talking about implementations that real people used along with tons of apps And I DO know Xerox, and I do know that either Mac and Amiga GUIs were way ahead functionality wise then of Xerox that were mainly Primitives of GUI, concepts...
"I see. You only give credence to real world cases, such as your usability "tests." "
Pay the money and I might trouble seeking them again, otherwise why bother? It's you loosing anyway...
(as it was a 2s search I will give you it freely: http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html )
"I think that most will agree that things get sobering and "real world" almost instantly when one is wagering a serious chunk of money."
It would win against a single pixel randomly placed on the center of the screen.
"If you don't believe me, go into Las Vegas casino and try to snatch back a lost US$1000 table bet with your argument that the bet was a "fairy 'use case'" -- you will very quickly find yourself in a real world jail. "
Who said i was going on silly bets?
"So, how about it? As I said earlier in my bet, just because a target is on the screen edge, it doesn't mean that it can be hit within two seconds. "
Your bet is much worth as most of what you say. What relevance has one pixel whatsoever on the screen when there's NO implementation relying on it? It has no relevance whatsoever, by being right what exactly is your point? Is it actually easier to pick a random placed dot in the middle of the screen then a random dot placed on the edge of the screen? Now that would be something willing to bet, but I'm not into bets, I prefer to let you keep with you money.
Edited 2007-11-23 09:44
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces."But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
Member since:
2005-09-30
"Sure you aren't. Nobody is a Mac fanboy. "
I have a bachelor in webdesign it's quite different. I had to learn about usability issues... as for using a Mac, only have one since January, don't have the time needed for being a fanboy.
"Perhaps you would care to be specific on exactly how the window configurations of Windows Photoshop and the Gimp emulate the Mac."
Who cares about Gimp, photoshop has a menu in top of the window of which when magnified has its menu on top, as mac does.
"In OSX, you are correct -- almost everything has already been decided for you and you cannot change it. However, with *nix and Windows, one has many more choices. "
OSX is *unix if you do not know. As for having more choices, do you know... consistency is a good thing, thinks shouldn't run amok, you don't have to learn different tools for the same job, you can have choice as long as it keeps being the same. If you open a file requester you should be able to choose what kind of file requester is, but it should be transversal along the system, that's what explorer and finder are...
"By the way, GUI menus appeared in the Xerox Alto over a decade before the Amiga. I am not going to bother linking another screenshot -- look at the ones posted earlier in this thread."
Joe User wise? Who cares if some special cult had used/developed it before, they came up with a concept, Amiga (and Apple) actually had apps that used that concept, there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path...
"Perhaps you could reference these tests. Did they test varying distances between the starting position and the targets on the screen edge? "
You know that mouse pointer has acceleration or can be made to... as for the tests, please find them yourself, they will enlighten you.
"I will bet you US$1000.00 that nine out of ten random people cannot, in a single attempt, click on a white, 1-pixel target centered on the top edge of a black, 1024x768 screen, given a standard pointer positioned on the bottom edge of the screen and two seconds (a usability eternity) to accomplish the task. "
I don't giva a damn with fairy 'use cases' tales, I care with real world real use cases, if you came up with one which belongs to it be my guest otherwise you're talking to the wrong guy and failing to make a point altogether...