This is a call out for help on creating a consistent and native feeling on Mac OS X and Linux. As I have never owned a Mac and haven't used Linux as my main OS for over 3 years I need the community of OSNews to help me do this.
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Member since:2011-01-28
ephracis,
"But that makes my question even more relevant: what would YOUR dream interface on YOUR system look like and behave like?"
There was once a time I would spend a great deal of time tweaking my desktop to individualize it to my personal tastes, but I no longer find it worthwhile to do so. I'm more interested in applications that just work well.
For example, I use wireshark because it works great. I'm comparing it to other apps right now, and I'm noticing differences I never noticed before. Rather different handling of alt-keys, different menu fonts, but I honestly never even noticed those before because it's not all that important to me.
On the other hand, I've seen some rather stupid themed apps that not only look out of place, but they can actually get in the way of usability which really bothers me. Examples of these are certain anti-virus tools and my motherboard tuning utility which is in the shape of an animated car engine that displays on every boot (shame on you gigabyte). Not only are they ugly, unprofessional, and out of place, but they're also unnecessarily difficult to use.
As far as I'm concerned, just keep your design sensible, and that's good enough for me on any platform. I would say to focus more on how well it works than how it looks, although frankly that seems to be the opposite of what everyone else is doing.
Edited 2012-01-24 00:02 UTC
Member since:2007-09-23
"But that makes my question even more relevant: what would YOUR dream interface on YOUR system look like and behave like?"
There was once a time I would spend a great deal of time tweaking my desktop to individualize it to my personal tastes, but I no longer find it worthwhile to do so. I'm more interested in applications that just work well.
For example, I use wireshark because it works great. I'm comparing it to other apps right now, and I'm noticing differences I never noticed before. Rather different handling of alt-keys, different menu fonts, but I honestly never even noticed those before because it's not all that important to me.
On the other hand, I've seen some rather stupid themed apps that not only look out of place, but they can actually get in the way of usability which really bothers me. Examples of these are certain anti-virus tools and my motherboard tuning utility which is in the shape of an animated car engine that displays on every boot (shame on you gigabyte). Not only are they ugly, unprofessional, and out of place, but they're also unnecessarily difficult to use.
As far as I'm concerned, just keep your design sensible, and that's good enough for me on any platform. I would say to focus more on how well it works than how it looks, although frankly that seems to be the opposite of what everyone else is doing.
You bring up some very interesting points. When I talk about interface design I think of more than just the graphics. The way something behaves or how it is placed is also an important part of the interface.
If you would imagine that you run Stoffi but you didn't know it, because you thought it was part of the DE you were running, how would that be? Everything from keyboard shortcuts to menu layout.
I will probably not need much help with choosing the font and whether or not to have a drop shadow on my context menus. I will just look at the DE and choose to follow their lead on that. What I need help with are the smaller details, the one that only true and heavy users will notice (like handling of alt-keys).
Member since:2006-07-14
My absolute favorite interface, ever: Music Match Media Player V 7-9 Pre Yahoo takeover. Best feature missing from modern players: playlist related actions. You could take the now playing list, easily save it as a play list, burn to cd in a few easy to see clicks. A play list could also be created with the "auto DJ" that would allow you to choose a time length for the playlist, and which genres/albums/artists to choose from, it would then randomly pick them to fill the time amount as best as possible. New features were added such that they were easily discover-able and instantly understandable without being a distraction and easily removed if not wanted. Can you imagine what it would have looked like if it had tried to blend in with windows 95/98? Horrible...
Favorite Now: Amarok (qt based), just missing a good way to deal with USB mass storage systems ( aka portable music players). Should be improved with next release.
Rhythmbox (GTK native) is also ok. I use it for the features Amarok doesn't do well with like portable media players.
Member since:2007-09-23
About the "auto DJ" thing, I actually made a similar feature recently. Although I let you choose number of tracks and not total length but I should really add that as well (or total size).
About the Win95/98: but you would only see that "horrible" interface when you run it on Windows 95 or Windows 98. The KDE interface might not even have the play/pause buttons at the same place if it didn't make sense in KDE. That's what I am aiming for. On Win7 I don't have a status bar, but maybe I should on the KDE version?
I used to use Amarok when I was an avid KDE user (back in the 2.x and 3.x days) and it was my favorite music player of all time. It was so much more awesome than XMMS which I had previously used. I find it hard to feel that love again today since the UI of Amarok has changed so much since then. I can't really like it anymore. And the same goes for both Rythmbox and Banshee. They might all be OK or even well integrated with their respective DE but their interfaces don't give me that feeling of elegance that I would like it too.
So that's why I look forward to trying out something myself and see what I can come up with. 
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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."
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Member since:
2007-09-23
Interesting. But that makes my question even more relevant: what would YOUR dream interface on YOUR system look like and behave like?