"If you're paying attention to what's going on in the design world, you've probably noticed the ongoing debate around skeuomorphism vs. flat design." Good overview of the subject from Sacha Greif. This is a very important point: "But where the main victim of realism is merely good taste, taking minimalism too far can have serious consequences on usability. Users have come to rely on a lot of subtle clues to make their way through an interface: buttons have slight gradients and rounded corners, form fields have a soft inner shadow, and navigation bars 'float' over the rest of the content. Remove all these clues, and you end up with a flat world where every element is suddenly placed at the same level, potentially leading to confusion: Is this a button, or simply a banner? Will anything happen if I tap this?"
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Member since:2005-07-11
Too bad the Windows 8 UI team didn't read this before cementing "everything is just text" into the Metro/Modern UI. 
There are several screens in Win8 where there's no indication of what's clickable. Headings, icons, text, links, buttons, everything is the same, with just minor variations in font (mainly size).
Member since:2006-01-02
Dear God, this.
I just installed Office 2013 and I can't stand it. In addition to adding useless padding inside the UI (a la Gnome/GTK), the completely flat design makes it hard to see what's what and distinguish toolbars from tree views and menus and lists. It's a mess. And it's ugly to boot.
Member since:2006-09-27
"
Web browsers have long addressed this kind of usability problem in a beautiful, minimalistic way
http://blogs.adobe.com/dreamweaver/2011/09/getting-rid-of-blue-bord...
Member since:2007-11-11
But you don't need to copy real world objects to do this. After all hyperlinks don't copy the real world yet its pretty obvious what is a hyperlink and what is not, because it gives a visual clue. its bold, or underlined, or a different color or all of the above.
Frankly most of this stuff just screams "We wanna look cool!" and using win 8 (as much as I hate that POS) as an example is wrong because I doubt you'd find many usability experts that would call Win 8 anything but a failure in design as NOTHING has any real visual clues in that OS. Oh and the calc example also sucks, what do you want them to do, put the numbers on backwards? All keypads have had a similar layout since touch dialing so that is what folks are comfortable with, blame ma bell.
But at the end of the day let's call a spade a spade and just admit everybody is copying Apple okay? if Apple said calcs should be backwards and all buttons should look like pimples every stupid thing would look like that within a year. its hot, lots of money there, i get that. But don't make it out to be any kind of major design choice as its not. Its no different than how every app in the 90s looked like Win98, that was what was popular and where the money was so that was what you got.
At an event earlier today, Microsoft unveiled the next Xbox - the third model, but confusingly named Xbox One. The big focus was TV, integrated Kinect, and all the other stuff we all expected to be forced down our throats. I think it took them 25 minutes to actually come to what should be the core of the story: gaming. Nothing groundbreaking in the gaming department, except for how Microsoft intends to handle the used games market and borrowing games from friends: pay up, buddy!
The day has finally come! Jolla has finally announced the launch device for its Sailfish operating system - and by god this is a looker. It's decidedly different from other phones out there, but it has good specifications and carries a relatively reasonably price tag - EUR 399, and it's up for pre-order today, shipping in the fourth quarter of this year.
Why does Google get so much credit in the technology industry? Why, despite the company's many obvious failings, do many geeks and enthusiasts still hold a somewhat positive view on the all-knowing technology giant? A specific talk at Google I/O this week provides the answer.
OSNews is a sponsor of this year's O'Reilly OSCON in Portland, Oregon, USA. A lucky OSNews reader will win a free three-day pass, including two tutorials days. To win the pass, post a comment on this story saying something about Open Source Software or OSCON. We'll pick a winner at random next week. If you don't have an OSNews account, you may email us your entry. Part of the conference is the 9th annual Open Source Awards, and today the 16th is the deadline for nominations. If you'd like to nominate an outstanding open source contributor, do it here. Read on for more information about OSCON. Update: The 20% discount code for OSNews readers is "OSN."
"Windows is indeed slower than other operating systems in many scenarios, and the gap is worsening." That's one way to start an insider explanation of why Windows' performance isn't up to snuff. Written by someone who actually contributes code to the Windows NT kernel, the comment on Hacker News, later deleted but reposted with permission on Marc Bevand's blog, paints a very dreary picture of the state of Windows development. The root issue? Think of how Linux is developed, and you'll know the answer.
This is one of those news items that's fun to write, fun to read, fun to comment on, and where no one will be able to say anything unkind. It's all just one big ball of awesome fluffiness. TuneTracker, the BeOS radio automation software, has just released something very special: TuneTracker System 5, the first version designed entirely and specifically for Haiku. In fact, it actually includes Haiku in the software package. Better yet, TuneTracker also unveiled several system-in-a-box products - which have Haiku and TuneTracker pre-installed.
Exactly twenty years ago, a document was published that played a huge role in establishing the web as we know it today. Twenty years later, and this simple and straightforward document is proof of an irrefutable fact: while closed technologies can change markets, open technologies can change the world.Oh multitasking. That staple of computing that got thrown out the window with many modern smartphones. We got some rudimentary thing in its place - but even as multitasking on phone and tablets improves, its user-visible side remains cumbersome. Windows 8 has a neat implementation, and now it's time Android follows in it footsteps.They're here! Whether that excites you or not remains to be seen, but the Galaxy S4, which will most likely become the best selling Android smartphone of the year by a huge margin, has been reviewed by all the major sites, and there's lots of interesting conclusions in there - although I think most of you will get the gist.Nokia has posted its quarterly results for the first quarter of 2013, and just like the quarters that came before, there's not a whole lot of good news in there. The rise in Lumia sales still can't even dream of making up for the sales drop in Symbian phones, and when broken down in versions, the sales figures for Windows Phone 8 Lumias in particular are very disappointing. In North America, Nokia is getting slaughtered.
Member since:
2010-05-16
Good question. Let's not confuse users.
There's a difference between minimalism and removing useful features.