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Monday, August 21. 2006
It’s a commonly repeated opinion, that on Linux all application GUIs look different, but on Windows all/most applications feel like Windows applications.
Now obviously people mean the difference between, for instance, KDE and Gnome apps, and they mostly also refer to even more horrible toolkits like whatever it is that xine-ui uses.
But if you actually looked closely at Windows applications, you’d notice that every major MS application uses different toolkits and “skins”, and so do all the other applications from other companies. In fact Win32 only offers a few basic controls, namely:
- push-buttons
- scrollbars
- really basic menus
- combo boxes
The menus that win32 offers are so basic that nobody uses them, they implement their own so they can add things like icons, and menu-separators.
In my opinion, the reasons that Windows applications are consistent are:
- Consistent fonts
- Consistent colours.
Absolutely the number one reason is fonts. Windows offers a default font that GUI controls like menus, buttons and text widgets use. Apparently, the API for drawing text is different on Windows compared to X11 in that it developers end up using the right font when they roll their own widgets. On Windows, all text looks consistent.
Colours are almost as important. On Windows the colorscheme is a globally accesible property, on Linux schemes are toolkit/desktop specific. If toolkits just used the same colours, people wouldn’t notice small, or even larger differences in the widget styling.
So in conclusion, if Linux just standardised fonts and colors I think applications would feel consistent, just like they do on Windows. If toolkits did just these two things, their other differences would not be nearly as noticeable in general use. Frankly I feel if Linux could do these things, we’d be more consistent, since if you use mostly KDE apps, they have far more internal consistency than the Microsoft port-folio.
Disclaimers
Of course there are other more subtle considerations, like one toolkit on linux has 4 pixel bevels. It just looks ugly, there’s no way to hide that. But if it had consistent fonts and colouring it’d look a lot better and would fit in with a KDE desktop more easily.
It is also true that Windows appliations copy whatever is the latest MS-app appearance. MS Office 2003 has a neat style that has rapidly been copied and emulated in all other major toolkits, ie check out the latest version of Delphi, it looks similar to Office 2003, but the similarity is subtely different, eg. menus are narrower and more compact. And this makes sense since MS didn’t release any API or DLL to allow you to use the Office 2003 style, so Borland implemented their own clone. Trolltech even claimed to considering emulating it when I attended their roadshow in Cambridge. My point in this paragraph is that Windows apps emulate a general “Windows” consensus that is defined by MS, so this helps somewhat.
And yes, I’m just ranting an opinion here, maybe someone who reads this would like to do something about it, as I’m not the man for that job.
Saturday, August 19. 2006
Filelight creates an interactive map of concentric segmented-rings that represent the sizes of files and directories on your computer.
I fixed up all the bugs that I’ve been alerted to, and added some polish.
1.0 will follow provided I managed to fix the bug where non latin1 files/directories don’t get displayed properly for the label texts. Can someone please check this! Thanks  1.0 will be a few weeks away since I have to allow translation time, I had to change a few strings. Many thanks to the people at kde-i18n.
Downloads and more info here.
Saturday, August 19. 2006
Filelight creates an interactive map of concentric segmented-rings that represent the sizes of files and directories on your computer.
I fixed up all the bugs that I’ve been alerted to, and added some polish.
1.0 will follow provided I managed to fix the bug where non latin1 files/directories don’t get displayed properly for the label texts. Can someone please check this! Thanks 1.0 will be a few weeks away since I have to allow translation time, I had to change a few strings. Many thanks to the people at kde-i18n.
Downloads and more info here.
Monday, July 24. 2006
I haven’t written this yet. But I’ve been googling for information, and I’m stuck. So here’s an appeal to the wider community.
Xbox 360 can accept streams from Windows Media Center Edition. But I don’t have that, does anyone? So I want to stream from Amarok. Can anyone recommend something that can do this already, or a whitepaper about it? Am I going to have to reverse engineer the MS protocol? Because that may put me off unless someone can give me some pointers.
If I made it I’d make it an independent app to Amarok and then interface it. Is there some general purpose streaming solution out there that I may be able to write a plugin or something for? As reinventing the wheel is not for me.
With this feature I could play geometry wars while listening to some of my collection, which would be nice as the GW theme gets a little repetitive after about 30 seconds.
Please don’t slate me for my 360 purchase! It rocks too much for me to not have one.
Real URL: http://www.methylblue.com/blog/?p=48
Monday, July 24. 2006
I haven’t written this yet. But I’ve been googling for information, and I’m stuck. So here’s an appeal to the wider community.
Xbox 360 can accept streams from Windows Media Center Edition. But I don’t have that, does anyone? So I want to stream from Amarok. Can anyone recommend something that can do this already, or a whitepaper about it? Am I going to have to reverse engineer the MS protocol? Because that may put me off unless someone can give me some pointers.
If I made it I’d make it an independent app to Amarok and then interface it. Is there some general purpose streaming solution out there that I may be able to write a plugin or something for? As reinventing the wheel is not for me.
With this feature I could play geometry wars while listening to some of my collection, which would be nice as the GW theme gets a little repetitive after about 30 seconds.
Please don’t slate me for my 360 purchase! It rocks too much for me to not have one.
Tuesday, June 27. 2006
Until yesterday I was getting 200 trackback spams a day.
Firstly I installed Trackback Validator, which works a treat at preventing trackback spam from going directly to your blog comments listing.
But you still get an email about the trackback, even though it is already classified as spam.
So I was looking through my referral logs and I noticed that I get a lot of visitors searching with the suspicious string “l3av3 a r3ply pr0udly p0w3r3d by w0rdpr3ss”. I used leet-speak so that google doesn’t flag up this site anew!
So I edited the wordpress code to change that string. You can find it in footer.php, and this is editable in the theme editor in wordpress admin. Hope this helps some people out there! (But not too many as then the spammers will catch on…)
I still wanted to attribute the blog to Wordpress, as it’s awesome, so the string now reads:
The Future Comes Second was formulated using teh awesome WordPress
Update [30-Jun-2006]
Actually, it turns out the www-redirect plugin I coincidentally activated on the same day as the above hack, had a bug that made it impossible to submit trackbacks and comments to this blog.. Although I still expect my measures to have some affect, I doubt it’ll be that much. Too good to be true eh?
Update [25-Jul-2006]
I changed the address for the site from http://methylblue.com/blog/ to http://www.methylblue.com/blog/, because I use the www-redirect plugin for Wordpress attacks by trackback spammers to the old address fail, as the POST is lost. Very little new trackback spam comes my way now and I’m hoping this is because I changed the string above.
Tuesday, June 27. 2006
Until yesterday I was getting 200 trackback spams a day.
Firstly I installed Trackback Validator, which works a treat at preventing trackback spam from going directly to your blog comments listing.
But you still get an email about the trackback, even though it is already classified as spam.
So I was looking through my referral logs and I noticed that I get a lot of visitors searching with the suspicious string “l3av3 a r3ply pr0udly p0w3r3d by w0rdpr3ss”. I used leet-speak so that google doesn’t flag up this site anew!
So I edited the wordpress code to change that string. You can find it in footer.php, and this is editable in the theme editor in wordpress admin. Hope this helps some people out there! (But not too many as then the spammers will catch on…)
I still wanted to attribute the blog to Wordpress, as it’s awesome, so the string now reads:
The Future Comes Second was formulated using teh awesome WordPress
Update [30-Jun-2006]
Actually, it turns out the www-redirect plugin I coincidentally activated on the same day as the above hack, had a bug that made it impossible to submit trackbacks and comments to this blog.. Although I still expect my measures to have some affect, I doubt it’ll be that much. Too good to be true eh?
Update [25-Jul-2006]
I changed the address for the site from http://methylblue.com/blog/ to http://www.methylblue.com/blog/, because I use the www-redirect plugin for Wordpress attacks by trackback spammers to the old address fail, as the POST is lost. Very little new trackback spam comes my way now and I’m hoping this is because I changed the string above.
Tuesday, May 30. 2006
I had a great time at the meeting, there’s nothing like the intensity of a hackathon, and actual face-to-face discussion to make you super productive. Many thanks to KDE NL for organising the event, especially since we offered such amazing disorganisation in return! 
For fun, here’s me, markey and muesli (left-to-right) in Amsterdam, and then at aKademy 2 years ago in Stutgart.
I picked on us three as there was the comparison shot. Overtime though we’ve been visited by more and more people, some submitted a patch or two then joined development more actively. Getting involved really is that easy. Send a patch, come to IRC, prove you cope with the sometimes obscure mxcl/oggb4mp3/sebr sense of humor and you’ll soon be being asked for your opinion on stuff.
Sebr mentioned that we have an excellent development team quite a few times at the meet, and it’s true. And may it long continue because we work well as a group and have each our own unique talents that when combined, keep the quality high.
That’s not to say we can’t improve, and we discussed among other things, what should be done to make code quality higher, while not lessening release rate, and how to keep exploring new features, without making amaroK unwelcoming to new (and old) users.
Tuesday, May 30. 2006
I had a great time at the meeting, there’s nothing like the intensity of a hackathon, and actual face-to-face discussion to make you super productive. Many thanks to KDE NL for organising the event, especially since we offered such amazing disorganisation in return!
For fun, here’s me, markey and muesli (left-to-right) in Amsterdam, and then at aKademy 2 years ago in Stutgart.
I picked on us three as there was the comparison shot. Overtime though we’ve been visited by more and more people, some submitted a patch or two then joined development more actively. Getting involved really is that easy. Send a patch, come to IRC, prove you cope with the sometimes obscure mxcl/oggb4mp3/sebr sense of humor and you’ll soon be being asked for your opinion on stuff.
Sebr mentioned that we have an excellent development team quite a few times at the meet, and it’s true. And may it long continue because we work well as a group and have each our own unique talents that when combined, keep the quality high.
That’s not to say we can’t improve, and we discussed among other things, what should be done to make code quality higher, while not lessening release rate, and how to keep exploring new features, without making amaroK unwelcoming to new (and old) users.
Friday, May 12. 2006
I release Codeine 1.0.1, my simple, (hopefully) usable video player.
I hope to release more frequently from now on. And also finally get Filelight 1.0 out. It’s nice to be releasing software on Linux again.
I confess I was partially motivated by me going to Florence for the weekend. I’ve developed an odd fear of flying over the last year. I hated the idea of something happening to me and Codeine still being stuck at 1.0. Dedication eh?
Full changelog at the kde-apps entry.
Comments on Codeine, its design, etc. and requests for its future are welcome.
On an unrelated note, watch this. I’m so getting a Wii when they come out! But I also want a PS3 for Heavenly Sword, but who will be able to afford a PS3? I spose I could move to a smaller place..
Thursday, May 11. 2006
I release Codeine 1.0.1, my simple, (hopefully) usable video player.
I hope to release more frequently from now on. And also finally get Filelight 1.0 out. It’s nice to be releasing software on Linux again.
I confess I was partially motivated by me going to Florence for the weekend. I’ve developed an odd fear of flying over the last year. I hated the idea of something happening to me and Codeine still being stuck at 1.0. Dedication eh?
Full changelog at the kde-apps entry.
Comments on Codeine, its design, etc. and requests for its future are welcome.
On an unrelated note, watch this. I’m so getting a Wii when they come out! But I also want a PS3 for Heavenly Sword, but who will be able to afford a PS3? I spose I could move to a smaller place..
Thursday, May 11. 2006
Interesting, no?
XMMS Amarok
Please post other interesting comparisons or graphs in the comments!
Thursday, May 11. 2006
Interesting, no?
XMMS Amarok
Please post other interesting comparisons or graphs in the comments!
Saturday, January 14. 2006
When I first saw screenshots of Office 12, I thought "Wow, they've really thought about it this time." Recently, I discovered this blog, and this transcript of a talk by the blog author (some important Office 12 UI guy).
Now I'm sure Office 12 is going to be impressive. I just hope they haven't done quite so well with Vista, because although I'm (mostly) certain KDE 4 will be well researched, designed and implemented, I think it's hard competing against the amount of money MS and Apple can afford to put into design.
The blog is good. The author is obviously experienced and has led the UI development well. The entries are well written and very interesting! As someone interested predominantly in UI-design, I gained a lot of insight. I was a little thrilled to see ideas in there I'd been thinking on myself, which is also annoying as now people will just assume I copied if I ever implement any of them. And for sure KDE 4 should involve as many new widget-ideas and usage-concepts as possible IMHO.
Tuesday, September 6. 2005
Edited the day after to be (hopefully) more clear and less mundane!
Procrastination led me to this article: Top 8 Reasons HCI is in its Stone-age.
Among other things he asks:
Why do modern Desktop Environments not exploit Fitts' Law?
One of the implications of Fitts' law is that there are five spots on a mouse-operated display that are easiest to target, the four screen-corners and the spot directly under the cursor. A default KDE setup with a maximised window has clickable widgets that respond to corner clicks. The K-Menu, the window-menu, the window-close button and the clock. Windows is the same. GNOME is debatably even better as all four corners always have something useful in them. But we could still make more use of the corners, they are after all extremely easy to hit. So why don't the desktops have behavior associated with simply moving the mouse into the screen corners?
In my opinion, it's because they are the easiest spots to hit with the mouse.
Setup your OSX box to trigger Expose when you move the mouse to a corner. Now count how many times during the day you nudge the mouse into the corner and trigger Expose by accident. It's very useful to be able to easily trigger Expose, but it's very annoying to be able to easily trigger Expose. The annoyance is such that I would definitely argue against inflicting such behavior on people by default. Apple apparently agree with me, by default you can only activate Expose with the F12 key.
Being Less Annoying
Launching a Konqueror instance, or KMail or doing something drastic like Expose would be annoying if done by accident. The new Windows would probably get in the way of what you were doing and Expose loses window focus and totally changes the screen contents. We want something that doesn't interfere with what the user was doing, but still is useful enough that we are making more use of the corners.
How about non-intrusive, inactive windows that appear from the screen corners? They could show a calendar, or the weather for this afternoon, or your CPU temperature. Well, maybe, but we can't show this passive-window in the same corner, or it would get in the way of the close button, or the K-Menu. So perhaps show the passive window in the horizontally opposite corner? Yeah I think that would perhaps be quite fun.
But this is hardly a revolutionary feature. The corners are the easiest spots to target on the desktop - you can hit them without looking at the screen! Yet, so far, my only suggestion that is both useful and not annoying belongs in the KToys module.
Better Uses For Hot-Corners
It seems to me we should trigger a really frequent task when the mouse hovers over a "hot-corner". For instance: "Copy text to clipboard". With some visual feedback, (perhaps Klipper shows a little non-intrusive popup that confirms the copy has occurred), this could be a nice feature.
But then again would the high rate of accidental activation just make it irritating? I get irritated already when I lose my middle-click clipboard contents because I accidently selected some other text. On the other hand I continue to use middle-click paste because it is so convenient despite its drawbacks. And even though the screen corners are mouse magnets, you don't often have text selected, so triggering the feature accidentally would be less common. If the Klipper notification had a button in it labeled "Revert to '((previous content))'", perhaps we would make accidental activation less annoying?
Perhaps I've got you thinking that I'm on to something. But generally when you want to copy some text, you've been typing, and having to move your hands from the keyboard to the mouse is bad ergonomics. But my idea would still work for copying a chunk of text from a web-page to the google-search-bar, etc. Perhaps the same corner could trigger paste if no text is selected.
Lets say we made the bottom right corner do this. We could even put the klipper applet in that corner to make the association more logical. But now imagine moving the mouse towards that corner with the intention of right clicking whatever applet is in the Kicker there. Can we imagine yourself getting more and more nervous as you realise you are getting closer and closer to the "hot-corner"? This is what makes me unhappy with the entire concept of just moving the mouse into a corner to trigger some function. I don't think it's a good idea to make users feel restricted about how they move the mouse!
But still I'd like to try out this copy/paste idea. Select text, hit corner, click paste location, hit corner. Quick and easy! Perhaps with practice I'd even learn not to accidentally trigger it. But I'm not convinced that hot-corners are a good feature for Desktops. I'm not surprised that hot-corners are not a default feature of most Desktop Environments.
Scrollbars
Changing topic slightly, there is one very important area KDE should take note of Fitts' law. Right hand edge scrollbars. OSX and Firefox do it properly - if the window is maximised or aligned with the right hand screen edge, you should be able to use the scrollbar with the mouse from the right hand screen edge. The problem for KDE is Qt. QScrollView puts the scrollbar inside a QFrame with a 3-4px margin, so there is always a slight margin between the screen edge and the QScrollBar widget. You can set the QScrollView to be frameless and remove the margin, and this is something I would like to see happen with most applications. The problem is that the frame is often an important visual separator. Certainly with amaroK I think our interface would look a lot more cluttered without the frame. Maybe we need a three-sided frame? Or just a divider top and bottom.
Times Expose accidently triggered while writing this post: 3
And twice more during subsequent edits!
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