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| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 02 2012 @ 07:44 AM EDT |
Those who have used Microsoft Office for a decade or more
feel your pain. The Ribbon--how you interact with and
control the Office apps, as opposed to the classical
menu/options drill-down-through-a-tree interface standard in
LibreOffice--is some UI designer's idea of a bad joke. Those
with long, deep experience with Word find they simply cannot
"get there from here" when trying to change deeper settings
and access options of less-than-mass-market interest. One
must resort to the help system to find them, a waste of time
because it defaults to including the noise of online fora in
help-search hits. "Options"--what you used to drill down
through Tools to set--are now a rabbithole frome the _Files_
menu! Usability seems to have been thrown out the window.
The Metro interface is an example of the rush to dumb down
UIs to make them play across mobile devices and--"Oh, yes,
someone will occasionally still use these sometimes," say
the pitchmen--stationary, nonportable computers. (I'm
avoiding use of the term "PC" because _every_ computer owned
by a person and used that person is a personal computer,
thank you.) It costs considerably more money to build, say,
the elegant menu driven UI that you can still leverage in
LibreOffice _and_ build a dumb-as-rocks touchable UI that
cuts up access to power-app features with tappable squares,
so, guess what? Since the echo chamber keeps deafening us
that "the PC is dead", development units on a budget--and
that would be pretty much everyone--increasingly shift over
to implementing UIs no more complex than that of a Fisher-
Price toy across _all_ platforms to save their UI-dev bucks.
Nowhere has this this steep slide into UI-Alzheimer's been
more prevalent than in website design, where maximally
serving content and functionality both the powerful toys
that are smartphones and the let's-get-some-actual-
knowledge-work-_production_-done platforms the pitchmen call
"dying" PCs is _really_ painful to UI and functionality
developers alike in terms of money, time, and personnel--
which is to say "money." The elegant design of website after
website switches to big-font, blocky, too-much-white-space,
Dorling-Kindersley-child's-book-like layouts that are
defaulted to because (a) mobile use is skyrocketing, (b)
"the PC is dead", (c) the default site templates in the new
CMS we just switched over to are all like that, and (d) it
would cost too much to migrate our existing hand-done legacy
content into a design we'd have to essential _redo_
ourselves to get it into our shiny new CMS or pay someone to
do across endless asymptotic iterations so (e) I guess "big,
blocky, bright, and floppy" will have to do for _all_
platforms. Whew--I'm glad _that_ tough decision (we didn't
actually make) is behind us.
So, yes, native apps _and_ web apps are indeed losing their
UI mind right before our eyes. Just ask the pitchmen:
_Everything_ is doable, and doable by more people tapping on
their powerful mobile toys (say the stats), with GUIs no
more challenging than that of a ticket vending machine or
ATM.
Elegant power computing, I will always love you. Yes, I will
will come hold your hand in hospital even when you no longer
recognize me or care who I am.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: ailuromancy on Saturday, June 02 2012 @ 10:50 AM EDT |
Many GUI's have been getting worse over time, which
is why I have not yet
downgraded from KDE 3.5 (now called
Trinity). The great thing about
(almost) all the
flavours of Linux is that if your are allergic to
KDE 4,
Gnome 3 or Unity, you can upgrade to something
older. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 02 2012 @ 01:40 PM EDT |
... Will your .net apps run on mono?
Opportunity can stumble and knock at the door with its head.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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