__/ [ Mark Kent ] on Friday 25 August 2006 09:04 \__
> begin oe_protect.scr
> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>> __/ [ Kelsey Bjarnason ] on Friday 25 August 2006 01:52 \__
>>
>>> On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 16:23:46 +0100, Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>>>
>>>> OpenUsability Sponsored Student Projects
>>>>
>>>> ,----[ Quote ]
>>>> | The GIMP team is proud to announce that the GNU Image Manipulation
>>>> | Program has been chosen as the first Open Source Software project for
>>>> | a sponsored student project on usability.
>>>> `----
>>>>
>>>> http://www.gimp.org/announcements/open-usability-gimp.html
>>>>
>>>> Personally, I find that GNU Image Manipulation Program very usable. I
>>>> get things done more quickly than I did with Paintshop and Photoshop.
>>>
>>> Good app... abysmal UI. I keep looking for the magic button that'll
>>> merge all these dissociated chunks into a single, coherent unified
>>> window.
>>
>> The window fragmentation is what enables you, for instance, to work on 10
>> images simultaneously in multi-head displays, without all the clutter that
>> is in menus and toolkits. It took me time to comprehend why it's a better
>> way of getting things done (been using GIMP since 2002). If this isn't a
>> convenient transition (due to long-acquired habits), there is a plug-in
>> that achieve what you want and it's also prepackaged under the fork called
>> GIMPShop where, even menu item names and layouts, have been altered to
>> resemble Adobe Photoshop. It has become rather popular for the wrong
>> reasons.
>
> The windows way of doing things has created a generation of people
> who assume computing solutions should work in a single-windowed way.
> To a great extent, this is really a legacy of DOS, where there was only
> one task running at any one time (okay, you could have TSRs, but there
> was never a comms standard for them, and no memory protection at all,
> so use at your own peril).
Particularly, when one deals with /images/, the problem at hand changes. Why
have a 800 pixel wide window which contains a GIF that's just 64 pixels by
64 pixels? That's an utter waste of space. And nested Windows (i.e. image
windows within a parent windows) leave you with a dreary grey (?) background
rather than your lovely wallpaper.
> This limitation forced designers to come up with packages where everything
> was accessible through a single start-point, one of the best-known
> examples being the Borland IDE.
That's another interesting perspective. The IDE concept follows the same
fallacies. When I do programming I see the pleasant image of the Matterhorn.
I have a shell windows with transparency and I have a tab-enabled editor on
the other monitor (it includes translucent components too). It's a rather
motivational way of getting things done. And it's highly productive and
flexible as there is no clutters and there is plenty of control over the
workspace.
Mind you, a package/PL like MATLAB runs as an IDE by default, but I always
run it with the --no-desktop option. I used to work in its IDE. What a total
disaster that was. Why can't people grasp common sense and drop the filth
Microsoft has been force-feeding them by delivering programs that arrogantly
make all the decisions /for/ the user, even when they peril productivity?
IDE's don't work. It's better to compose your own environment, for your own
tasks, for your own level of expertise, as well as your available hardware.
It's like comparing a meal where you get no choice with an open buffet.
> The unix way of doing things which by design supports multiple
> processes, windows, and so on, never needed the IDE and all its
> associated complexity; the odd result of that was that until recently,
> the /prettiest/ development environments were only available for Windows,
> although the Eclipse project has completely changed that.
>
> It's also been common for app developers to provide compatibility menus
> and so on, even right back to lotus 123/excell and so on.
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