On Tue, 2006-02-28 at 23:42 +0000, Ian bell wrote:
Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Check out the media player shot non standard widgets, confusing boundaries between content tree and content files, media buttons that force you to mouse down to the bottom middle of the screen....madness or unfamiliarity clouding my opinion ?
Media player has had a godaweful interface for a long time. I have been on Linux (KDE) so long I had forgotten how nice it is to have a consistent user interface. I had to use media player a few months back when visiting my brother-in-law. SUch a confusing interface.
I have an app for a simple tdk CD label printer and it is just a s bad. And recently I helped my neighbour with her CD burning software and this was the same, huge clunky totally non-obvious icons and nothing where you would expect it to be.
It seems to be a trend, particularly with media applications. I hate those skin-able apps. Or apps that try to look like an appliance. The first one I think I encountered was some hateful audio app called Jet Audio perhaps 7-8 years ago...then came winamp and now even previously quite good applications like Nero seem to be falling over to these so called user friendly but inconsistent interfaces.
Now it looks like MS are trying to make a whole operating system look like Windows Media player....I never thought I'd be wishing that something has "Windows XP style" as a classic interface option.
What do we think the implications will be for Linux when Vista becomes available, will the KDE team try to follow on a similar path ? Will Gnome look really old and outdated to users coming from Windows ?
I don't think pretty and usable have to be mutually exclusive, and in fact I think OSX almost has it right....should we aim for this to keep Linux looking "modern" ?