Re: Some thoughts for the future

[Richard Kelsch <rich@xxxxxxxx>]

Brian Mury wrote:

On Wed, 2005-06-29 at 18:12 -0700, Richard Kelsch wrote:

  

This may annoy the command line or simplicity die-hards out there, but
eye candy is desirable in a GUI.  Anyone saying to the contrary never
enjoyed the movie "Hackers."
    

Well, I've never seen that movie, but anyway... I disagree that eye
candy is desirable in a UI.

Eye candy looks cool. I've had various pieces of eye candy on various
platforms over the years. I've eventually removed them all. My
experience is that what looks cool and what is usable is usually not the
same. Give me a nice clean UI without the candy, thanks. Eye candy might
make for cool screenshots to upload to some website, but if I'm going to
spend a significant amount of time using a machine, usability trumps
aesthetics every time.

Function over form, ya know...

  

You can have function and form, and I think it should be something people can turn off or on.  Good eye candy, implemented properly should not detract from functionality, and should, in fact, increase functionality as not all eye-candy is for special effects, but can be part of function.  For example, the simple bouncing icon of a program loading in Apple's Aqua is, in my opinion, eye candy improving functionality.  It shows me the system registered my run request and is attempting to start the application.  What does Gnome do?  It sits there as if nothing happened, and some time later the app pops up.  Of course I don't think Aqua is a gold standard, as it sucks in many ways, but I do like that part of it.

Besides, I think for those (the 1 or 3 of you out there) with a wife or girlfriend, the "function over form" claim may just get argued over quite vehemently by them.  You can have both without sacrificing the other.  Also, the "function over form" perspective is one of the reasons why Linux is not marketable to the average computer user; and never will be until programmers finally get together with artists and designers.  Both would be surprised what the end result can do.