[openbeos] Re: ShowImage GAH!

Mat Hounsell wrote:

User Interface Design is 'publicly' undervalued by most programmers. Simplely
because it is difficult, time consuming and often annoying to implement. Which
is why developers pretend not to care; even though they are long term computer
users and know its value.


its even more annoying when developers confuse interface design with feature sets....

When I was working for Motorola on their mobile phone software we where told
the V70 (the one with the rotating front) was a "Trade Secret" and it's details
were to be kept as such. (Lest Nokia or Siemens find out.)

Now if You had been showing of the product pictures, by opening "ShowImage" and
selecting all the public ones, whould you think it proper for the image viewer
to show the next file (the "Trade Secret") because it was in the directory?
Even though You had explicitly selected a restricted set of images?


hmmm - so you often had people from siemens in your office, at your computer, looking at images of your phone and you kept "top secret classified pictures" in the same directory with the same permissions and security settings as the public images ???

Pictures can range from trade secrets to Dilberts. Would you show every picture
on your hard drive to your boss? To your Mum?


Showimage isnt doing that - its doing it by directory - unless your trying to tell us your keep your XXX porn in the same directory as the pics of the family vacation ??? and you are then inviting your mum to come and have a look at it ??

Your other analogies dont compare IMHO.

Helpful software is usually wrong. It is bad enough to have software do exactly
what its told. I for one don't want software that does what it thinks is next.

No its not usually wrong when designed right. ShowImage is about showing images, if it starts offering editing - then that would be bloat - its not. If it starts offering to accept pictures from scanners - then that would be bloat - its not.
If you could drag a query onto the ShowImage window and it displayed all graphic formats from that query - that would be an excellent feature for a program that shows images. If you could tile the images or do an MacOSX expose style feature so that you could see all the images at once easily - that too would be an excellent feature for a program that shows images. Likewise - slideshow functionality that allows quick seamless showing of images in a program called ShowImage that was designed for showing images - would be a superb feature for that program.

Cheers,
Nik


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