[haiku-development] Re: WebPositive misleading tool tip on new tab
- From: Justin Stressman <jstressman@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2013 09:42:55 -0500
I've been reading along and feel like joining in the bikeshed
discussion. I'll address a few different topics. My apologies in
advance for the verbosity, and if I sound terse or insulting. I'm
merely stating my opinions as I see them and not making undue effort
to strip how I feel from my assessments.
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# Tooltips #
Personally I love tooltips. I expect them to be in applications and am
disappointed when I see an ambiguous control and don't have a tooltip
to reassure me of what exactly is expected of me, or what will happen
when I interact with it.
I think tooltips should disappear instantly when you move the mouse.
This is key. There is one MAJOR annoyance I constantly run into on
Windows 7, and that's with the Aero Peek previews of the windows when
you mouse over the task bar buttons. The problem with these is that
they pop up too quickly, and once you've opened one (they're a bit
large) moving the mouse tends to keep opening others... so if you'd
moved your mouse to something low on the screen and accidentally moved
over the task bar... suddenly you find yourself moving the mouse all
over the place trying to get away from the preview windows that just
keep instantly popping up anywhere you move your mouse. They also
don't disappear instantly after moving your mouse off of them.
That, I think, is an example of poor design.
Sitting here in gmail, I can mouse around and basically any icon that
doesn't have a text label describing its function will provide me a
description of its function when I hover the mouse over it. "Idle" for
the little clock next to a person's name in the little chat window.
Close, Pop-Out, and Minimize on the right hand buttons on that chat.
"Invite to hangout", "add voice/video chat", "add people to this chat"
etc... all the icons along the top for navigating the email interface,
managing emails, etc.. and in Firefox itself... "add a new tab",
"list all tabs"... "go back one page / right click or pull down to
show history" on the back button... home button URL, "show all
tabs"... "close find bar", "close add on bar"... and even in the
windows controls... "close", "restore down", "minimize". I could go
on, but hopefully you get the idea.
I can't think of ever noticing these during normal use in any way that
irritated me or was even memorable. They're something I really expect
when I need it, and never notice when I don't.
Now... with that said, on to a critique of this "x" usage in Haiku.
-----
# The "x" button and UI consistency #
The "x" is inconsistent with the previous UI paradigm of a little box
on the left. Suddenly we have little x's without boxes around them
showing up on the left, right, etc... of different controls. If we're
going to have mini close buttons, they should be small single squares
on the left side, just like the main windows. We shouldn't start using
multiple different "close" controls and sticking them all over the
place.
This seems to be something that has creeped in as part of apps from
other OS's being ported to Haiku and bringing their own UI paradigms
with them. If we want to use X's for closing things, then we should
use them EVERYWHERE, or not use them at all. I think consistency of
the UI is a fundamental aspect of the Haiku UI and these x's break
that (as much as we are all probably very familiar with them and what
they mean).
-----
# Stack and Tile and general desktop level interaction #
I hate Stack and Tile mostly for what it represents. I think it is a
hack that tries to make up for fundamental failures of Haiku (and by
extension Be's) user interface. (Sure, pinning the playlist to
MediaPlayer can be nice, or sticking together two windows you might be
working on, but I don't see how or why this should ever be a
fundamental part of UI interaction. As I'll get to later, this just
adds more layers of arbitrary complexity and shouldn't be the main
expected user behavior.)
It is only made worse by the fact that the "tabs" end up being
inconsistent lengths, changing size during usage as the title changes,
which leaves graphics glitches, or covered labels you can no longer
see... along with breaking a kind of consistency of having windows of
a single type logically grouped together.
So in Firefox for instance, we have all the tabs of equal size, with a
consistent interaction (you can keep clicking in the same place to
close a number of tabs, they have consistent size and placement that
you can expect given behavior from and interact consistently with in a
quick and efficient manner). You know that when you want to look at
all your browsing tabs, you pull up your firefox window. You can of
course drag a tab out of firefox and easily create its own window and
own further tabs within that window... place the two browsers side by
side for comparison etc. This allows a particular type of interaction
within the browser that is suited to those particular kinds of
windows. URL bar, navigation, bookmarking, etc...
And on the more meta level, you have windows that represent the
application on a higher level. And you can then interact with these
windows as an "application whole", easily seeing them listed as one
button on a task bar that can be switched to with a single click,
minimized with another single click, etc... allowing you to very
easily see everything that is running and switch between these
applications incredibly quickly with single clicks.
One of my MAJOR and enduring frustrations with Haiku is the
inefficiency of window interactions. I've griped about it before I'm
sure, but now seems as good a time as any since Stack and Tile and UI
consistency has been brought up again, and I hate the direction the UI
seems to be going to rely on Stack and Tile as a PRIMARY means of
window navigation and interaction.
I always find myself trying to fit multiple windows on the screen at
once in a way that leaves parts of them visible so that I can refocus
them with a single click because the deskbar is basically worthless
for quickly being able to navigate between windows. If a window gets
hidden behind another window completely it effectively becomes lost to
me. Or I have to sit and right click titlebars to keep sending things
to the back to find out what hidden treasures might await me under my
other windows. So I end up opening only 3 or 4 windows per workspace
and having to use multiple workspaces to work on different things and
keep switching back and forth... which means having to remember not
only which windows I have open, but which workspaces I have them open
on... requiring me to remember multiple levels of complexity to do
basic work because of shortcomings of the basic user interface.
(Not to mention trying not to cover my desktop icons, which I also
interact with regularly, and have no easy way of getting to if they
get covered... so I end up switching to other desktops, or trying to
make sure my windows don't cover them... the same with my replicants,
deskbar, etc)
The only reason I can think of it being done this way is because
that's the way Be did it. But clearly Be didn't do Stack and Tile, so
it's not as though we're averse to doing things differently.
Further, I think there are good ways that a UI can be changed to still
be very usable. Gnome 3's UI for instance is quite different from what
we're probably used to, but it is very efficient for quickly
navigating between windows and even working with multiple workspaces.
With a single quick flick of the mouse you get an overview of all your
open windows, and with a single click can switch to a different window
(there is much more, but it's beyond the scope of this discussion).
In short, I think we should keep things consistent, but I fear the
direction the UI seems to be going with Stack and Tile just because
it's a novelty, and seeing it as a panacea for the shortcomings of the
existing UI rather than just making the deskbar more useful and
managing the apps themselves in a way that works WITH the deskbar
rather than independently of it.
The direction Haiku seems to be going seems to be to not care about
grouping things in logical ways and allowing quick and efficient
higher level control of these groups... but in forcing the user to
remember on a fine grained level numerous distinct arbitrary
groupings, and interacting with them using various functionally and
semantically unrelated mechanisms. (eg; the deskbar shows things
grouped by application, but allows no way of easily interacting with
that application "group" because the windows are all distinct... so by
default you have to click multiple times to see or get to any given
window... and there is little means of telling one window from
another... and it generally just becomes far more trouble than it's
worth.. with the deskbar relegated to killing an application or the
rare case when you know the app only has a single window open that you
want on a different workspace, so it's the easiest means of jumping to
that one window.)
I feel like I'm beating a dead horse... but this aspect of the UI is
my single greatest disappointment with Haiku by far. I love basically
everything else about it. And I worry about the direction it's going
when I see talk of relying on Stack and Tile as the UI paradigm and
leaving deskbar as is etc... it seems like just making a bad situation
worse.
--
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