Now, I’ve always been an open-source enthousiast. I’ve applauded the decision of the GNOME team to keep most of their decisions behind closed doors and not really take all the crazy feature suggestions serious. KDE 4, for some reason or another, thought it was a great idea, UI-wise, to just slap about 3 buttons on each icon on your desktop as you hover over it. Other than being brightly colored, they are quite nondescript. If this blog post wouldn’t exist, I’m quite sure very few people would know what it does. In the screen-cast you can actually see the person in question opening a file by clicking a badge over the icon with a gear on it. Oh, of course - if we click on gear icons in UI’s, files open. A totally logical piece of causality that commonly accepted.
Okay, I hear you say, it’s not even done yet; he’s just made it to show what it can do! Well, in that case, fantastic job regressing in the history of UI design. We’ve been doing everything possible to limit nondescript buttons and too much choice in the UI on the Mac; it’s in our interface guidelines. GNOME has been doing a great effort to keep it as simple and minimal as possible. What do these guys do? They just liberally sprinkle badges all over existing icons, that were meant to serve the function of the badges in the first place.
If you still think this is a good idea, you might imagine taking this step in OS X. Imagine you open Mail.app, and in the list of emails, every email is preceded by four brightly colored dots. It’s not really clear what function they have, but it seems you know because some icons on the dots seem familiar. You click the orange one and your email is suddenly gone. What happened? Well, your choice for a compact list view made the icon on the orange dot illegible and it was the button that marked it as trash. You go to your trash, where you click the green dot, and it opens a reply template. You can imagine the problems with such colored dots in small sizes.
UI design is a great job. You can think up all sorts of awesome stuff and these days, we have 3d interface possibilities for the willing. That doesn’t mean, however, that you should just do everything you can imagine because you think it’s cool. The reason why people like me are hired is that we weigh every possible user in. The same reason why the GNOME team is often criticized for being overly conservative when it comes to UI additions. KDE’s been known, to me, as the desktop with the ‘in progress’ cursor of a bouncing object and it’s XP-like icon sets. It’s never been usable, pretty, or otherwise impressive to me. This addition adds to that.
The comments on digg do make me smile. I loved this one;
” I wonder when the apple fanboys will raid this and clam they stole it from apple. sigh”
Somehow, I doubt they will.
Monday, 18. June 2007
Yeah, the bouncing “in progress” cursor, a so terrible idea that OSX just does the same with bouncing icons in the dock.
Anyway, this is Plasma, and this means that these icons belgons to the *desktop*, so you can easily use bigger icons, cause you are supposed to have big real estate and few documents.
Moreover, maybe they could implement a short text description appearing when hovering over these icons, who knows? or maybe you prefer apple+click or two-finger+click to show a context menu? (the worst idea *ever* in discoverability).
comments by the editor: Hey vide. Thanks for giving some comments. I won’t comment on the parallel between a bouncing dock icon and a bouncing cursor, because they are, in my opinion, two unrelated things. There are a few words on your response, though;
I also noted that these icon additions belong to the desktop. Furthermore, I don’t think the context-click of the Mac has ever been a standard interface paradigm. Since it’s inception, the interface of Mac OS consists of ‘document icons’ (virtual representations of documents or particular data) and ‘tools’, which we know now as applications. It’s whole notion is that you can drag data on a tool and get going. Other operations that these badges do, like getting it’s info and adding a song to a playlist, have respectively got contextual functions in the menu bar, or a drag area in an application. There is no reason to use a ‘ctrl+click’ on a Mac if you understand its interface paradigm.
As I also posted, I think it’s clear that it’s not finished yet. It just seemed like a more impulsive decision in UI design to me.
Monday, 18. June 2007
Hey,
I’m actually the “stupid” mind behind this mockup made on May 2005. Think you are talking a bit out of context. The thingy implemented by Riccardo took inspiration from that animation but it’s not intended to be use in … Mail, or better Kmail ;p
This is being tested as functionality for KDE desktop icons (dekstop only icons), so no mini colored dots all around. I’m not an UI expert as you are but I’m not dumb as you might think.
Hope you’ll find time to install KDE 4 when it came out and comment the final product.
bye
david
Monday, 18. June 2007
What exactly makes you think we won’t implement a “what’s this” help on hovering?
And, I found this post very irritating, especially because you don’t have understood what we are talking about. The mail example is totally wrong. Plasma is not a mail application.
Monday, 18. June 2007
There’s a proverb I’m sure you’ve heard which goes something like: “it is better to stay silent and have people wonder how stupid you are than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”
See, if you had actually looked at the plasma interface rather than gone spinning off and written this blog you would know that pretty much everything you wrote in your pompous little self-congratulatory entry is incorrect.
But hey, I suppose it’s more fun to just show us all how arrogant you can be in your ignorance. Good job, now we don’t have to wonder.
For the interested:
- there are not 3 coloured icons on every icon on your desktop
- there is no relevance to a mail app here, though the writer does a textbook job of setting up and knocking down the strawman on that one
- the self-proclaimed designed failed to get the connection between hover activated interfaces versus the banality of right click menus
Personally, I don’t mind if the author here doesn’t like KDE (or any other piece of software). I do take mirth in listening to the petulant whinges of “it’s not usable” all the while our user base not only grows but we achieve usability certifications in Europe and test quite well in real world situations. =)
From the editor:I’ve condensed your two comments into one.
Monday, 18. June 2007
I like it. Adds functionality. You failed to mention the hover part :)
Tuesday, 19. June 2007
Cocoia (sorry I don’t know how to address to you), a couple of things:
“bouncing icons”…I’m sorry but the concept they express both in KDE and OSX it is the same: they give feedback on application’s launch. Additionaly, OSX dock uses bouncing icons to capture user attention, whilst KDE uses (a la Windows) flashing panels.
You’re right about context menus in OSX, it has never been the main paradigm, but nonetheless they are used (for example, while lesser discoverable, it’s quicker to use a context menu on a file to show its information rather than going to the top bar menu, Fitt’s law doesn’t apply here).
And for things like this, I found this Plasma idea simply great. It is discoverable, it is quick, and if they implement larger hover icons it’s even fitt’s law compliant.
And remember we are talking about DESKTOP icons, where you have a few, selected and often used documents
Tuesday, 19. June 2007
I don’t know KDE and am not a designer. Nor do I need to read this post past the title and the following sentence “If this blog post wouldn’t exist, I’m quite sure very few people would know what it does.” to know that this post will be a learning experience for Cocoia.
A war on bad design is great when it provides tangible alternatives. A war on bad design is lame when it complains about others.
Continue to lead by example, Sebastiaan. Don’t worry about others.