New ask Hacker News story: GUI's still the pinnacle of productivity, let's help them out
GUI's still the pinnacle of productivity, let's help them out
2 by tabtab | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Ignore specific technologies, standards, and programming languages for a thought experiment. What's the most productive UI design for regular office productivity? The answer is still GUI's, a technique that's several decades old. All the focus on finger-based mobile and social networks hasn't changed this fact. While it may be possible to build a highly-productive mobile-style UI, it's difficult to get right and/or requires more user training. The mobile UI world is a sub-set of GUI idioms, for the most part. This means you are more constrained; working with a smaller pallet. Desktop-style GUI's can fit more on a given screen because the pointer is smaller compared to finger aiming, can have roll-over text for cryptic icons, right-click options, nested pop-ups for drilling down into progressively further detail, and others. Emulating full GUI's in web browsers has proven tricky. The emulation libraries are huge and often break when new browser versions or brands come along. If the industry faced the fact GUI's are not going away any time soon, perhaps it would form a good GUI-over-HTTP standard. It could roughly resemble Microsoft's GUI XAML, but be cross-platform, "stateful", and interactive. The Tk or Qt engines maybe can serve as the base for a "GUI browser" or browser plug-in.
2 by tabtab | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Ignore specific technologies, standards, and programming languages for a thought experiment. What's the most productive UI design for regular office productivity? The answer is still GUI's, a technique that's several decades old. All the focus on finger-based mobile and social networks hasn't changed this fact. While it may be possible to build a highly-productive mobile-style UI, it's difficult to get right and/or requires more user training. The mobile UI world is a sub-set of GUI idioms, for the most part. This means you are more constrained; working with a smaller pallet. Desktop-style GUI's can fit more on a given screen because the pointer is smaller compared to finger aiming, can have roll-over text for cryptic icons, right-click options, nested pop-ups for drilling down into progressively further detail, and others. Emulating full GUI's in web browsers has proven tricky. The emulation libraries are huge and often break when new browser versions or brands come along. If the industry faced the fact GUI's are not going away any time soon, perhaps it would form a good GUI-over-HTTP standard. It could roughly resemble Microsoft's GUI XAML, but be cross-platform, "stateful", and interactive. The Tk or Qt engines maybe can serve as the base for a "GUI browser" or browser plug-in.
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