OT(ish): modern UI design concepts

From: Ronald Wayne <AppleTO_at_gmail.com>
Date: Fri Sep 24 08:25:40 2004

On Thu, 23 Sep 2004 19:23:01 +0000, Jules Richardson
<julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Does anyone else find that modern UIs with lots of pretty grahpics are
> actually getting harder to use? I'm not sure if it's just me or not!

Yes, I find them harder to use and more distracting. If it weren't
for an old Mac (circa 1992) which I keep on hand, I would get half of
the work done.

While you seem to point to busy eye-candy as a cause, I regard it as a symptom.

The over configurability of user interfaces is another symptom. For
example: Apple's web browser (Safari) has 11 menu options which
determine which button bars are shown and which buttons are shown on
them. This is on a drop down menu on the menu bar. Why does anyone
need immediate control over those options? Oh, and Apple is noted,
rightfully, for their refined user interfaces. I'm not even going to
mention my opinion of skins.

There are many other problems which contribute to complexity, but I
won't go on to describe them because it will make me sound like a sour
grape.

Is there a solution? The only one I know of is to use older machines.
 As I said earlier, most of my work is done on a 1992 Mac. I don't
get to play with emulators as much, but that's okay because real
hardware is more fun! A 68030 or 68040 can emulate an 8-bit computer
with quite reasonable results anyhow, because a lot more performance
tweaking was done back then. The main problem with this approach is
that the old hardware is bound to fail sooner rather than later.
Received on Fri Sep 24 2004 - 08:25:40 BST