Re: Look and Feel

[Jesse Ross]

> > It will be easier to sell (GNUSTEP/Objective-C) to developers if some 
> > of apple's well thought out interface ideas are adopted.
>
> NeXTstep introduced a lot of gui improvements (they were able to learn 
> from the design errors of MacOS/MS-Windows).  Some of these got into 
> MacOS-X, but others were left out because of the difficulty of 
> changing the habits of the existing userbase when Apple tried to move 
> people to MacOSX.  Basically Apple tried to make NeXTstep look as much 
> like MacOS as they could, in order to minimise disruption, but that 
> meant throwing out some improvements.
>
> So at present in MacOS-X we have a user interface consisting of -
> Many features inherited from the early MacOS, some bad, some good.
> Some features introduced by NeXTstep to fix early MacOS errors.
> A few features introduced recently which are genuinely new.

Exactly. I've been a Mac user exclusively for about 8 years, and when I 
first touched GNUstep, the left scroll bars seemed awfully awkward to 
me. Are the NeXTSTEP-style scrollbars a user-design error, or am I just 
so accustomed to the left right scroll bar that it's habit?

The Mac interface was designed first. A lot of it was ripped off by 
MANY other OSs (see 
http://www.aci.com.pl/mwichary/guidebook/interfaces/featured for a 
historical collection of OS interfaces). What was established was a 
standard, and people got used to it. Therefore, it's familiar, but is 
it best?

NeXTSTEP was designed next, so they could correct any problems with the 
Mac interface. But they also had to be distinctive. Were the UI 
decisions they made based on usability or on defining a "look" for 
themselves to stand apart? So now whether the interface is better or 
not is somewhat nebulous.

When Mac OS X inherited both the NeXT environment and the Mac 
environment, it had certain design decisions to make. It's debt was 
mostly to it's current Mac user base, so naturally it had to keep a lot 
of Mac-isms. Some were good, some not so good. But that's the problem 
with interface design: there is no perfect interface, and you can't 
base your own design exclusively on anyone else's.

With any interface, there are three factors:

 1, Usability
 2. User's expectations
 3. Marketing (Standing apart from the competition)

We want GNUstep to be usable. We want to make user's feel comfortable. 
We want to stand out. Sometimes we have to make decisions that favor 
one over the other.

A prime example is the top menu bar. Research has proven that it's a 
much more usable interface than a window-attached menu or a palette 
menu. However, if GNUstep were to provide a top menu bar as the 
_default_ (it can be an option all we want), it may get into the habit 
of copying a lot of other Mac-isms and then become little more than a 
Mac clone. The palette menu is one of GNUstep's strongest identifying 
marks. Do we go with the usable option, or the distinctive option? 
There will always be two camps here on this issue -- but we have to 
somehow reach a decision on what the default option is and all stand 
behind it and push it like it's the best interface ever.


J.