🚀 go-pugleaf

   In article <5348@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> barnett@grymoire.crd.ge.com (Bruce Barnett) writes:
   >Why do most people measure the "quality" of a window system on such
   >cosmetic features like 3-D buttons?

And don@brillig.umd.edu writes in reply:
   I have been wondering about this too. Are 3-D buttons any easier to
   use? Is the 3-D "look" a metaphore or an illusion? That is, does the
   apparent third dimension effect the "feel" in any way at all? I think
   the "feel" is much more important than the "look".

The 3d look folks will claim that 3d presentation is in fact easier to
use based on the semantic feedback provided.  A control is evident
because it "sticks out" of the work surface.  Of course, in Motif,
separators are 3d - I guess this is to keep the "look" consistent at
the price of the "feel."

This does raise an interesting question about how to resolve such
conflicts.  I suspect it has been resolved in the favor of "look" not
because any thought was given to it, but rather that a nice "look"
sells product...

   What amazes me are the people who used to hate Open Look, but now that
   it's 3-D, they love it.

The one part of an interface's "look" that obviously affects the user
is that it be unabtrusive.  I have not seen OL3d, and have not used OL
at all, but looking at the color and B&W screenshots I will note, that
the color OL is much less intrusive that the B&W ones.  My initial
reaction to B&W OL is "it's ugly".  Of course, I recall a thread in
which Motif was called "Art Deco" and while I like deco, and resent it
being used as an insult ;-) I am reminded about the old adage of where
beauty lies...

   >	Is the UI easy to use? Does it require any documentation?
   >	Is it intutive?

   Is it self documenting? Open Look has a "help" key that pops up a
   magnifying glass window explaining how to use the control under the
   cursor. The Lisp Machine has a status line at the bottom of the screen
   that always tells what the mouse buttons and shift keys will do
   wherever the mouse is pointing -- I like that a whole lot, other user
   interfaces should have such a feature.

Motif skirts the magnifying glass through the help menu item, and a
help button on dialog boxes.  I have yet to see anyone provide status
line stuff.  The LM, Explorer, and other lisp enviroments offer it...
I suspect this is an example of the comparative maturity of the
interfaces... 

   This brings up another issue that I think is more important than the
   look: how easy is it to customize a particular toolkit?

And of course, the flip side - if you support interface customization,
what happens to the grand dream of standardization...

   >	How easy it it to keep track of the keyboard focus?
   >	How easy is it to change the focus?

   Can you choose between click-to-type and focus-follows-cursor, or are
   you forced to live with one or the other?

Motif separates focus and raise into two issues.  I also hate click to
type, and use focus-follows-pointer but not auto-raise.

   >	Are there any mechanisms to help you keep track of
   >	the state (busy/idle/error) of each application?

   Open Look dims the title bar to show that a window is busy.

The only notification that Motif provides is the "busy cursor" when in
the window.  The OL spec points out the problems with this approach.

   >	How convenient is the scrollbar?

   I like the way Open Look scroll bars work. They take up a bit too much
   space on the screen for my tastes, and I'd like to be able to move
   them to either edge of the window, though. 

I don't like objects to warp the pointer, which the scrollbars do, but
this is personal taste.

The OL scrollbars have an interesting feature in the ability to split
viewports.  I do have some questions though - if a viewport has both H
and V scrollbars, how is screen real estate allocated to make room for
the scroll bar?  And more important - how are menu actions associated
with viewports?  If you have click to type - you can set focus, but
for focus-follows-pointer this is not clear to me...

   >	Are there accelerators for common actions? Can you redefine them?

Motif is very good about this.  Everything is supposed to have an
keyboard equivalent, and they are supposed to be defined in the
configuration files.

   >	Notices/Alerts - do they tell you which application caused the
   >	alert? What happens if two applications alert you at the
   >	same time?

Motif associates modal dialogues with the application, so you can use
another app.  Also, the dialogues are defined to be always within the
borders and above the application.

This is not as visually informative as the "zoom" effect used by OL,
but also saves real estate.
--
WISE@cs.umass.EDU                                             Arxin@UMass.BITNET
Alexander Erskine Wise                           Software Development Laboratory
   Disclaimer: The opinions above are ficticious, any similarity to opinions
               living or dead is completely co-incidental.