[Gllug] On Linux desktops...

[Alex Hudson]

On Thursday 18 October 2001 3:10 pm, you wrote:
> >Not bash. Check out fbi, for example.
>
> That's a command-line tool that produces graphics. I don't know if you
> can interact with the results, but if so I'd say it produces a GUI 

And I'd probably agree. It's clear, though, that we're not going to agree on 
GUIness being a set of paradigms, rather than an enfironment :)

> I think one could reasonably have a single button that displayed the
> current justification (as text) and either ran through them if clicked
> or popped up a menu if clicked and held.

Yep, that is a valid scheme. I would suspect it would require more 
concentration though - you can actually treat icons more or less as single 
letters, in a way - when interacting with an interface, humans don't actually 
'read' the words on it per se, it's a shape thing. Good icons tend to be very 
simple but obvious shapes, and hence are 'read' very quickly, which is one of 
the reasons they work so well.

KMail has some exceptionally bad icons: the reply, reply-all and forward 
icons are terrible, because even though looking at it you'd be able to tell 
very quickly what they do, you need to really 'parse' them conciously before 
pressing one, even when used to the software. Similarly, words which are 
all-caps are hard to read, and bunches of similar words are hard to read. Bad 
icons tend to be a) hard to work out and/or b) hard to use in practice (ie., 
they slow you down). As I said, I'm not an apologist for bad UIs.

> The advantage would be that
> more complex justification schemes could be described.

Which is generally where it's used - long lists, etc. I would say the 
justification group is unlikely to expand beyond three any time soon, which I 
would say is why it is done this way - you can also immediately see what 
options you have open to you. I seem to recall a pretty good paper on simple 
editing tools which did proper testing on different variations on the current 
scheme, and it turns out what we have at the moment is pretty much perfect, 
even taking into account user training.

Cheers,
					Alex.

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