Symmetry

[pj]

Can you consider improving the symmetry in X2 by:

1. All Organize dialogs have "DELETE". Can they also have an "ADD" button?

2. The tab context menu has "CLOSE". Can it also have "OPEN", like the ctrl-Ins keyboard combination?

3. Can the Filter bar have a drop down for history like the Address bar or autocomplete from the list of previous entries?

[nikos]

1. most lists from organize dialogs have items that are not easily editable. Simple lists like bookmarks could possibly offer ADD but then you'd have to type the path as opposed to getting it free of charge using BOOKMARKS > ADD CURRENT

2. to open a new tab, double click on the tab strip empty area to the right of the tabs

3. I don't think it's a good idea. The time it will take you to search for a past entry you may as well type it afresh

[Kilmatead]

1. ...then you'd have to type the path as opposed to getting it free of charge...

Apparently you've never had to duplicate a complex user-command, like the rest of us do a million times a week. Users shouldn't experience menus as "a frustrating last resort", they should see them as the first port of call to access what is right in front of them - it's not logical to take one step back to go two steps forward.

2. ...double click on the tab strip empty area...

Practical and logical menu entries are always superior to un-obvious gimmicks like "oh, just click where you can't see anything". There's a reason why "mouse gestures" never caught on amongst the classical gentry.

* Actually, while we're at it, since we are forced to use <Ctrl+Inst> all the time anyway, it would be reasonable to have "remove duplicates", and "remove all but this" entries too - you know, the stuff people "expect" to be there. It's not like the tab context menu is clogged up or anything.

[nikos]

if you were constantly rebuilding a house for 15 years with lots of changes in direction, it wouldn't be symmetrical either, more bubbly organic
you know what they say, "My girlfriend went to a parallel universe that lacks bilateral symmetry and all I got was this F-shirt"

what a bunch of anoraks!

[Kilmatead]

Anorakish Ergonomics: 1
Nikos: 0

See, people are dumb. It's a fact. God gives them a whole skull full of deliciously concatenated protoplasm, and they use it to watch the Kardashians and post on Facebook: Good for them. I like Baywatch re-runs: Good for me.

However, like many users here (I should imagine) I was for my sins elected the local "computer guy" for all the dumb people around me in real life. Real life is a pain, yes: poor me. Anyway, trying to teach dumb people to use a computer is... well... there's that pain-thing again.

I've got one gentleman who just can't listen to reason - if a popup-window is displayed on his screen blocking his email or PDF reader, all he does is click wildly on everything in sight "to make it go away". I've told him a hundred times not to do that, but I've also had to clean up his "little messes" another hundred times, so the odds are that's either proof that people are dumb or that old men and little children are somewhat difficult to tell apart. Go figure.

Anyway, I finally struck upon a path of enlightenment for the codger: if at any time he can't figure out how to get to a command he can't otherwise find (in browsers, email clients, etc), yet he knows "it's in there somewhere" he should just right-click whatever he's looking at and see if the command is there. He's not interested in complex stuff, just the normal things like delete, copy, whiskey and death. As these are all normal, every-day ergonomic things, they usually appear in the menu for him and he happily continues on his way, content that he's mastered the contraption once again.

Since I plastered the post-it note on his computer desk that says "When in doubt, Right-Click", his need for my attention has decreased dramatically, leaving me plenty of time to commune with the gods of Baywatch.

Thus, I can only but conclude that the more logically symmetrical an interface is, the more productive it can be for users of all ages, shapes, sizes, and vitamin-deficiencies. Since you can't just cater for eternally-complaining power-users, it behoves you to recognise that the more obvious, simple, and predictable ways provided for a user to skin a rabbit is a good thing for both you and us.

Anorakish Ergonomics: 2
Nikos: -1

I've often harboured the belief that you can tell a good product by how much the builder himself actually uses it, and that you can glean his usage from how many obvious things are missing. For instance, have you ever returned from the grocery-store and tried to open some silly thing encased in the most egregious plastic known to humanity? Exactly: you can tell right off that the maker of that product doesn't actually use it because otherwise he would pick up the phone at 4am and immediately berate his highly-paid box-designers to "just fix the damn box, my wife can't open it".

More than once I have questioned whether you use the same interface version of x2 as the rest of us.

Anorakish Ergonomics: 3
Nikos: -2

Tolerating a "Bubbly-organic" design is akin to Darwin just gleefully pointing out that a bear without teeth isn't going to survive in the wild. While true in the evolutionary sense (and a boon for spawning salmon everywhere), it's a real downer for the poor bear.

Have a little sympathy for the symmetry-lovers of the world: all we want is for menus to have contents which are easy to predict, use, and (in every other programme we rely upon daily) have proved the test of time. Menus should not make us furrow our brow's, swear at the moon, or appear to be missing commands which every doglike carnivoran, elderly curmudgeon, or Baywatch-Babe expects to be there!

How tough can it be to make sure all the LED's blink in symmetrical unison on your wonkily-shaped Aircraft-carrier? It's not really that much to ask. Indeed, if one's girlfriend wasn't sporting a certain amount of bilateral symmetry herself, then even she wouldn't be wearing that T-shirt she gave to you as a booby-prize, and would happily opt for the baggy old anorak instead.

Anorakish Ergonomics: 4
Nikos: -3

[Tuxman]

Since you can't just cater for eternally-complaining power-users

It regularly feels weird (and arousing) to write this, but: I am not confident that this assumption of yours contains a sufficient amount of objective truth.
Of course he can and he probably better should. In a world of dumb interfaces for dumb users, targeting a lost audience is your only way to stay on top.

World's greatest artists, including painters, deliberately got rid of symmetry in their most famous - not necessarily, but irregularly also: best - works. There must be something wrong with the equation of symmetry and greatness.

[Kilmatead]

World's greatest artists, including painters, deliberately got rid of symmetry in their most famous - not necessarily, but irregularly also: best - works. There must be something wrong with the equation of symmetry and greatness.

Not something "wrong", just something evolutionary. The removal of symmetry in Western art came about as a matter of gradual necessity to escape the burgeoning weight of traditional strangulation, not as an experimental exercise of intellectual enlightenment. Where the (ever-conservative) Académie des Beaux-Arts was choking the life out of the 19th-century, Impressionism took the literal 17th-century "light" of Vermeer and made it visceral by injecting it with movement, irregularity and the sheer trauma of non-Western influence. (Any coincidence to the 50th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper's? I should hope so!) It's no mistake that ancient cultures (or, at any rate, at least non-colonial cultures) distorted the human (and inhuman) forms not by merely suggesting that the body is a receptacle of ancestral worth, but by actually seeing it as such for themselves, and representing it thereunto.

Thus, if one were so amused, one could trace the grotesqueries stemming from the Egyptian and African traditions (distended, elongated, twisted malformed bodies) as the playthings of Auguste Rodin for his Three Shades (from the Divine Comedy) and the ever-popular The Scream by Edvard Munch.

Fortunately, Nikos' interface "design" is not quite as pompous and conceited as all that , as he himself admits that it's mostly a result of prodding the clay and leaving it out in the sun to dry only to discover that it actually melted instead. In the same way as W.C. Fields is oft-quoted for his "weather not being fit for man or beast" catchphrase, what we have is actually neither a dumb interface for dumb users nor an affected interface for power users - 15 years of imbalance have resulted in... well... imbalance.

I am not confident that this assumption of yours contains a sufficient amount of objective truth [...] In a world of dumb interfaces for dumb users, targeting a lost audience is your only way to stay on top.

I lay no claim to ever providing objective truth (where's the fun in that?), I'm just here to poke holes in the so-called traditional truths, and the assumptions therein.

Nikos struggles with his affections for both Aristotle and Jazz in a contradictory way which has yet to bear fruit, yet holds just enough promise that it can't be easily dismissed. That he himself is aware of this must be somewhat painful, I should think. Unfortunately (and I feel this may be a cultural thing), his adherence to his own perceptions at the expense of the larger logical intuitive-form undermines the overall functionality. That is to say, if something can already be done one way via the UI, he doesn't often see that duplication need not lead to the inevitable mess he fears it may. Does that make sense? Perhaps not - I can only but guess at how his intuition really works - but it's probably nothing that a decent dose of LSD or a whack upside the head with a cricket-bat couldn't shake loose. At least, that's how I see it. He does a pretty good job for a being a Muggle, really, so it's not completely his fault.

So, yeah, a wholehearted embrace of universal symmetry is really just a technocratic wet dream (total-unification theory, and all that rot) for the mathematically inclined (beauty in function and form, sayeth the engineer) - not something that is entirely desirable for the common man. While there are appropriate ways of means of disposing of logic, there are also times it should be embraced, and, I think, in this small way, the tab context-menu is but one of them.

Now that that's out of the way, anyone up for a little post-modern deconstruction of <Insert Subject Here>? No? Didn't think so. But hey, never hurts to ask... just stirring the pot, and all that...

[Tuxman]

My favorite (alleged) W.C. Fields quote is his advice to carry a small snake wherever you go. I admit I didn't take it too literally though, at least not the second part. (Apply innuendo as you wish.)

It might not surprise you that I have a copy of Munch's Skrik in my living room as it (and the complimentary diary entry) describes my general feeling rather well. Nikos' interface design, while surely less deep than paintings like this, is what dragged me towards xplorer² in the first place. Hooray, Verdana. You can get enough of Sgt. Pepper's - at least I have -, but you will rarely get enough of a well-thought user interface that pleases you and your muscle memory. Good old ed(1) is still around with no user interface at all - take that, you GUI-focused millennials with your man-buns and your horrible taste in music, food and software!

anyone up for a little post-modern deconstruction of <Insert Subject Here>?

When exactly have you started to ask us first? And, more importantly, why?

[Kilmatead]

It might not surprise you that I have a copy of Munch's Skrik in my living room as it (and the complimentary diary entry) describes my general feeling rather well.

What surprises me is that you have a living room! I always pictured you as a paranoid schizophrenic living alone in a smoke-stained one-room bedsit, suspiciously glancing at the world from behind off-white post-war lace curtains. Guess I was wrong then? Ah, the small illusions we keep of brethren are always the best.

The diary entry... the original poem you mean? "I stood there quaking with angst – and I felt as though a vast, endless Scream passed through nature".

Mayhap I wasn't so wrong about the post-war lace curtains after all.

When exactly have you started to ask us first? And, more importantly, why?

I was being sardonically post-modern by reflexively mentioning post-modernism in a post-modernistic way. Geddit? No? Ah well, sometimes I inhale my own bullshit too deeply.

[Tuxman]

What surprises me is that you have a living room!

I admit that, while it is called my living room, I usually only use it as a room. My living happens when I'm with friends and/or people of similar interests, not while I sit inside and write some horrible code while listening to awesome music; entirely depending on my personal view of what life really is. Aging gives me a longer and more excessive mid-life crisis than I was hoping in the first place. (At least I have an excuse or I, at least, pretend to; if only my mid-life hadn't started when I was 21!)

I always pictured you as a paranoid schizophrenic living alone in a smoke-stained one-room bedsit, suspiciously glancing at the world from behind off-white post-war lace curtains.

I am a paranoid schizophrenic, but I have a decent sense of acceptable living room design - at least this is what I was told. Your perception of acceptable design might be much different from mine, especially when considering your remarks on art and your own take of software design.

sometimes I inhale my own bullshit too deeply.

Breathe, old friend, breathe! The air smells good in this time of the year.

[Kilmatead]

Aging gives me a longer and more excessive mid-life crisis than I was hoping in the first place

<Applause> You'd be surprised (or, actually, you probably wouldn't be surprised) how that sentiment is rather drastically misunderstood by 89.4% of the world's population. And the remaining 10.6% are supremely indifferent about it. Sometimes it's bloody difficult to tell the percentages apart, though. Contrary to the physicists who insist that mathematics describes the majesty of the world, they neglect to mention the part where it really tells more lies than a prideful man at his own funeral. On the plus side, mine started at 16, so you at least had 5 more years of Saturday morning cartoons than I did. And Nikos' only seems to have really broken the floodgates in the last year or so, so he got off light, old man that he is!

...especially when considering your remarks on art and your own take of software design

Art is easy - it's funny how some people can spend their whole lives reading books about it, faking their way through dinner-party conversations, putting on airs of faux-sophistication (and suffering the same of others) - while for other people the world just kicks them in the face and says: "This is yours you undeserving bastard, live with the broken teeth of your inheritance!" And you try and try to explain to others how ridiculously painful it is to be immediately overwhelmed by the sheer "stuff-ness" of stuff they never imagined even existed, but you soon discover that their admiration and envy is nothing but a poison of their own innocence. Art sucks, in short: like love, nothing good can ever come of it. (Yet somehow one still gets up in the morning. Weird.)

Software design, on the other hand, is just a royal pain in the plebian tuckus. Or a plebian pain in the royal tuckus. Either way, 'nuff said. (But Nikos, don't think that lets you off the hook - we're still on topic here!)

The air smells good in this time of the year.

You're a city-boy aren't you? Nobody but a city-boy or a farmer would say that the air smells good this time of year, because... well... it doesn't! Slurry! Manure! Car exhaust! Children screaming! People enjoying themselves! The stuff of life is really not very pleasant. Look beyond the stupidly colourful meadows, the deceptively fragrant flowerings borne of filth - and you will see the orcs of Middle Earth mining their evil in pits of despair. That's what people really smell, it's just that every culture magically seems to use the most incredibly wrong words to describe it.

[nikos]

whoever is in need of subject matter for a mid life crisis, here's something to wax on

[Kilmatead]

Ah hah! I knew the old cynic was still reading even when he pretends not to. Remember, a more symmetrical context menu can set you free! Really! Every now and then even PJ makes a worthy complaint.

[Tuxman]

On the plus side, mine started at 16, so you at least had 5 more years of Saturday morning cartoons than I did.

I still enjoy Saturday morning cartoons, albeit usually consumed sometime later as I sleep a lot on Saturdays (and any other day). The little distractions from the everyday boredom and total lack of Garfield situations make it easier to not collapse under the load of being an adult (according to the laws). Nobody had warned me!

Software design, on the other hand, is just a royal pain in the plebian tuckus. Or a plebian pain in the royal tuckus.

Yours, at least, is.

You're a city-boy aren't you?

No, not at all.

I spent more than half of my current life in or around a small town of ~ 3,000 people, randomly enjoying the narrow flow floating through the medieval streets and gladly catching some of the spirit of the adjoining woods. Happy old times when I was not interested in wasting my days with social stuff yet.
A couple of years ago, I moved into a slightly larger city (add two zeroes) for work et cetera. I can see the advantages of having a relatively easy way to buy virtually anything within a time frame of half an hour (given that I walk), but I am still not a city-boy. The more people are around me, the more disturbing is the area. As an obvious example, I can't stand Berlin for more than a few hours - its ant hill atmosphere makes me wonder how creative people can actually live there.

On the other hand, Berlin's young start-up companies never last. City karma, I guess.

That does not mean that I have an actual aversion towards real cities though. I wish i had an excuse to move to Hamburg. That city is beautiful and it has a lot of amazingly quiet nature-dominated areas with a good lack of tourists. Sadly, Hamburg is expensive and too many people aim to work there. Dreams are hard.

whoever is in need of subject matter for a mid life crisis, here's something to wax on

I found Max Frisch's Questionnaires to be a good starting point for those who prefer to get something relevant for their own life out of the time spent with philosophy instead of just general musings about what could have been better in other people's own worlds. Sadly, only a limited number of them is available online as of today.

[nikos]

do you have kids? or am I the only family man using xplorer2?