Re: writing a GUI for an app running under Linux ? <1149758718.674404.211190@i39g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <1152160924.532123.189870@75g2000cwc.googlegroups.com> <gE1rg.521495$7F7.12585033@phobos.telenet-ops.be>
- From: Florian Diesch <diesch@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2006 04:37:32 +0200
Robert Heller <heller@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
At Fri, 07 Jul 2006 02:33:56 +0200 Florian Diesch <diesch@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Aragorn <stryder@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thursday 06 July 2006 06:42, mast2as@xxxxxxxxx stood up and spoke the
following words to the masses in /comp.os.linux.misc...:/
[...]
Although I am really astonished that the GUI topic doesn't take more
importance in the programming community. Most of what we do with a
computer when we use it, has to deal somehow with the user interface !
Why is that (it seems to me at least) the most painful thing to do
from a programing point of view ?
User interfaces are a topic all of their own, I'm afraid. It's not
quite easy to conceive what would be a good or intuitive user
interface.
And what's good depends very much on what you want to do. If you're
working several years 8 hours a day with an UI it's quite OK if you need
a few days to learn it if this lets you work faster. If you use it only
a few times a year for some minutes it's bad if you need more than a few
seconds to understand what to do.
It is critical when creating a GUI that one follows some basic standard,
esp. for the main menu items.
Only if the target users are expected to use other applications too. If
your program is the only one that is used by your users it is much more
important that they can do their work fast.
On the other hand, graphical user interfaces have never really been a
priority on UNIX-style operating systems - the priority there is
getting your work done, and the graphical environment of UNIX was in
fact only intended so as to be able to display graphical images for DTP
and CAD/CAM, either locally or on a remote machine. Desktops and
window managers only came much later. ;-)
That's wrong. X has been developed as a part of the Athena project at
MIT and released in 1984. AFAIK the project was about user interfaces,
not CAD or DTP. Window managers AFAIMK have been part of X since the
beginning, twm und fvwm are around since at least 1988. The first
desktop system was AFAIK CDE which AFAIK came up in the early 90's
Given that *UNIX* dates back to the 1960s, this suggests that UNIX was
around for like 20+ years before there was anything like a GUI.
Yes. My point is that X was invented not only to "display graphical
images for DTP and CAD/CAM" but for real GUIs.
It was true (and is still true) that the GUI is not a *core* part of UNIX
and UNIX-like operating systems. It was and continues to be an
'optional add-on' -- that is it was and is something that is not a part
of the core system and it is possible to install UNIX(-like) operating
system without any sort of GUI support at all.
Of course. Lots of servers don't even have a video card.
Florian
--
<http://www.florian-diesch.de/>
.
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