RE: The GNUstep code challenge.

[Vaisburd, Haim]

Nicolas Roard wrote: 
On 5/16/06, Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf <lars.sonchocky-helldorf@hamburg.de>
wrote:

>> could a port of this:
>>
>> http://seashore.sourceforge.net/
>>
>> be it [a killer app] ?

>> the screenshot shows a clear and uncluttered interface:

>Indeed.

Sorry to disagree with you both. This image editor closely follows the
GIMP,
which I personally think is poor with respect to its UI design,
although it has a lot of features.

There are too many windows and dialog boxes to my mind.
I admit that I have only tried simple operations required
for photo editing, like crop, rescale, format change, etc.,
but for those simple operations the flow is not smooth at all.


Here is some food for though from
http://www.cabochon.com/~stevey/blog-rants/effective-emacs.html :

[...]
Dialog Boxes: The Root of All Evil
Emacs is an incredibly powerful editor, but a few design choices in
particular really stand out as being the biggest individual
contributors. One of them is the fact that Emacs has no dialog boxes.
This was actually a requirement in order to give Emacs its full
functionality while running in a text-only terminal window. But by happy
accident, it's also one of the key features that helps make Emacs so
insanely powerful.

Dialog boxes suck. [...] the problem with dialog boxes goes even deeper
than the focus, sizing and positioning problems. Dialogs are never, ever
full peers of the rest of the application UI.
[...]

(End of citation).

Frankly, I agree with this point of view. Ideally I want to get a full
control
right from the main window - the main window being the only window.
There is a promising tour for new iPhoto (I do not have a Mac and can't
tell you how good/bad the iPhoto really is) at
http://www.apple.com/ilife/quicktour/iphoto/ ,
they show semi-transparect controls on top of the image they are
editing.

Another example of this approach is the design of the web-site
http://maps.google.com

I think this is the way to go into the future.

Thank you,
Tima.