I use OS X and I think that it is pretty good OS, but there is one thing that I hate about it. You can’t really customize the GUI behavior. I am not saying that OS X’s default GUI behavior is bad or anything, but it is quite restricting for me. I bought my iBook because I want to use as many operating systems as possible and now I kinda regret it. It isn’t really that bad after you get used to it, but I really miss my GNU/Linux+MWM setup I had on my old computer. I hope I don’t start another flame war on this subject, but I think that any UI I have used except MS Windows is better than OS X’s. Even my old System 6.

OK. I get your point there…
I am probably just extremely unlucky to have both sound and video card totally unsupported by Ubuntu on only two machines… :-(

I think Apple is in a slightly different league when it comes to drivers and hardware support. I think someone mentioned it already here but Apple only supports a very limited set of configurations. You can’t really build a Mac from scratch yourself, and for the most part you can’t start swapping parts in and out to upgrade it. Since they only have 5 or 6 different hardware specs to work with they can make sure that everything works out of the box and that it works well. Furthermore they can optimize their software for these specific hardware profiles.

Windows and Linux on the other hand are supposed to work on generic PC architecture. This means millions of different devices and components. Amazingly enough, more often than not Linux manages to get things working out of the box – mainly because they can’t rely on hardware vendors to provide them with drivers. I can’t tell you how many times I installed Windows on some box only to find that half of the hardware including the video card, audio card, network controller, wifi card and etc siply were not recognized. I would then take the Ubuntu Live CD and laugh as it detected and configured all these devices out of the box.

So I would venture out and say that hardware support in most linux distros is mind-blowingly awesome. It’s just that some hardware just won’t work. Windows has piss poor hardware support, but every hardware vendor usually ships with a driver which may or may not be very poorly designed.

Well, I am sorry to say, but the main problem with an OS is not per se its user friendliness, as Luke perfectly demonstrated, but how it works flawlessly on a standard machine. Windows is not as good as OSX with this, but still pretty good and a lot better than Ubuntu, for instance. Not that Microsoft is doing a good work at it, but simply because every hardware vendor develops its drivers for it. Linux on the other side (and Ubuntu in particular) has to wait for drivers to be developed by its community. This is, in my opinion, the main problem for new Linux users, not the GUI/CL approach.

For example, I am using Ubuntu both at work and at home, along with Windows XP and 2000, all on different machines. Well, I can’t use the sound properly on the Ubuntu machines. And I found out after two months of following support forums and other sites that my only option was to waut for a new versio of ALSA to support my (antique) sound cards. No need to tell that these cards are all working perfectly under Windows…

[quote post=”2177″]Cross language needs to be pictorial, but it cannot explain complexity well at all. Even the idea of saving too a disk is massively hard thing too communicate with a simple icon. But we already compromise and have flags too distinguish between various language interfaces- Another small step towards the most intuitive interface.[/quote]

Yup – this is why we have localization. No matter what you do, UI will always have to include text and/or voice controls in a language that the user understands. Otherwise it’s an exercise in pictorial abstraction which is ok for very simple things only.

It’s like that project they had to design pictorial warnings to prevent archaeologists thousands of years in the future from digging out nuclear waste which haven’t decayed yet. We could assume that these people would probably know as much about us as we know about ancient Egypt – ie. a lot of what we know is speculation and theories. I think they had a whole show on Discovery about this project, and the conclusion was that it was nearly impossible to design pictographs that could be instantly interpreted by people who may not speak our language or know anything about out culture.

Similarly, creating an UI that is intuitive for anyone regardless of language is really, really hard hard unless you are doing something like the classic Play/Stop/Fast Forward/Rewind VCR buttons.

Vacri: That’s the whole idea. It translates it into CLI. The whole point of GUI is too make commandline recognisable as icons.

That’s what it boils down too-Icons. Or, more specifically, Iconography. Something that can be explained pictorially, a simplified picture of real life. Of course, for “Put your trash in the trashcan” and “Emergency Exit” this is all pretty simple, but for computer language it’s massively complex.

Whether a GUI is pure or not depends on the amount of stuff which can be Recieved Iconography as opposed too Percieved language. The workflow is totally irrelevant too all this- It’s just another action too be describe pictorially.

Luke- Your entirely right- It would be equally intuitive for somone who spoke that language, because voice command imitates conversation. Speaking is the most natural thing in the world and for computers too incorporate this would be a massive step for usability. It’s ideal for anyone unused too a type/mouse interface, or who’s unused too the whole Computer idea. Like Dr.Whateverhernameis shouting at Will Smiths JVC stereo too “Turn Off! Deactivate! Shut down!” to no avail, it’s the ideal means too easy computer command.

If you speak that language.

Cross language needs to be pictorial, but it cannot explain complexity well at all. Even the idea of saving too a disk is massively hard thing too communicate with a simple icon. But we already compromise and have flags too distinguish between various language interfaces- Another small step towards the most intuitive interface.

@Johan

I feel that the current state of competition IS fair. Apple’s policy of allowing buyers to share the song onto up to 5 other computers for 99 cents IS fair. Their goal has never been one of dominating their market segments – it has only been to provide a superior level of service and functionality to the people who buy their products. They sell iPods and provide the iTunes store for the people who bought them – their goal was never to build the biggest or best music distribution site. Meeting this vision required them to lock down the songs – that requirement was by the music industry. The music industry is now having a change of heart not in small part due to Apple’s desire to distribute DRM-free music. For those companies/artists which allow Apple to do so, they have higher-quality, DRM-free (higher cost) songs.

The reason closed source software exists is because in large part, people won’t pay for something they can have for free, and most open-source software can be had for free. Apple is a business and the point of having any business is to earn profit. Making money off of authoring open-source software is really hard; among commercial open-source ventures, there are way more failures than successes. Commercial companies which contribute the most to open-source software generally have a financially sound reason for doing so.

Apple (and pretty much any successful company) just asks: “What would people PAY for?” and that is what they make. As we all know, making good software or hardware is EXPENSIVE. The best programmers don’t work for free – they have to eat too. This is the cycle of a strong economy. If you take away the strong economy, nobody will be thinking about whether their software is open or not.

So, I come back to my original position: all of the people posting comments here are fortunate enough to live in places and in time in human history where things are mostly very good. We are healthy and well fed, we can practice whatever religion we want, we have reasonably good governments – compared to most of the rest of human history, we live in the lap of luxury. To me, there is art that is free, and art which, if we want to use/experience it, we must earn it. Thanks to economies of scale, we all have pretty inexpensive access to essentially unlimited amounts and varieties of entertainment (music, pictures, songs, books, etc.) which took their creators months or years and anywhere from hundreds of dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars to create.

Software is art, and I am thankful that I live in a time where people can invest themselves into making great software and giving it away. But I am not unaware of the fact that it is the art I (and others) have to EARN (pay for) that supports circumstances (strong economy) which allow people to make great software for free.

Now, just in case you are going to say, “It isn’t about the price, it is about better, more secure software!” I will say this:

Quality: With a few notable exceptions, when I go looking for a piece of software to do some task, and I find 10 different products, rarely is the open-source one the best.

Security: Knowing that those who would break your code have unfettered access to it DOES encourage one to be very careful and thorough. However, I don’t think that closed-source teams *rely* on the fact that they know nobody can read their code – they still write it as tight as they can. So if both teams are writing code as tightly as they can and one codebase is readily available to those with malicious intent and one isn’t, which codebase is more secure? As far as “the public” knowing that their software is secure… they don’t know – even if it is open-source. The people who wrote it don’t even know for sure that it is secure or not! There is a false sense of security either way!

Developing nations: they don’t *need* open-source software either. If they want it, they take it.

The future: I look forward to that Star Trek society where nobody has nor needs money; where everyone works to better themselves and they work in teams to produce the best software ever known. But the path to that society will be built on a foundation of innovation for the purposes of commerce.

-Kiyu

Mackenzie – whether you have English language text or an abstract symbol is irrelevant to the function. You have to understand the meaning of the icon in exactly the same way you understand the meaning of the text. A new user wouldn’t even understand what compression or archives are.

Anyway, whether your stuffit icon is a box with an arrow or a text label saying ‘extract’ or ‘stuffit’ is irrelevant to the workflow. Changing dropdown menus from text to icons wouldn’t really make a gui ‘purer’, more graphical in anything but the most superficial sense – the workflow would be identical.

You are right though, guis are skins for cli, but no amount of elite design is going to change that fact. You perform an action in a gui, the gui interprets that action into cli, and passes it on to be actioned.

@Mackenzie – Interesting ideas. I guess the other polar end of usability research is the area of voice and touch activated control which is really an extrapolation of CLI.

For example, you sit down at a computer and say: “Open Browser” and browser pops up. You then touch the screen to scroll around the text and click links. So the control is command driven with a set vocabulary, and some smart search features – just like CLI.

If you say help it will show you a list of common commands which you can expand. A lot of stuff like that is already done for mobile and hand held technologies.

I don’t know which one is more intuitive, but both should be pretty accessible to people who had no prior experience with computers. I guess the UI of the future will be voice + multi-touch with an on-screen keyboard. So navigation will be a hybrid of spoken command as well as dragging, dropping and sliding. Because let’s face it – like you yourself said, some operations are hard to conceptualize with just icons and drag/drop and click operations.

@Kiyu

Way to obsessed you say? What’s wrong with wanting to secure fair competition and use? How we store all of our information is extremely important. The ability for poor countries to develop and infrastructure of their own is greatly improved from already existing code under non-restrictive licensing.
And to take an exampe a bit closer to everyday: Apple selling music that’s only playable on their own devices, is that something good?
There is a reason for wanting to keep things open. And it has nothing to do with my high horses. Too be fair though, I was in a bad mood when writing my last comment, so I might not have been the best diplomat, and for that, I apologize.
I do know that some nice applications and innovations have come from prorietary products/companies. However, that really has nothing to do with if we should use those kinds of applications or not.