| Chris' Rant | - by Chris Wenham

  ### This GUI Stinks

  he modern WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointers) user interface stinks and I'll tell you why. It's counterproductive, annoying, frustrating and wasteful in so many ways and the tragedy is that it didn't have to be so. Most of the problems can be fixed just by taking a different philosophy when designing user interfaces in both software and hardware.

  Let's take dialog boxes for instance. Error and alert dialogs should be thrown on the ground and stomped on, especially modal dialogs (ones that won't let you use any other window of the application until you've acknowledged it). I first noticed my annoyance with them while using Netscape and trying to load a page from a server that was temporarily unreachable. Up pops an error dialog that has to be acknowledged. All it tells me is that the server doesn't have a DNS entry, or is temporarily unreachable, or whatever. It's major, big-time annoying when boxes like these fly up and disrupt my flow. I don't care if the page can't be loaded right now, I'll try again later, in the meantime I wanna click on another link!

  Instead of error dialogs, how about an error log? Stick it in a small drop-down window somewhere. If I'm concerned with the error I can select it from this log later and see a detailed report, otherwise I could care less. The user is smart enough to realize something went wrong and will usually be happy enough to go do something else. Flag recent errors with red dots if it helps, but just get rid of these annoying dialogs.

  Now fire up a major application like a word processor or a browser or a paint program. Look just under the menu bar and you'll probably see a row of buttons with little pictures on them. Okay, number one: what the heck do those pictures mean? The ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphics, not Westerners like us. An icon is good for identifying a program if it's easy to work in a company or product logo. But in a modern word-processor there can be hundreds of these silly little nubbits, smaller than a program icon and even less descriptive. How am I supposed to memorize all this?

  The failure of the icon toolbar is reflected by the need to have 'flyover help bubbles' to tell you what they mean. What is the point? Give the user words to use instead, like Netscape and some other programs allow. Even better, have these commands in a list that runs down the side and starts to scroll when the mouse gets near the top or bottom. Even better still; start moving frequently used commands nearer the top of the list so they can be found faster.

  My second gripe is this: look just below your monitor, see that wide piece of plastic? It's got literally hundreds of pushable buttons on it. (That's right, it's your keyboard!) Remember when developers used those buttons, instead of relying just on your mouse and on-screen icons?

  I look at the default layout for StarWriter and I see that all the graphical buttons and other widgets take up almost two thirds of my screen estate. Hello? I know you can remove these palettes but why were they there in the first place? Okay, they make the program look sexy, but I think a screenful of my document looks even sexier.

  And some programs don't let you get rid of the button bar. This is bad. Especially when the programmers make ugly icons.

  I really wish some of the money that has gone into developing and redeveloping the button-bar could have instead helped really advance keyboard technology (and no I don't mean the recent renaissance of ergonomic keyboards). Lets stick a cheap LCD strip above the function keys, re-definable via software so it can display what each key does, then start getting rid of those damn buttonbars and free up a bit of screen space.

  The mouse pointer idea is also dumb. We have two hands, five fingers on each hand, but the idea behind the mouse pointer effectively gives you just one finger with which to control the computer. There are whole programs out there that can only be controlled by the mouse (and I'm not just talking about draw/paint programs) not to mention the vast majority of the OS/2 interface itself. No wonder some people still worship the command-line; you're actually making use of the ten best tools God gave you.

  So let's break a few moulds here; How about using two mouse pointers? How about using ten? I can use one to move a window out of the way, the other to drag an icon previously covered by that window to the shredder, then move the window back again -- all in one smooth operation.

  Let's invent a glove-mouse that lets you use all five fingers as pointing/selecting devices, or a touch-sensitive screen that can track multiple points (and get someone in the chemical labs to invent a smear-proof coating for monitors; I hate greasy fingerprints).

  And then there are the windows. Do you ever stop to guess how much time you spend moving, resizing, nudging, tweaking, maximizing, minimizing, restoring and shuffling all those windows? One folder overlaps the icons in another, so you move it a bit, and then you have to nudge another before you can copy a file. The floating color palette is overlapping the canvas, so you move it, then you move the tool palette, then you move the color palette again because the tool palette is now covering that. And on and on and on. Bah! Spend ten minutes and I can tweak all of these windows into a usable configuration, but I don't get those ten minutes back!

  If an application must have a tool palette then dock it somewhere and give me room to work on those wide .TIF files.

  ### There's hope

  We all saw how awful graphical user interfaces could be when we played around with Windows 3.x. The stupid application-centric program manager with its homogenous group icons. Jungles of nested dialogs. The horrid File Manager and its primitive file associations. MORICONS.DLL (ugh!). By comparison OS/2's Workplace Shell is many light-years ahead, but it still shares many of the same problems as Windows 95, MacOS 7-point-something and most other GUIs.

  I do see improvement though. SouthSide Software's PMMail is what gave me the idea of eschewing error and alert dialogs for a simple log instead. And I'm sorry to say, but the sliding toolbars in Microsoft's Internet Explorer are a fantastic way of tucking multiple tool palettes out of the way when they aren't needed (yeah, that keeps the life of the buttonbar going a bit longer, but I'd still like to see more use of those other 'button palettes' that have been sitting under our fingers for years earlier).

  Newsreaders that follow the Free Agent style of layout have got a good hold on the window-fiddling problem. How about seeing that applied to other applications? Or maybe the whole OS itself?

  Thumbs up to Microsoft again (and Lotus too) for putting plain-English interpreters into their office suites. Thumbs down to Microsoft for the dancing paperclip and for only making it an elaborate search-engine for the help file. Stick the command line in the same place a browser's "Location:" field goes and let me type stuff like "Save this file and print it, then close and open june-budget." I want to do simple batch programming in English so I can really take advantage of my OS's background multitasking power.

  The first operating system that offers this kind of interface improvements will be the first one to seriously tempt me away from OS/2... that is unless it is OS/2 that gets 'em first.

  Chris Wenham is a freelance web designer, writer and Englishman who now lives in Endicott, NY. In the past he has written comedy, sci-fi, Pascal, Rexx, HTML and Gibberish. He has been using OS/2 exclusively for the past 2 years.

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