Archive for the ‘ui’ Category

gdm sloppiness

March 28th, 2008

Today's example sponsored by gdm. Say that you have a certain session (gnome, kde, fluxbox, whatever) and you're experimenting with another one which isn't working quite smoothly yet. Then you'll be stuck going back and forth a few times. And you'll probably see this dialog:

gdm1.png

The Ubuntu gdm theme is nice and clean and it's easy to figure out how to change the session. This dialog does the job without much ado. But then you find this:

gdm2.png

After you've changed the session, assumed that the change succeeded, stopped thinking about it, and moved on to start the session by logging in, you get this idiotic dialog.

This is horrifying in several ways. First of all, the gdm login screen is completely clean of any dialogs, so there is no hint given that you should expect a popup. Secondly, once you've set everything using the secondary controls at the bottom of the screen, you just want to login and be on your way. When I'm in that mode, I've basically learnt to hit Enter as many times as it takes to get me through, so I'm very likely to accidentally accept the dialog since I don't know it's coming.

And finally, the question of whether to make the session the default one is completely cut out from the menu for changing the session, which shows a complete lack of consistency. Here I'm done doing something and later on I have to answer unexpected question about something I already finished.

Not to mention that the "unsafe" choice is selected by default, I might accidentally change my default session just by clicking Enter twice after putting in my password.

Worst of all, even when I know that the popup is coming, I absolutely do not want to have to answer it again and again just because someone couldn't figure out a better place to put that option. Make it a checkbox on the previous dialog, that's what everyone else does, why must you be so special?

I'll be nice and I'll just call this sloppiness.

EDIT: Bug filed.

UPDATE: Bug fixed in gdm 2.21.

ui is all about ideas

March 23rd, 2008

User interfaces take a whole lot of effort to get right and that's the main reason I'm not particularly inclined to write gui apps. There are so many examples of bad user interface that I could spend my life writing about nothing else. Ui is hard mostly because what seems correct for one person gets forced on everyone to use. It's also because good ui takes good ideas and those are not as common as you might think. A lot of the bad ui we have to put up with comes from one group of people copying not so much the ideas but the results of another group without understanding them equally well or realizing them the same way. There's a lot of ranting in ui circles about how we're all using decade old paradigms in user interfaces, but where is the rich vein of fresh supplies?

Well, sometimes ideas do actually surface. Jensen Harris talks about the process of redesigning the gui for Ms Office. It's an insightful talk that approaches the problem of the well known gui (that has caused us all a lot of pain) with the appropriate humility towards the frustrated user. It also shows off some of the improvements (which are major!) that makes the 2007-series gui a lot more intuitive by making commands whose names we know appear visually and offer dynamic previews. Obviously, these ideas are specific to the domain of formatting and don't apply to any application, which happens to coincide with why they represent a big step forward: they enrich the experience in the domain they are for.

As you might expect, I'm not particularly interested in Office or any products coming out of Microsoft in general as they do not address my needs. But I sure do wish projects like OpenOffice (which, again, we're stuck with) would stop trying to clone the bad gui of old Microsoft products and do a little brainstorming themselves. Other examples that continue to live on in infamy include the gimp (how many thousands of dialogs have you clicked through today?), vlc (great technical performance, horrendous gui) and gvim (the gui offers next to nothing over the keyboard ui).

data representation makes the difference

February 11th, 2008

You probably remember ethereal, right? Yeah, the gtk packet sniffer that has been around forever, but people like me who are pretty lame about networks tried it and didn't know what to do with it. In principle it's all very simple: you capture traffic and then you look at the data. Erm... kay. Well, in practice I had a tough time getting something out of that. Even a simple http request when split into an array of tcp packets doesn't really enlighten me that much when I have a little chunk of it here and the next there and so on. There are so many of them that I'm looking for the needle in the haystack.

This is a lesson in user interface design. ethereal is now called wireshark, and it's the same exact gui window that it always has been (with some minor incremental improvements). Here's the difference though. They figured out that data visualization goes so much further when you actually give a thought to representation.

The before picture, googled for an old screenshot of ethereal:

The window is split into three panes. The top one is the one you'll look at first, this is the list of packets we captured. Notice how small the scrollbar is and just imagine we have a large chunk of traffic in front of our eyes. Scroll up, scroll down, sort by protocol, whatever. In the other two panes you have info on the packet that is selected right now. In the middle one you have nicely structured info, in the bottom you have the raw data. This is the way to look at packet content. Btw tcp packets can be up to 1.5kb in size, so it's not exactly a sizable amount of content.

Gear up for the after picture:

Yeap, colors. Really, that's all I had to say. People underestimate what a difference it makes to have the same exact output in contextual coloring. The same data just jumps up at you if you know it's gonna be in red and you don't have to parse the whole chunk of text to get to it. Notice how the old version and this one have the protocol column just the same, but how much easier is it now to spot different types of traffic? It makes a world of difference.

wireshark has another brilliant addition that I don't remember from years ago. You right click on a packet, like the tcp packet selected in the screenshot above that belongs to an http stream, and go Follow TCP Stream. What you now get is a new window with aaaaall the packets that belong to this conversation assembled and you can observe the whole thing in one place. Fabulous. You can also filter the data (on message level, not packet level mind you) on host if you like. It's fantastic.

If you thought *that* was bling, this will really blow you away. wireshark does not only assemble http conversations, it assembles a lot more protocols. For instance, I saw a talk the other day where the guy was demonstrating how he sniffed a voip conversation and then reassembled the whole thing to a simple audio file with a few clicks!

These two features, packets colored by protocol and packet assembly, alone make wireshark about 200% more useful than it used to be. And think about what has changed here. It's still the same data. The only difference is how you represent it.

Opera: the huge missed opportunity?

January 27th, 2008

Tabs. Mouse gestures. User-agent switcher. Dedicated transfer window. Pop-up blocking and javascript abuse filtering. Integrated search box. Page zoom. Session saver.

Chew on those features. We'll be coming back to them.

Let me take you back in time to a year I like to call 1996. Those were the murky days of 28.8kbps dial-up modems and "personal websites" that said "Welcome to my website! (under construction) Here's my email address." It was also the prime of Netscape Navigator, the new browser that had taken the fast expanding internet by storm and become the successor to the venerable Mosaic. Netscape was about as ubiquitous as you can imagine, for all intents and purposes it was the world wide web. Anyone privileged enough to have access to the web (chiefly in universities) had Netscape running. Microsoft (already then king of the desktop), having famously discarded the internet as a fad, had nothing to offer and Internet Explorer in 1996 was a complete joke.

This is the climate in which a little Norwegian software company decided to launch their precocious new product: a web browser. It was very much the right time for that. The web browser was by no means an established product, it was a very fresh concept. Netscape was putting in all sorts of new features and had no competition (yet). So in 1996 Opera launched their Opera web browser 2.0 and the game was on. The project was a success: a couple of years down the road a lot of people knew about Opera. And it was cool to have a Norwegian company out there in the arena - one of the most hotly contested applications even to this day, the browser.

Of course, there were hard times ahead for Netscape. Microsoft made serious progress with IE and bundling it with Windows (adding to the ongoing internet revolution where more and more home users got connected) meant that Netscape's position was threatened. Little by little it was becoming apparent that Netscape was a dinosaur next to IE, which loaded quicker, ran faster and crashed less. Netscape was not blind to this, but their counter strategy turned out to be the cyanide pill in the cocktail. They decided to scrap the existing code and start a rewrite. And thus, give or take, we never heard from Netscape again. Over the next couple of years IE pushed out the old Netscape installations (and with no new releases, IE won by default), and basically captured the whole market. This was a time when IE actually was the best product. (I know how incredible that must sound.)

Where was Opera in all of this? Catching up, it would seem. But by 2000 Opera had caught up quite nicely and Opera 4 was a very slick browser. It wasn't as complete as IE, but it looked good and both loaded and ran faster than IE5. This seems like the first time Opera was in a position to start competing with IE. It had momentum, it had speed going for it, it had new features. Hot on the heels came Opera 5, and then Opera 6 in 2001.

This is where Opera set an important precedent. With the benefit of hindsight, knowing how incredibly difficult it has been for Firefox to unseat IE, things could have been different for Opera. I recall using Opera on and off in this period. I liked the product, I liked how lightweight it was and still worked just as well, but there was just something... off about it. It didn't quite feel right. As a user of IE, I didn't feel at home in Opera. The user interface was not just different, it was too different. Then and there, I realized that Opera would not be my first choice, in spite of everything it had going for it. Purely because of the user interface.

It wasn't just me. Opera failed to build a user base. It had adoption among technology enthusiasts, but it utterly failed to break into the realm of average users. We are talking about a browser with an attractive interface, with tabbed browsing, and faster page loading. Not only that, it was more solid than just about any Microsoft application: it just did not crash. IE5, meanwhile, was on a downhill stability slope where the crashes and freezes would only get worse and worse with the proliferation of pop-ups and various nasty advertising gimmicks that the web was becoming infested with. Opera handled this so much more gracefully. But Opera was #3 (still behind Netscape) and light years behind IE in user base, without really making progress.

In 2002 Netscape returned from the dead. The rewrite everyone had long since forgotten about was released into the open, under the name Mozilla. It had little in common with the old Netscape now, the rendering engine (Gecko) was new and the user interface had been replaced (phew). Meanwhile, it was IE's turn to stagnate, IE6 was released in 2001 just before Windows XP and there ended the trail. By 2003 I felt Mozilla was so overwhelmingly superior that I wrote an advocacy text in favor of it, to wean people off the (by now) awfully backward IE. Firebird became Firefox and a year or two later the popular Firefox revolution began for real - suddenly everyone and their grandma was using Firefox.

Today IE is the dinosaur next to Firefox. The dinosaur still dominates the market, because of the unfair advantage of being pre-installed. And for the sake of completeness, grab a can of Microsoft Anti-Competitive Practices and sprinkle the whole historical period generously. But it's completely obvious that Firefox has long since won in every dimension, on technical merit, and in folklore.

Browser market share is a notoriously contested metric, but the general consensus (to the extent that there is one), is that IE remains first, then Firefox, then Safari (they basically pulled an IE on the Mac), finally Opera at #4.

With the release of KDE 4.1 on Windows and Mac (expected in July), Konqueror (which seems to be gaining ground on Linux) will be available on all platforms. If KDE adoption on Windows goes well, which I think is entirely plausible, Konqueror (now with the webkit engine) could relegate Opera to #5.

What is wrong with this picture? Let's return to the features I mentioned at the start.

Tabs. Mouse gestures. User-agent switcher. Dedicated transfer window. Pop-up blocking and javascript abuse filtering. Integrated search box. Page zoom. Session saver.

Here is the big question: which browser was first to include these features? Opera. Opera. Opera. Opera. Opera. Opera. Opera. Opera. That's right, Opera prototyped all of these things. And it would actually take years before other browsers could be persuaded that these were good ideas. For heaven's sake, Firefox didn't include saving your tabs until version 2.0 in 2006! Futhermore, Opera has taken certain ideas from others and improved upon them. Firefox was first to save your passwords, but it works better in Opera.

Opera also predates every browser in common use except IE, its contemporary. And yet Opera has failed to make a real impact, why? It's not because the technology isn't good enough: Opera is still super stable and faster than anything else. Performance wise Opera completely dominates the embedded market, that should be sufficient proof. And it's not for a lack of ideas, clearly.

To put it bluntly: why did people rally around Firefox and not Opera? Is it because Firefox is technically superior? It isn't. Is it because Opera is closed source? No, I really don't believe the average user understands the distinction, or cares about it. Is it because of the extensions? It is definitely a great sales pitch, but again I don't believe that's the reason. "Power users" adore them, but does grandma really care? I sort of doubt it. Is it because Firefox is more "secure"? It isn't. Nor is it any less portable, you get the same Opera on every platform, just like Firefox. What's more, I don't think Opera has an unfair reputation on any of these points. It's just that Opera is the browser I'm going to use if this one crashes. It is "the alternative". It isn't the first choice.

Taking a stand to be different is bold, and deciding to make your application different and expect users to adapt is even more bold. It doesn't matter if your way is better. If there's one thing you absolutely have to know about software engineering, it is this: people hate change. If you are first to the party, you set your own rules. But if you're second, alas you have to play by someone else's. Opera is not competing for the theoretical masses of people who don't have a browser and are looking for one. They are ostensibly fighting to convert people from IE and Firefox.

I first heard about Opera through Norwegian media in 1999. I was excited about it and I've kept an eye on it ever since. I have made several attempts to adopt it (most recently because Firefox&adobe-flash is such an explosive combination, pun intended), but they've all failed. It is little things. How I cannot satisfactorily reproduce my Personal Bookmark Folder toolbar the way I have it set up in Firefox. Or how when I click to close a tab in Opera the tab that becomes active is not the one I want, I want the Firefox behavior. Or how I can't use extensions that I have come to expect (nowadays it is Firefox setting the standard for browsers). Or how when loading pages from slow servers they seem to get stuck loading and never time out, which doesn't give me a conclusive answer as to whether it's just slow or it can't connect. Or how when I want to configure something I can never seem to find that specific option amid a lot of other options I don't care about. Or how the caching mechanism seems to work slightly differently, so that I have to deliberately reload pages more often. Or how the fonts until very recently (before 9.50) have been scaled different and looked wrong. A dozen little things like that and it adds up to "I don't quite like this application".

When I've spoken to people about Opera I have never heard complaints about technical shortcomings. What people always say is "it's too different". And it was too different from IE when Firefox came along as it is too different from Firefox now. User interface is a very delicate problem. People's perceptions of how things are "right" or "wrong" are very subjective and entrenched, much like how in one city you feel at home and in another you don't. Opera has stayed true to their user base over the years by doing things slightly differently. I think this is also how they have taken themselves out of the running in the browser wars, despite having a highly competitive product at least since 2000.

That isn't to say they have failed. Opera Software is a thriving company and while they have 1% or less of the desktop market, they have made a successful land grab on the PDA/smartphone market with Opera Mobile, which is the same browser. While I find the proposition of putting a browser on a 200 pixel display is a horrible idea, I would pick Opera any day for that role.

Still, one could easily imagine a status quo where Opera is more of an influence. I think had they been more reluctant to redefine the browser this could have been the case. Ironically, most people will remember Firefox to have innovated the concept of tabbed browsing. Just like Apple "innovates" by recycling old ideas. By now Firefox has taken just about every good idea left from Opera and put it into a product and a form that people are more eager to use. That is to Opera's credit, and yet it is a bit sad that that Opera hasn't gotten the credit for it by attracting users.

I do actually think Opera has been converging on a lot of these little points of friction over the last couple of years, so it makes a stronger case than it used to. They have adopted some Firefox-bling that Firefox users expect to have, like an Adblock-lookalike, themes, about:config etc. Unfortunately, there is also more competition these days, from Safari (which sort of sucks, but not enough for people to rebel) and soon perhaps Konqueror.

user settings migration

January 19th, 2008

The nice thing about being a gentoo user (as all gentoo users know), is not having to wait for your distribution to ship packages for a new release. You just decide for yourself how soon you want to jump ahead and start using either unstable code or just-released goodness. So while Ubuntu is shipping KDE 4.0 in 8.04, and thus my laptop is stuck waiting for it, on my gentoo box I can use it as soon as the ebuilds hit the tree (and even before that, with layman).

So when I launch into the nicely pre-configured KDE 4.0 desktop the first thing I notice is that my configuration settings from KDE 3 no longer apply. What's happened is that the ~/.kde symlink has been pointed from ~/.kde3.5 to ~/.kde4.0 and so every remaining KDE 3 application (of which I have many), is now trying to locate its settings under ~/.kde4.0, where it has no settings. In other words, every application I've configured from akregator to yakuake now has to be reconfigured (even though it hasn't changed!) because of KDE 4. That stinks, I don't want to waste time trying to reproduce the settings of some 20 applications to match exactly what they used to be.

What are my options? I can go into ~/.kde3.5/share/apps and copy every directory I care about over to ~/.kde4.0/share/apps. Then I have to do something similar for ~/.kde3.5/share/config versus ~/.kde4.0/share/config. But if that is all it takes why didn't KDE 4 do that on the first run? There are a lot of configuration files in there, and I've never looked at them nor should I have any reason to, they've all been written by the application they belong to. Furthermore, some applications are upgraded with KDE 4.0.0, so I don't know if it's safe to copy their config files across. For instance, kwin-4.0.0 is one of the new packages I installed. Now, I like my existing kwin settings, and as far as they still apply I want to use them in kwin4, but I don't know how kwin4 deals with old configuration files. Applications know this, users don't.

What KDE 4 could have done is to duplicate ~/.kde3.5 into ~/.kde4.0 (although that could potentially grab a lot of disk space) and then selectively migrate the configuration files on a per-application basis. So kwin4 could figure out there are some things that no longer apply, discard those, and accept the rest. It would only have to do that once. And all the KDE 3 settings would still be preserved in ~/.kde3.5.

The thing to remember is that configuration settings is still user data. Losing a user's settings is not as egregious as losing his emails, but it's still data loss. It's valuable information. And the more configurable your application is, the more you should care about keeping the user's settings safe, because a complicated configuration is a lot harder to remember and reproduce than a simple one. Preserving old settings is fine, but it isn't very useful when you don't also migrate them to a new version of your application.