Re: OT: Custom UI design tools
Re: OT: Custom UI design tools
- Subject: Re: OT: Custom UI design tools
- From: James Chandler Jr <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 12:11:59 -0400
On Tuesday, May 27, 2003, at 08:13 AM, Jay Vaughan wrote:
Seems silly, to me, to be emulating synthesizers all the way to the
knobs, which I think are crap controls anyway.
Sometimes I like "photo-realistic" GUI's, sometimes not. Eye candy can
be nice for its own sake, same reason folks hang pictures on the wall,
spend thousands of extra bucks for a "good looking car", or prefer Aqua
appearance to MacOS 5 (GRIN).
For customers long-familiar with a specific hardware box, it can be a
mnemonic, perceptual aid to glance at a "unique" control panel with
which one is already familiar, rather than a big anonymous array of
generic system sliders and buttons. In that neat orderly array of
identical sliders, one must read the text to locate the desired control.
Product differentiation-- some big company that makes the most
fantastic reverb in the world, might encounter difficulty convincing
musicians to plunk down hundreds of dollars, if the UI is so generic
that it looks identical to freeware reverb plugins (GRIN).
Regardless if a window is "photo-realistic" or uses generic controls vs
custom controls, it can be truly useful if your favorite Compressor
plugin looks entirely different from your favorite Reverb plugin. Makes
it faster to identify windows "at a glance". If all the plugins have
the same anonymous orderly rows of sliders and buttons, must "look
twice" to find the desired window. When you have to think about the
program, it can get your mind off the music, which is the main task at
hand.
IMO, a poorly done "photo-realistic" panel is much worse than a generic
window. There are numerous examples of ugly badly-rendered controls.
Conversely, one can find numerous examples where great care was taken
to draw a pretty panel, but the program's UI handling is so bad that
the panel is practically unusable.
It takes a LOT of time and trouble to program a good photo-realistic
panel. Is desirable to have an actual artist on-board, because many
programmers have terrible taste in graphics and layout (GRIN).
International translation/localization can be difficult on
photo-realistic panels, compared to ordinary vanilla interfaces.
Typical translators (from my experience) don't have programming chops.
Each locale can require significant programmer intervention.
Those are reasons I don't do "fancy" interfaces lately. There isn't
enough time, and localization is too big a chore.
James Chandler Jr.
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