Does anyone remember Office 2013 with the UPPER CASE MENUS?
They were bad enough, but then Visual Studio 2013 HAD THEM TOO.
That was triply bad: ugly, took more screen width than Mixed Case, and perhaps worst of all, to a programmer they looked like errors.
Most of the languages we work with are case sensitive, so FILE and File look like two different things. It was a constant irritant.
The chief designer for VS2013 had a blog post about the new design, and naturally in the comments there were a lot of complaints about the uppercase menus.
The designer eventually replied: "Thanks for your feedback. We decided to keep the uppercase menus because we want more energy in this part of the interface."
More energy. I am not making this up.
They eventually came to their senses, and the next releases of Office and Visual Studio went back to conventional Mixed Case menus, just like every Windows app has used since the beginning.
(Note: my use of uppercase at the top of this message is not for emphasis or shouting, it's for illustrative purposes.)
> "We decided to keep the uppercase menus because we want more energy in this part of the interface."
It always seems to be new-age mumbo jumbo with these sort of design people. Design needs to be given back over to the engineers again. I know that suggesting is going to draw ridicule; it's easy and popular to point to the worst engineer-designed interfaces to ridicule the design abilities of all engineers. But form needs to be balanced with function and these artsy new-age designers who justify everything they do with faux-poetic metaphors have been a disaster. There needs to be balance.
Engineers can be taught the pragmatic virtue of interfaces designed for common people. Using standardized widgets and guidelines, engineers are perfectly capable of creating interfaces that are intuitive to users, even if they don't satisfy the dedicated designer's sense of aesthetics. Just look at the GUI libraries from the 90s and compare it with the dumpster fire of modern interfaces. In the 90s an engineer designing an interface would use a button widget and the button would look like a button. Today designers make everything look sleek and special to leave their artistic mark and I am left with no fucking clue what I can even click.
Design needs to be given back over to the engineers again.
No, no, then you get the open source approach:
In case the desktop shortcut for your application is not available with the /usr/share/applications/ directory you have and option to create the Desktop launcher manually. In this example we will create and Desktop application shortcut for Skype application. Obtain the following information for any given application you wish to create shortcut for. Below you can find an example:
To obtain a full path to executable binary of any program use the which command eg.:
$ which skype
/snap/bin/skype
In regards to the application icon, the choice is yours. You can either head over to /usr/share/icons/hicolor/ directory and search for any relevant icon to use, or simply download new icon from the web. Now that we have all the necessary information, create a new file Skype.desktop within ~/Desktop directory using your favourite text editor and paste the following lines as part of the file’s content. Change the code where necessary to fit your application specific details.
Yeah yeah, typical. "it's easy and popular to point to the worst engineer-designed interfaces to ridicule the design abilities of all engineers."
The general dysfunction of open source design is much broader than UI design and has little to do with engineers in general being incapable of good UI design. You might as well linux bluetooth woes to claim that engineers shouldn't be allowed to write device drivers. Whether it's designing a GUI, an API, or any other system, there will be some engineers who are good at it an others who suck. To get good design of any sort out of engineers you need an organizational structure that promotes talent and weeds out the hacks. The open source scene broadly lacks such structure and struggles to do this.
What you're talking about is a deficiency with community driven model of development, not a general deficiency of all engineers. Put 20 random chefs into a kitchen with no organizational structure imposed on them and your restaurant will be a disaster. But using that to claim chefs can't run a restaurant is absurd.
> 1) to keep Visual Studio consistent with the direction of other Microsoft user experiences
In other words, we jumped off this bridge because all our friends did to. Consistency... with other Microsoft products. What a joke. What about consistency with virtually every other Windows application, both from 3rd parties and Microsoft's own history? Citing consistency to justify such a bizarre departure from the 20 year norm is truly insulting.
> We decided to keep the uppercase menus because we want more energy in this part of the interface.
Translation: Here is vague explanation that distracts from the fact that I made this choice emotionally rather than rationally.
I see this time and time again. People are simply reacting emotionally. If they try to explain why they behaved a certain way, they offer an explanation with something that sounds rational but isn't actually the reason.
In this case, the designer probably was hurt that people didn't like their work and stubbornly resisted it.
They were bad enough, but then Visual Studio 2013 HAD THEM TOO.
That was triply bad: ugly, took more screen width than Mixed Case, and perhaps worst of all, to a programmer they looked like errors.
Most of the languages we work with are case sensitive, so FILE and File look like two different things. It was a constant irritant.
The chief designer for VS2013 had a blog post about the new design, and naturally in the comments there were a lot of complaints about the uppercase menus.
The designer eventually replied: "Thanks for your feedback. We decided to keep the uppercase menus because we want more energy in this part of the interface."
More energy. I am not making this up.
They eventually came to their senses, and the next releases of Office and Visual Studio went back to conventional Mixed Case menus, just like every Windows app has used since the beginning.
(Note: my use of uppercase at the top of this message is not for emphasis or shouting, it's for illustrative purposes.)