http://forums.t-mobile.com/tmbl/boar...3&thread.id=75...

This was the original one....not sure what happenend.

http://forums.t-mobile.com/tmbl/boar...&thread.id=738

I'm rather confused over people seriously discussing whether buttons are good or not, and about the number of buttons.

Let me show two good remote control designs:

http://gizmodo.com/5017972/story-of-...ent-and-future

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Remote

-
To me it's almost like discussing if dropdown menus are good or not. Buttons are tools, UI elements, and you can do a great job with a lot of buttons (like TiVo) or a really crappy job, and you can do a great job with only a few buttons or a really crappy job with them.

For remotes, Apple sacrifies long-term usability and performance for simplicity and ease of learning, whilst TiVo gives the performance, but at some cost. For the use case of watching a TV - where most users do it really a lot and have the time to become experts with it, and functions are rather static and predictable - the TiVo approach makes sense.

But to Allnameswereout, arguments like "You do not understand user interfaces" are quite immature. There is more than _your_ way to understand user interfaces, and any good designer should realize and respect that.

Don't worry, it's just a run of the mill internet flamewar.

This is true.

That is patently untrue. The buttons are there, originally, to serve a necessary purpose: functionality. The manufacturer then tries to save cost by moving those features elsewhere (e.g. slow-to-use-but-cheap on-screen-menu system, or relying solely on the remote control. Which is often only able to use the d*mn menu system anyway).

As for cameras, a well-designed camera with buttons, e.g. a thumb-wheel to switch quickly between options, is easier to use than any menu system. I've tested out a few different camera interfaces on my old parents, for example. For them, LCD menus are terrible, buttons are easy to get a grip on - if they are well thought out. And yes, also my old father wants to sometimes adjust the exposure by +/- a step of two, it didn't take him long to see that some pictures would be under- or over exposed otherwise. Incorrect exposure can't be fixed in photoshop or gimp, the functionality must be in the camera itself.

I'm sorry, but this generalization is false enough of the time to be misleading. 99% (this might be conservative) of the OS/WM is exposed by Python bindings. I use well written Python scripts that are quick, and more robust and reusable than their C/C++ counterparts to do real work on my tablet and desktop. Big or small doesn't matter if you leave the obvious heavy lifting to the OS/WM/other*. Relative to the work load, high level heavy logic can be handled quickly by good Python code. The conductor doesn't play the instruments.

So, generally, I disagree.

*any other Python bound shared library

I'm having a hard time understanding the point you're trying to get across anyway. It doesn't help that you're getting personal.

I can see the point of the simple "check mail while on the go" or "look up one site, then close browser" use cases.
Clearly, if this is what you have in mind, the current concept of Mameo isn't as ideal as the things you propose. (Hey! We agree here!)

But the point is: Would anybody pay $450,- or so for a device with only this limited capability? The things you talk about are things I do regularly on my S60 cell phone. Yes, this S60-phone could need a little love and attention in terms of UI design. It's not bad, but some of the points you make here about Maemo apply to S60. It could be improved.

Now the bad news is:
This cell phone (Nokia 6110 Navigator) with mail, HSDPA, browser, navigation software+maps, mobile office applications, multimedia player, FM radio, PIM+sync capability etc.... plus the ability to install additional software cost me €77,- (€17 plus a 1 year data plan for €5,-/month).

So if I say that I'd get a "voice and text message only"-phone for €35, the additional value of simple surfing, mailing, multimedia, office - all the things the Nokia 6110 can do - is roughly €45,-.

Given these prices, I'd either want a Maemo-device that's a GSM-phone for €77,- or a Maemo-tablet that's not a phone for €45. If it is as restricted as you propose. If it's made for the casual "one task at a time" use case.

When something is in the €300-500 price range, it needs to do much, much more than just let me "open website, read, close". I want to do what I described in my first post: Things that require workflows across several applications. Two tasks in parallel, each of which requires two or more applications to be used. When I take my tablet in my hand, the average use time is around 30mins-45mins:

Some IRC channels are lame, you have several minutes between relevant messages. I use this time to go through my newsfeeds. You say the interaction between feed reader and browser is minimal? Not if many of the feeds you follow only provide headlines or teasers, but not the full text content. It's a constant back-and-forth between feed reader and browser. Then I find something I copy and send via mail right there an then, while I'm at it. I dont go through all the feeds and then close the feed reader and return to this one page and copy and then close the browser to open modest to ... That's what I would do on the phone, maybe - no, I wouldn't, I wouldn't even try to do this on my cell phone, although technically maybe it could do it. (Symbian can do multitasking, can't it?) The restricted UI would drive me mad. I don't want a $450,--tablet to drive me mad.


I'm sorry to hear you consider my usage of my brain suboptimal. I feel I'm getting along just fine, maybe I'm lacking some of your social skills.

What use would it be to make NITs for the same segment of the market that's already well covered by Apple? Wouldn't it be much wiser to go for the segment that's currently completely ignored by Apple? Not only would it reduce unnecessary fights, it also seems that Apple is holding the smaller segment (as compared to all the people who choose not to buy Apple, no matter which market) and the other one would be more profitable.

Same here. I don't even remember people's names, let alone street names, yet I never get lost and find my way because I somehow always have a clear 3D model of where I am right now and how I got there from where I started. Nice chat. I just don't see how this relates to kiosk-mode applications that prevent task switching and adjusting volume etc.

Oh come on, you made this up right now. Why would this be?
And even if they did: In MicroB, they do this by 1 click on a button that's always visible. In Fennec, they need 2 interactions, one of which is completely counter-intuitive. MicroB wins.


Among geeks, not in the real world. Geeks loved Operas mouse gestures. Nobody ever used them in real life. Geeks loved exotic skins on media players. 99,99% of the users wouldn't even find a play button with these skins.
My first real graphical UI was Win3.11 (I even had Win 1.0 once, but I refuse to count this). There's no change since those days, and even the concepts of Win3.11 weren't invented by MS with this operating system but date waaay back. There's a very good reason why we still have the same menus, check-boxes and buttons we had decades ago: They stand the test of time. Every now and then, UI-gurus declare a new age of user interfaces. 20 years later, we happily click on buttons and choose from menus.

I can't see how creating 653 profiles for all brightness/volume-combinations I could ever want would increase the joy of using the device. Still, even if I did: I'd need some means of activating a certain profile while I'm working in an application. And that was the whole point: You cannot do this if applications run full screen and full screen only.

Links please.

Startup time, minimal memory usage... Of course it will work fast after that if you leave the heavy lifting to the more robust libs. Hell, every scripting language works fast if you don't write [relatively too much] code in it

Too many variables here.

Flame throwers enyone??...