Power User definition [LWN.net]

Power User definition

Posted Feb 13, 2012 19:43 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Power User definition by bronson
Parent article: Day: A New Approach to GNOME Application Design

I'm confused. I thought GNOME 3's entire design was predicated on the assumption that people would be using tablets for it all the time rather than PCs? (I can't see any sense to most of its design decisions except in light of that.)

Yet now we get 'people don't replace anything with tablets'. Hmm.

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Power User definition

Posted Feb 13, 2012 23:03 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (4 responses)

I don't think they believe there will only be tablet but there will be a lot of them and it's a new open market that Apple and Microsoft haven't completely locked up yet. Keeping the UI flexible so that it can be used both on a tablet and a traditional desktop, without doubling the work, seems to make logical engineering sense. The two big vendors, Apple and Microsoft have independently come to the same conclusion as they are merging a bunch of their smartphone/tablet UI onto their desktop PC systems. I'm guessing that using a mouse on a UI that was designed with touch in mind is much easier than going the other way. Have you ever tried a traditional Windows tablet in the last 20 years? Awful, all sorts of mouse-dependent behavior that doesn't work with a touchscreen.

They may be right or they may be wrong but they came to their conclusions logically and reasonably AFAICT. We'll see in 5 years if these design decisions bear fruit.

Power User definition

Posted Feb 18, 2012 0:37 UTC (Sat) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] (3 responses)

The UI you need for a tablet is very different from the UI you need for a desktop. Apple recognizes that and hasn't tried to make the user interfaces the same between the two.

> I'm guessing that using a mouse on a UI that was designed with
> touch in mind is much easier than going the other way.

Bad guess. There's a lot of touch operations that have no mouse equivalent, like anything using multitouch.

The mouse is a precision instrument, whereas touch is very imprecise.

Users get annoyed when they have to move their mouse a long distance, whereas tapping a different part of the touch screen is easy.

> Have you ever tried a traditional Windows tablet in the last 20
> years? Awful, all sorts of mouse-dependent behavior that doesn't
> work with a touchscreen.

Wow-- it's almost like the two products need different user interfaces. Maybe someone should make a note of that. A lot of companies and open source organizations have sunk a huge amount of time and money into the foolish assumption that tablet UIs are relevant on the desktop, and vice versa.

Power User definition

Posted Feb 18, 2012 6:15 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (2 responses)

> The UI you need for a tablet is very different from the UI you need for a desktop. Apple recognizes that and hasn't tried to make the user interfaces the same between the two.

That's just nonsense. Most of the user-visible changes in Lion and the announce features for Mountain Lion are the transfer of iOS UI elements to the desktop (such as the app launcher or Notification Center) and even whole applications (like Notes, Messaging)

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/02/apple-unleashes...

Power User definition

Posted Feb 18, 2012 10:14 UTC (Sat) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] (1 responses)

That article says that they added "messages, notes, and reminders" to "Mac OS Mountain Lion." I don't see anything in there about making the user interface the same between the desktop and portable devices.

Power User definition

Posted Feb 18, 2012 18:11 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

If you didn't see that it was the same app and same ui then you must have not been looking, I don't know what else to say.