Lately in my attempt to juggle many tasks and getting things done as fast as possible, I have become increasingly frustrated at some of the current UI implementations, some are pointless, some are ugly, some are a pain to use. And often it’s the combination of all 3. For once, I am not talking about Blender. This is a general rant on the various softwares I encounter every day.
Part 1: The diminishing vertical space
How much time do you spend watching movies on the computer screen? And how much time do you spend browsing the net? If your answer is in favor of the web browsing, then help me understand why is widescreen still a popular choice for laptops and netbooks, where the focus is suppose to be work, and not play?
And if we agree that widescreen is a bad idea for working with text (reading webs and writing emails, etc), then why do applications still like to hog up vertical screen space so much? And no, a 1280×800 screen can NOT fit two pages of point 11 text side-by-side, so don’t even try that argument.
On a 13 inch laptop, the ever popular resolution seems to be 1280×800. If you are browsing with IE8 running on Win 7, (Firefox is not any better when it comes to this), out of the 800 vertical pixels, 185 pixels are taken up by the UI elements, shrinking the viewable content to a diminutive 615 pixel! For a netbook it’s worse, browsing without fullscreen is almost like looking out a slit. Sure you can scroll up and down to view the content. But why make the user work for it when the application can simply condense the UI element?
Google Chrome seems to have the right idea about this: out of the box uses a reasonable 64 pixel of vertical space, leaving the rest for CONTENT. A few pixels might not seems like a big deal, but when you are working on a small screen, every pixel needs to do something useful!
Man I am bitter today…
Hi,
I’ve started wondering on this myself too often. Even when You use a spacious large enough 24 desktop screen as I do every day a two pages really fit well. I really can put two A4 sheets on my screen and it’s five fingers from side and only finger and a half on top as a space that is left. Thinking that all new gizmos are really taking their time to arrange their space MOSTLY on the right side of the screen a left side navigation for the programs should be something for everybody a serious consideration.. More of for people that are breathing movies a new 2.11:1 aspect ratio TV and I hope soon 30″ monitors will come. So that simply means – more side space then ever. I know that usually it’s not practical to arrange tabs etc in columns, but blender proves the opposite, and even M$ are preferring dropping menus from some time now (vista style office etc.) And a quick question regarding this one – why not moving at least Your bottom bar to the side? I’m hiding mine, since I prefer Alt-TABBING and ususally not too many (only 3 to 4) applications running :-)
Blender 2.5′s UI definitely embraced widescreens with the new default vertical panels. It’s so much superior to the old horizontal setup.
Ribbon is an interesting concept. But then again it takes up a lot of vertical space when expanded, I saw someone writing a paper with Word 2007 on a netbook today, they can only see two lines of text. The problem is most people don’t seems to mind the limited screen space, even though they can easily mimimize the UI with a few clicks. When you are focused on writing, all that formatting UI is useless and is just taking up screenspace.
I agree totally. What annoys me the most, is the kind of additional menus under the main menus, which contain just a few big buttons with large icons and text under the icons (like new, save etc.) I never click on those buttons in most apps, and at worst there’s just two or three of them, yet the bar extends through the whole window, wasting a lot of vertical space.
Bloated UI’s can actually slow people down quite a bit.
And yeah Mike, I’ve noticed many people don’t seem to mind bloated UI, perhaps they just accept whatever UI is thrown at them.
My main gripe, though, is lots of small, overlapping windows you need to hunt around for. I hate making every other click, a click to move something around.