I think this dude is a good thinker but damn, i can imagine the poor user or should i say victim running for cover.
âI have to say that a big dialog with loads of controls on it is prolly the best type of design for a wget gui.â
I think that basically bouys Jeffâs point. 
You donât see FTP clients all centering around that idea, despite the being the same in concept! Nor gui-based spider engines come to think of it, like black widow, sitescan, etc. I wouldnât hold them up as paragons of great UI, but at least it isnât so horrifying.
Thr big problem with a bag of checkboxes, dropdowns, and textboxes, is it doesnât highlight the most important changes, it doesnât hide non-imporant options, it doesnât have any attempt at a logical flow in setting up a run, and most importantly it simply overwhelms.
I think many developers actually understand the issue, they simply have no UI training, nor the imagination and desire to come up with radically different workflows once they settle on one. If nothing else, theyâll try to conform it to the way IDEs and other power user tools work, thus the much more common mediocre tree-and-toolbar-based design. A lot of software I use or see would be right at home in the Windows 3.1 school of design.
(I pray that now that linux is starting to get some really good distros and attracting corporations to the desktop, itâll stop being so enslaved to cheapest-and-quickest UI. I donât care if making something easier is dumbing it down, scanning source code to see what a checkbox does got old real fast.)
Great, another fool that thinks that all developers canât do design. Theyâre just as bad as the ones that think they all can. Assess the individual and stop generalising you banana tree you.
Yea, developersâ UIs are crap. Websites âdesignedâ by âwebmastersâ (php, asp coders et al) are even bigger turds.
It could be the Marketing Departmentâs fault.
Poor guy needed a test harness and wrote what you see. Marketing upped the ship date a month and the rest is history!
well if any of you craptards had ever used wget youâd what a pain it is. So i guess this tool actually a nice gui for wget. Oh sorry, i forgot, youâd rather have 50-step wizardâŚ
This is pretty good actually.
Iâm coding some UI for living. I saw how specially trained UI designers ruins one too many products.
Which becomes flashy, slick and annoyingly impotent.
I donât like many things in both Linux and Windows UI worlds.
When I have to click thru 15 âstupid userâ-friendly wizards. And still have to hack registry.
Gimme my checkboxes in one place. Wget UI is good, back off.
I THINK EVERYONE IS PICKING ON WGET BECAUSE THEY ARENâT READING THE ENTIRE ARTICLE.
CLICK THE âThe FileMatrixâ LINK!!!
Who here would be really tempted to hit the âPro Modeâ button to get even more options?
Honestly, my experience has been worse with âdesignersâ than developers. As someone earlier mentioned, at least the UI a developer creates works for someone.
Photoshop is NOT appropriate for UI design. Please get a tool that generates something that could be implemented in the technology to be used, not fiction.
And please save me from designers who know nothing about human factors. Theyâre far more dangerous to UI than any other beast.
thatâs an UI for wget - who the hell needs GUI for wget, itâs natural environment is shellâŚ
You know there is nothing wrong with this. So itâs not pretty who cares. Just be thankful you donât have fifteen tabs, cascading dialog boxes, and icons you stare at trying to figure out what they mean.
If you want an example of horrible UI look at outlook options.
Apple UI design on Windows s-u-c-k-s.
There, I said it.
That being said, Iâm pretty darn good at UI design, even if I say so myself. Coding, not so much.
haha thats nothing. Download the beryl-settings tool (debs available for ubuntu) and check it out. Has more options than all of GNOME or KDE⌠combined. Quite handy for development since all the options are procedurally generated from the plugins, but man does it ever confuse the heck out of our users.
Thatâs it. Iâve gone blind now. Thank you.
So, whatâs your proposal for good design UI?
Complaining is way easier to proposing.
I think the resource editor has done more harm to UI design than good. In particular, it enables a kind of thoughtless drag and drop that results in the kind of VB-looking horror described above.
Iâm old enough to have been at this prior to the advent of resource editors, and while they are useful for some things, I still go back to handcoding UI, because, particularly with modern layout-managed frameworks, the code forces one to think through the hierarchy and containership, and to visualize whatâs going to occur at runtime.
In short, instead of obfuscating the relationship between UI and the code that creates it, handcoding illuminates it.
Iâll admit that there are some developers that wouldnât create quality UI either way, but Iâd argue that choosing a developer who has the proper perspective on usability is the key.
Seriously, itâs not that bad. The options are all clearly labelled and reasonably grouped. Itâs ugly sure, but it could be oh-so-much-worse.
Hereâs the thing. If the goal is to pop up the gui and click as many options as you need and hit go, thatâs about as good as the gui is going to get. Do I want to flip through a dozen menus to grab some data? No. This gui would work fine for me. This isnât a word processor, itâs a frontend for wget.
"have the good sense to stick to coding and leave the graphic design to the experts"
I beg to differ here, GUI programming is not any different than other types of programming. There are sets of rules and principles documented, lots of books about it, itâs not a black art.
The problem here is most developers look down on their users and think that GUI programming is inferior work.