That's because these fontes (Bitstream Vera, Profont) aren't as nicely hinted as Courier New. True Type fonts need good built-in hints to look good without antialias.
Font hinting is a careful and complicated job, and now that antialiased desktops are becoming the norm it seems that font designers are being more sloppy with hinting.
Is it me, or Windows, or Java font handling, or IDEA, or simply badly implemented fonts, that this Bitstream Vera Sans Mono as well as Profont look really bad without antialiasing?
Strange, for my taste, Profont looks on Windows NT or 2000 better without antialiasing.
I resent the spam reference. Is it so dishonest and unfashionable to *** not *** give away source code, ;-).
I am a paying IntelliJ customer and decided to offer up a view of my own product's look and feel as a possible basis for IntelliJ's UI design team and not for freeloaders.
You might be suprised to know that any pleasing qualities come not from a look and feel but a consistency in information (layout, spacing, positioning, contrast) and graphical design (color theory...).
In fact there really is no L&F if we are strict in the meaning of L&F.
People mentioned other products and I thought I would not be attacked for referencing my own.
The last time I tried your app, it was using SkinLF. The UI in fact was so horrible and irritating that I stopped evaluating your product due to it. It's rare that a UI is so annoying and unresponsive that I decide that it just isn't worth the bother.
Granted, this was on OSX, and I haven't tried it recently, but given the choice between eye candy and a functional app, I'd pick a functional app any day.
A few points: - JDBinsight 2.0 and previous versions 1.2 has always been fast, very fast. If you actually used the product you would know how incorrect this statement is.
- JDBInsight 1.2 and 2.0 have never used any SkinLF product its simply a hybrid of MetalLookAndFeel - lots of UIManager settings.
- JDBInsight 2.0 is used by most of the leading appserver vendors for their ECperf & SPECJApperver 2002 benchmarking and has the lowest overhead on the market for high transaction load systems.
- JDBInsight does not run on OSX. It is supported on Windows, Linux, and Solaris.
- I am a HCI expert as well as a graphic designer before I became a distributed systems engineer/consultant (ex-Borlander - Visibroker and Borland Enterprise Server) so I just might know what eye candy is.
Eye candy...that hurt.
I think after your post attacking the product your could at least spend a little time investigating the product and possibly retracting your statement.
Wow... now I did not see that coming. But since you took it as flamebate... well I'm game!
Stefan,
I resent the spam reference. Is it so dishonest and unfashionable to *** not *** give away source code, ;).
Who said anything about giving anything away? I asked if you had it available as a seperate product as well (meaning that I would have been willing to pay for it if it fit my needs... note the "would have been").
I am a paying IntelliJ customer and decided to offer up a view of my own product's look and feel as a possible basis for IntelliJ's UI design team and not for freeloaders.
Although I'm a dedicated supporter of open source software that doesn't mean I'm a freeloader. For example: would you be distributing your application under the GPL licence I would have respected that. I also respect that you don't want to use the GPL or an open source licence (well... you probably haven't even considered that since you regard me as a "freeloader"). You made a decision (or your company) to sell your product and I'm fine with that. The point is that I wasn't asking for a "free" download... I simply asked if the look and feel was available as a package.
You might be suprised to know that any pleasing qualities come not from a look and feel but a consistency in information (layout, spacing, positioning, contrast) and graphical design (color theory...).
Well.. I'm not very surprised to hear that. In fact I knew that already (surprised?). However, what you call "look and feel" that is, the look of an application, has a big impact on the first impression that the user gets. Therefore I believe that the look is important as well. I'm already working on the feel part so don't you worry about that.
I regard "look and feel" as a synonym for what you thought would surprise me... that is, the look and feel is how the application looks and feels and a big part of that is like you said an overall consistency. In fact, the purpose of an actual Look and Feel theme in Java is to make sure the things you talk about are consistent.
In fact there really is no L&F if we are strict in the meaning of L&F.
??? I don't follow... are you talking in general or just for your product? If you're saying that there is no actual look and feel as a part of your product that's fine, but your original post implied that there was.
People mentioned other products and I thought I would not be attacked for referencing my own.
Well... I wasn't attacking you for "referencing" your own product. If you would have said something like "Well.. in our product we do this and that to achive a rather pleasing overall effect in the user experience, you can see what I mean at " I would have been fine... but you wrote:
"Has anybody checked out JDBInsight's 2.0 Look and Feel?"
That sounded to me like you were promoting your Look and Feel package (which would have been fine because I would have been interested in that) but instead I see a product that I have no interest in and that hit me like a cheap advertisement (hence the "spam" in my post).
The fact that you're a paying customer has nothing to do with anything here. Rather, the fact that I'm a paying customer makes it more serious for you since you're posting an unwanted advertisement on a moderated list.
"clear your name....Kind regards", funny, lol.
You're welcome... I always aim to please. Oh, btw it may come as a surprise for you that this was actually meant to be a joke (the "clear your name" part), the "kind regards" part is something that I very often use at the end of my posts... do a quick search and you'll see for yourself.
All the best,
funny... lol.
I do recognize that there is a possibility that you may have sent your post without an intent to actually advertise your product and if that's the case then fine... case closed for my part. But the reason for this reply is that I resent your "freeloader" reference!
I do not believe I have ever posted on the IntelliJ forums apart from the lack of support for AspectJ and was somewhat taken back by the (preceived) attack since it was my first of such postings.
I am not saying I never spammed to get business but I do have respect for this particular board and the company, ;-).
I like IntelliJ and the UI direction was of interest to me. My post was not meant as product promotion because most of the product's current crop of users are in operations departments managing (pre-)production environments.
I love JDBInsight's UI and thought that maybe the IntelliJ guys could adopt its approach in some areas. It would be great to have my two favourite tools looking consistent - now that would be a cool desktop screenshot.
Regarding L&F I am saying that JDBInsight does not have its own UI and UIManager classes which is how most L&F tools do.
I respectfully disagree. I find it jarring and unintuitive. The UI should match the rest of the application. __________________________
I completey agree. It took me several minutes to figure out some of the most basic functionality. I liken that to how hard it used to be to add librabries to jBuilder's classpath (I don't know how it is today, but it used to be a completely unintuitive process).
Compare that to the simple, logical, and intuitive way that Idea 3.0 uses. This intuitive approach (found in many other places in 3.0 as well) was one of the things that lured me to Idea in the first place. I hope that the things I loved about Idea aren't sacrificed in an attempt to "keep up with the Jones" in the IDE world.
I don't know. So very many things about Aurora concern me. I know this is an EAP build, which is why these things only "concern" me, but still... Performance, ease of use, basic XML/JSP editing; all of these things seem to have suffered immensely in Aurora. I spend 6 hours a day with my butt parked in front of this IDE. It's important to me.
If I could bolt Aurora's CVS functionality onto 3.0, I don't think I'd upgrade to 4.0 when it came out. Oh well, not much chance of that happeneing, is there. ;)
While I'm at it. As I understand, the quick javadoc is generated from the
source files and it's not possible to view the javadoc in a browser for a specific class if the javadoc is jarred up (most browsers don't support that) so my question is: what exactly do you do with the javadoc jar file in the library definitions?
Ctrl-Q is able to extract information from html's when source is missing.
I disagree to an extent as many others. This post will probably be
drowned in the masses but I want to convey my point of view anyways. >
I do think that this look is much too different from the rest of IDEA.
Unlike some posts here that I've seen, I don't dislike the look... I just don't like it when the rest of IDEA looks so different. >
There is one major usability issue bothering me though and that is that
I'm not able to modify libraries. When I've added a library (complete with source jars and doc jars) I have no way of modifying these paths. I have to remove the whole library and re-add it! I would like to be able to select an ellipses button (...) and get a file chooser dialog where the current file is selected. There I could select a different jar file, quick and painless. >
Another thing is that I would like to have the ability to select a
directory and include all it's jar files as a library. This would need to support src jar files as well (I put my libraries in a lib/ directory and my source jar files in lib/src/ so I would like to be able to select different directories for library jar files and source jar files). IDEA should optimally be able to get pointed to the lib directory with a "recurse into sub-directories" option and it should figure out by itself what jar files contain source code, which ones contain javadoc and which ones contain source files. It should be possible to have a library with one jar file that has at both .class files and .java files (and perhaps even javadoc as well?). >
While I'm at it. As I understand, the quick javadoc is generated from the
source files and it's not possible to view the javadoc in a browser for a specific class if the javadoc is jarred up (most browsers don't support that) so my question is: what exactly do you do with the javadoc jar file in the library definitions? >
Well, that's enough for now. I hope someone reads this post and is able
Has anybody checked out JDBInsight's 2.0 Look and Feel?
Am I the only person in this world who still likes consistency between applications?
When I use my Mac, I want all the apps to look like Mac apps. That way I don't have to try to figure out how things work for each application. They all work the same.
Similarly, when I use my PC, I want all the apps to look like PC apps. When my PC ran Win2K, I wanted all the apps to look like Win2K apps. Now that it runs WinXP, I want all the apps to look like WinXP apps.
Can't IDEA (and all other Java apps) just look like a native app? Do we need look-and-feels?
I don't think you will find consistency on any platform. Microsoft's own products are not consistent even within the same product releases. Apple has similiar issues. There should (or will) always be room for deviations. Not every product has the same user and task profile.
My own preference is for the GUI toolkit to have less visual impact than the user content hence the reason why I take care to not add too much non-data ink lines.
JDBInsight has a flat surface because it wants to ensure that the user's data has greater prominence and real estate, unfortunately most toolkits are focused on the control's visual appearance (2d, eye candy...) than the user data.
Would you like all web pages to look the same? That said there needs to be consistency at particular level in the visualization and interaction style.
Emotional design is just as important as technical design and this is proven by the current size of this thread.
JDBInsight's console has been run on different platforms by the same customers and I have never heard any complaints. In fact users like the fact that the product looks the same on the different platforms. I use the product daily on Windows and Solaris, and HP-UX.
I do agree with you when a L&F dominates the visual space.
I completey agree. It took me several minutes to figure out some of the most basic functionality. I liken that to how hard it used to be to add librabries to jBuilder's classpath (I don't know how it is today, but it used to be a completely unintuitive process).
Please be a little bit more constructive in your criticism. What is "most basic functionality"? What was hard?
Compare that to the simple, logical, and intuitive way that Idea 3.0 uses. This intuitive approach (found in many other places in 3.0 as well) was one of the things that lured me to Idea in the first place.
I cannot call setup in IDEA 3.0 intuitive. Consider: the only difference between 'library' and 'project' source in 3.0 was: if source path intersects with project path, then the source is part of the project, and, say, refactorings work there. If they don't, it isn't and they don't. If that's what you call intuitive, you have a very special intuition :)
I don't know. So very many things about Aurora concern me. I know this is an EAP build, which is why these things only "concern" me, but still... Performance, ease of use, basic XML/JSP editing; all of these things seem to have suffered immensely in Aurora. I spend 6 hours a day with my butt parked in front of this IDE. It's important to me.
Have you been in Ariadna EAP? 1 month before release Ariadna was one big memory and CPU hog and large XML editing was close to impossible :)
Friendly, Dmitry -- Dmitry Lomov IntelliJ Labs / JetBrains Inc. http://www.intellij.com "Develop with pleasure!"
I don't think you will find consistency on any platform. Microsoft's own products are not consistent even within the same product releases.
True. But Microsoft products are not known as a model of good UI design.
Apple has similiar issues. There should (or will) always be room for deviations. Not every product has the same user and task profile.
Apple does have some inconsistency with its apps, but far less than many other app and OS vendors.
But Mac apps as a whole are very self-consistent. That's one of the key advantages of using a Mac. In fact, many PC-to-Mac ports have failed because they were ported over to the Mac by people who don't understand "the Macintosh way".
IDEA is a good example of a program that would be easily trounced on the Mac by a slightly less impressive application that had a proper Mac UI. (Luckily for IDEA, nobody else is even close. And also luckily, it wouldn't be that much work to get IDEA up to Mac standards, if JetBrains decided that it made sense to devote resources to it.)
Would you like all web pages to look the same?
Oh my god, yes. I would love it. As long as the UI was implemented by the browser, so that if one browser rendered pages in a poor way I could switch to a different browser.
JDBInsight's console has been run on different platforms by the same customers and I have never heard any complaints.
IMO, waiting for complaints isn't a great way to determine if people like your software or not. The coffee shop near my house brews really bad coffee. Do I complain? Of course not. I just go to a different coffee shop. The owner of the nearby shop has no idea why I'm not a customer.
(And of course, they never bother to ask, even though I stand in front of it every morning waiting for the bus. How hard would it be to say, "hey, do any of you want to buy some coffee? No? Why not? Oh, you think it tastes like crap? Well nobody else has complained!")
BTW, I've never used JDBInsight, and I only glanced at the L&F on your web site. My problem isn't with your product or your L&F, it's the whole concept of different L&Fs.
IMHO, L&Fs are as evil as "skins". Jamie Zawinksi expresses my sentiments exactly, but in a rather crude way:
Whenever a programmer thinks, "Hey, skins, what a cool idea", their computer's speakers should create some sort of cock-shaped soundwave and plunge it repeatedly through their skulls.
>
I am fully in support of this proposed audio-cock technology.
I have a feeling we've veered waaaay off topic... :)
JDBInsight has a flat surface because it wants to ensure that the user's
data has greater prominence and real estate, unfortunately most toolkits are focused on the control's visual appearance (2d, eye candy...) than the user data.
...
JDBInsight's console has been run on different platforms by the same
customers and I have never heard any complaints. In fact users like the fact that the product looks the same on the different platforms. I use the product daily on Windows and Solaris, and HP-UX.
Too much advertising, man. I might have looked at your stuff, but now decided not to.
I found the new LookAndFeel very confusing initially, and I still don't like it. I don't see why JetBrains is playing with a different UI, esp. at this point in the development. It makes the comparison of the new Module UI and the old Project UI more difficult because the LookAndFeel is so different.
Also, why is Configure Project... separate from Project Properties. It took me a few minutes to find that. I think it would be confusing for new users. I liked it when you only had two properties dialog, IDE Settings and Project Properties.
Have you been in Ariadna EAP? 1 month before release Ariadna was one big memory and CPU hog and large XML editing was close to impossible :)
My apologies. I wasn't intending to be overly negative. Of course I realize that this is just an EAP build. I was merely expressing some concern. A few months ago I finally convinced my company to make a significant investment in Idea licenses for all of our developers and so I'm naturally a little nervous about the ongoing development as it will reflect directly back on me.
Actually, I did particapte in the Ariadna EAP, but I guess time make makes past difficulties a little fuzzy as I didn't recall there being the same number of bugs. Naturally, you're far more familiar with what was happening back then than I could ever be.
In an effort to be more constructive, here are the things I noticed:
1) The general look of the UI didn't match with the rest of the app.
2) Rows of items in the lists were not well differntiated. This is a direct result of the bubbly UI.
3) Rows in the lists were inconsistently displayed. Some rows had the Java Jar icon in front of them while others didn't.
4) I initially didn't understand the how Paths tab was supposed to work. There's a list of some folders on the left and then an other tree view of many of the same folders on the right. I had no idea what "Add Content Entry" means. I still don't see an easy way to switch bettwen tree views in the right hand window when you have more than one content area. If nothign else, flipping the left and right panes on this tab would lead to a more intuitive feel.
Of course, I was able to figure all of this out after several minutes of tinkering. However, and perhaps I'm being naive, but it sems that path and library manipulation should be more intuitive than this.
Just a comment: The new interface element in your suggestion (the one that can be dynamically expanded/collapsed) could have its corners completely rounded off (as opposed to your nice example), to illustrate and give a strong association to the fact that the element CAN change its size.
As far as my visual memory goes, roundness is not used elsewhere in windows than in these previously mentioned and suggested context.
It is absolutely horrible! Please use the normal IDEA look as this design is barely visible and my screen (LCD). Also, it is not in line with the rest of the GUI - and please, please, please don't even think about converting the rest of the dialogs to this dreadful look!
That's because these fontes (Bitstream Vera, Profont) aren't as nicely hinted as Courier New. True Type fonts need good built-in hints to look good without antialias.
Font hinting is a careful and complicated job, and now that antialiased desktops are becoming the norm it seems that font designers are being more sloppy with hinting.
Michael Jouravlev wrote:
Strange, for my taste, Profont looks on Windows NT or 2000 better
without antialiasing.
Tom
Hi all,
Has anybody checked out JDBInsight's 2.0 Look and Feel?
Slightly out-of-date flash demo:
http://www.jinspired.com/products/jdbinsight/flash.html
Current Downloads (Windows, Linux, Solaris):
http://www.jinspired.com/products/jdbinsight/downloads/index.html
All the best,
William Louth
Product Architect
JInspired
"Tune and Test with Insight"
www.jinspired.com
Looks pretty decent but I don't see you providing downloads for the L&F per se... so I guess this makes your post spam?!?
But just to give you a chance to clear your name... are you providing the look and feel as a product or available for download?
Kind regards, Stefan.
Stefan,
I resent the spam reference. Is it so dishonest and unfashionable to *** not *** give away source code, ;-).
I am a paying IntelliJ customer and decided to offer up a view of my own product's look and feel as a possible basis for IntelliJ's UI design team and not for freeloaders.
You might be suprised to know that any pleasing qualities come not from a look and feel but a consistency in information (layout, spacing, positioning, contrast) and graphical design (color theory...).
In fact there really is no L&F if we are strict in the meaning of L&F.
People mentioned other products and I thought I would not be attacked for referencing my own.
"clear your name....Kind regards", funny, lol.
All the best,
William Louth
Product Architect
JInspired
"Test and Tune with Insight"
www.jinspired.com
The last time I tried your app, it was using SkinLF. The UI in fact was so horrible and irritating that I stopped evaluating your product due to it. It's rare that a UI is so annoying and unresponsive that I decide that it just isn't worth the bother.
Granted, this was on OSX, and I haven't tried it recently, but given the choice between eye candy and a functional app, I'd pick a functional app any day.
Hi Fate (Hani),
I think you are mistaken. JDBInsight is not IronGrid IronEye SQL. Please checkout the following link.
http://www.irongrid.com
Is this the product you are referring too.
A few points:
- JDBinsight 2.0 and previous versions 1.2 has always been fast, very fast. If you actually used the product you would know how incorrect this statement is.
- JDBInsight 1.2 and 2.0 have never used any SkinLF product its simply a hybrid of MetalLookAndFeel - lots of UIManager settings.
- JDBInsight 2.0 is used by most of the leading appserver vendors for their ECperf & SPECJApperver 2002 benchmarking and has the lowest overhead on the market for high transaction load systems.
- JDBInsight does not run on OSX. It is supported on Windows, Linux, and Solaris.
- I am a HCI expert as well as a graphic designer before I became a distributed systems engineer/consultant (ex-Borlander - Visibroker and Borland Enterprise Server) so I just might know what eye candy is.
Eye candy...that hurt.
I think after your post attacking the product your could at least spend a little time investigating the product and possibly retracting your statement.
Kind regards,
William Louth
Product Architect
JInspired
"Test and Tune with Insight"
www.jinspired.com
Alright alright, you're absolutely right. My comments were all targetted at ironeye sql, similar product, you have to admit ;)
Apologies for the ranting and raving before spending the minimum research effort. I must be slipping in my old age.
Wow... now I did not see that coming. But since you took it as flamebate... well I'm game!
Who said anything about giving anything away? I asked if you had it available as a seperate product as well (meaning that I would have been willing to pay for it if it fit my needs... note the "would have been").
Although I'm a dedicated supporter of open source software that doesn't mean I'm a freeloader. For example: would you be distributing your application under the GPL licence I would have respected that. I also respect that you don't want to use the GPL or an open source licence (well... you probably haven't even considered that since you regard me as a "freeloader"). You made a decision (or your company) to sell your product and I'm fine with that. The point is that I wasn't asking for a "free" download... I simply asked if the look and feel was available as a package.
Well.. I'm not very surprised to hear that. In fact I knew that already (surprised?). However, what you call "look and feel" that is, the look of an application, has a big impact on the first impression that the user gets. Therefore I believe that the look is important as well. I'm already working on the feel part so don't you worry about that.
I regard "look and feel" as a synonym for what you thought would surprise me... that is, the look and feel is how the application looks and feels and a big part of that is like you said an overall consistency. In fact, the purpose of an actual Look and Feel theme in Java is to make sure the things you talk about are consistent.
??? I don't follow... are you talking in general or just for your product? If you're saying that there is no actual look and feel as a part of your product that's fine, but your original post implied that there was.
Well... I wasn't attacking you for "referencing" your own product. If you would have said something like "Well.. in our product we do this and that to achive a rather pleasing overall effect in the user experience, you can see what I mean at " I would have been fine... but you wrote:
"Has anybody checked out JDBInsight's 2.0 Look and Feel?"
That sounded to me like you were promoting your Look and Feel package (which would have been fine because I would have been interested in that) but instead I see a product that I have no interest in and that hit me like a cheap advertisement (hence the "spam" in my post).
The fact that you're a paying customer has nothing to do with anything here. Rather, the fact that I'm a paying customer makes it more serious for you since you're posting an unwanted advertisement on a moderated list.
You're welcome... I always aim to please. Oh, btw it may come as a surprise for you that this was actually meant to be a joke (the "clear your name" part), the "kind regards" part is something that I very often use at the end of my posts... do a quick search and you'll see for yourself.
funny... lol.
I do recognize that there is a possibility that you may have sent your post without an intent to actually advertise your product and if that's the case then fine... case closed for my part. But the reason for this reply is that I resent your "freeloader" reference!
Kind regards, Stefan Freyr.
Stefan,
OK, we are now even.
I do not believe I have ever posted on the IntelliJ forums apart from the lack of support for AspectJ and was somewhat taken back by the (preceived) attack since it was my first of such postings.
I am not saying I never spammed to get business but I do have respect for this particular board and the company, ;-).
I like IntelliJ and the UI direction was of interest to me. My post was not meant as product promotion because most of the product's current crop of users are in operations departments managing (pre-)production environments.
I love JDBInsight's UI and thought that maybe the IntelliJ guys could adopt its approach in some areas. It would be great to have my two favourite tools looking consistent - now that would be a cool desktop screenshot.
Regarding L&F I am saying that JDBInsight does not have its own UI and UIManager classes which is how most L&F tools do.
EOT.
Best regards,
-Will
I respectfully disagree. I find it jarring and unintuitive. The UI should match the rest of the application.
__________________________
I completey agree. It took me several minutes to figure out some of the most basic functionality. I liken that to how hard it used to be to add librabries to jBuilder's classpath (I don't know how it is today, but it used to be a completely unintuitive process).
Compare that to the simple, logical, and intuitive way that Idea 3.0 uses. This intuitive approach (found in many other places in 3.0 as well) was one of the things that lured me to Idea in the first place. I hope that the things I loved about Idea aren't sacrificed in an attempt to "keep up with the Jones" in the IDE world.
I don't know. So very many things about Aurora concern me. I know this is an EAP build, which is why these things only "concern" me, but still... Performance, ease of use, basic XML/JSP editing; all of these things seem to have suffered immensely in Aurora. I spend 6 hours a day with my butt parked in front of this IDE. It's important to me.
If I could bolt Aurora's CVS functionality onto 3.0, I don't think I'd upgrade to 4.0 when it came out. Oh well, not much chance of that happeneing, is there. ;)
-Matt
source files and it's not possible to view the javadoc in a browser for a
specific class if the javadoc is jarred up (most browsers don't support
that) so my question is: what exactly do you do with the javadoc jar file in
the library definitions?
Ctrl-Q is able to extract information from html's when source is missing.
--
Valentin Kipiatkov
JetBrains, Inc
http://www.intellij.com
"Develop with pleasure!"
"Stefan Freyr Stefansson" <stefanf@althingi.is> wrote in message
news:12718636.1069238699010.JavaMail.itn@is.intellij.net...
drowned in the masses but I want to convey my point of view anyways.
>
Unlike some posts here that I've seen, I don't dislike the look... I just
don't like it when the rest of IDEA looks so different.
>
I'm not able to modify libraries. When I've added a library (complete
with source jars and doc jars) I have no way of modifying these paths. I
have to remove the whole library and re-add it! I would like to be able to
select an ellipses button (...) and get a file chooser dialog where the
current file is selected. There I could select a different jar file, quick
and painless.
>
directory and include all it's jar files as a library. This would need to
support src jar files as well (I put my libraries in a lib/ directory and my
source jar files in lib/src/ so I would like to be able to select different
directories for library jar files and source jar files). IDEA should
optimally be able to get pointed to the lib directory with a "recurse into
sub-directories" option and it should figure out by itself what jar files
contain source code, which ones contain javadoc and which ones contain
source files. It should be possible to have a library with one jar file
that has at both .class files and .java files (and perhaps even javadoc as
well?).
>
source files and it's not possible to view the javadoc in a browser for a
specific class if the javadoc is jarred up (most browsers don't support
that) so my question is: what exactly do you do with the javadoc jar file in
the library definitions?
>
to answer these (erradical) questions.
>
In article <26434890.1069252443099.JavaMail.itn@is.intellij.net>,
William Louth <no_mail@jetbrains.com> wrote:
Am I the only person in this world who still likes consistency between
applications?
When I use my Mac, I want all the apps to look like Mac apps. That way I
don't have to try to figure out how things work for each application.
They all work the same.
Similarly, when I use my PC, I want all the apps to look like PC apps.
When my PC ran Win2K, I wanted all the apps to look like Win2K apps. Now
that it runs WinXP, I want all the apps to look like WinXP apps.
Can't IDEA (and all other Java apps) just look like a native app? Do we
need look-and-feels?
--
Erik Hanson
Hi Erik,
I don't think you will find consistency on any platform. Microsoft's own products are not consistent even within the same product releases. Apple has similiar issues. There should (or will) always be room for deviations. Not every product has the same user and task profile.
My own preference is for the GUI toolkit to have less visual impact than the user content hence the reason why I take care to not add too much non-data ink lines.
JDBInsight has a flat surface because it wants to ensure that the user's data has greater prominence and real estate, unfortunately most toolkits are focused on the control's visual appearance (2d, eye candy...) than the user data.
Would you like all web pages to look the same? That said there needs to be consistency at particular level in the visualization and interaction style.
Emotional design is just as important as technical design and this is proven by the current size of this thread.
JDBInsight's console has been run on different platforms by the same customers and I have never heard any complaints. In fact users like the fact that the product looks the same on the different platforms. I use the product daily on Windows and Solaris, and HP-UX.
I do agree with you when a L&F dominates the visual space.
Regards,
William Louth
Product Architect
JInspired
"Tune and Test with Insight"
www.jinspired.com
Matthew Welch wrote:
Please be a little bit more constructive in your criticism.
What is "most basic functionality"? What was hard?
I cannot call setup in IDEA 3.0 intuitive.
Consider: the only difference between 'library' and 'project' source in 3.0
was: if source path intersects with project path, then the source is part
of the project, and, say, refactorings work there. If they don't, it isn't
and they don't. If that's what you call intuitive, you have a very special
intuition :)
Have you been in Ariadna EAP? 1 month before release Ariadna was one big
memory and CPU hog and large XML editing was close to impossible :)
Friendly,
Dmitry
--
Dmitry Lomov
IntelliJ Labs / JetBrains Inc.
http://www.intellij.com
"Develop with pleasure!"
In article <6350802.1069318402630.JavaMail.itn@is.intellij.net>,
William Louth <no_mail@jetbrains.com> wrote:
True. But Microsoft products are not known as a model of good UI design.
Apple does have some inconsistency with its apps, but far less than many
other app and OS vendors.
But Mac apps as a whole are very self-consistent. That's one of the key
advantages of using a Mac. In fact, many PC-to-Mac ports have failed
because they were ported over to the Mac by people who don't understand
"the Macintosh way".
IDEA is a good example of a program that would be easily trounced on the
Mac by a slightly less impressive application that had a proper Mac UI.
(Luckily for IDEA, nobody else is even close. And also luckily, it
wouldn't be that much work to get IDEA up to Mac standards, if JetBrains
decided that it made sense to devote resources to it.)
Oh my god, yes. I would love it. As long as the UI was implemented by
the browser, so that if one browser rendered pages in a poor way I could
switch to a different browser.
IMO, waiting for complaints isn't a great way to determine if people
like your software or not. The coffee shop near my house brews really
bad coffee. Do I complain? Of course not. I just go to a different
coffee shop. The owner of the nearby shop has no idea why I'm not a
customer.
(And of course, they never bother to ask, even though I stand in front
of it every morning waiting for the bus. How hard would it be to say,
"hey, do any of you want to buy some coffee? No? Why not? Oh, you think
it tastes like crap? Well nobody else has complained!")
BTW, I've never used JDBInsight, and I only glanced at the L&F on your
web site. My problem isn't with your product or your L&F, it's the whole
concept of different L&Fs.
IMHO, L&Fs are as evil as "skins". Jamie Zawinksi expresses my
sentiments exactly, but in a rather crude way:
(from <http://www.jwz.org/doc/linuxvideo.html>)
>
I have a feeling we've veered waaaay off topic... :)
--
Erik Hanson
"William Louth" <no_mail@jetbrains.com> wrote in message
news:6350802.1069318402630.JavaMail.itn@is.intellij.net...
...
data has greater prominence and real estate, unfortunately most toolkits are
focused on the control's visual appearance (2d, eye candy...) than the user
data.
...
customers and I have never heard any complaints. In fact users like the fact
that the product looks the same on the different platforms. I use the
product daily on Windows and Solaris, and HP-UX.
Too much advertising, man. I might have looked at your stuff, but now
decided not to.
I found the new LookAndFeel very confusing initially, and I still don't like it. I don't see why JetBrains is playing with a different UI, esp. at this point in the development. It makes the comparison of the new Module UI and the old Project UI more difficult because the LookAndFeel is so different.
Also, why is Configure Project... separate from Project Properties. It took me a few minutes to find that. I think it would be confusing for new users. I liked it when you only had two properties dialog, IDE Settings and Project Properties.
My apologies. I wasn't intending to be overly negative. Of course I realize that this is just an EAP build. I was merely expressing some concern. A few months ago I finally convinced my company to make a significant investment in Idea licenses for all of our developers and so I'm naturally a little nervous about the ongoing development as it will reflect directly back on me.
Actually, I did particapte in the Ariadna EAP, but I guess time make makes past difficulties a little fuzzy as I didn't recall there being the same number of bugs. Naturally, you're far more familiar with what was happening back then than I could ever be.
In an effort to be more constructive, here are the things I noticed:
1) The general look of the UI didn't match with the rest of the app.
2) Rows of items in the lists were not well differntiated. This is a direct result of the bubbly UI.
3) Rows in the lists were inconsistently displayed. Some rows had the Java Jar icon in front of them while others didn't.
4) I initially didn't understand the how Paths tab was supposed to work. There's a list of some folders on the left and then an other tree view of many of the same folders on the right. I had no idea what "Add Content Entry" means. I still don't see an easy way to switch bettwen tree views in the right hand window when you have more than one content area. If nothign else, flipping the left and right panes on this tab would lead to a more intuitive feel.
Of course, I was able to figure all of this out after several minutes of tinkering. However, and perhaps I'm being naive, but it sems that path and library manipulation should be more intuitive than this.
Matt
Dreadful, bad look, wrong place and doesn't follow doctrine of least suprise
-10
Just a comment: The new interface element in your suggestion (the one that can be dynamically expanded/collapsed) could have its corners completely rounded off (as opposed to your nice example), to illustrate and give a strong association to the fact that the element CAN change its size.
As far as my visual memory goes, roundness is not used elsewhere in windows than in these previously mentioned and suggested context.
Just had to reply to this:
It is absolutely horrible! Please use the normal IDEA look as this design is barely visible and my screen (LCD). Also, it is not in line with the rest of the GUI - and please, please, please don't even think about converting the rest of the dialogs to this dreadful look!
Thanks!