Article in PC Magazine relating to OS UIs

[David Grega <webmaster overtech zzn com>]

I was reading the December 19, 2000 issue of PC Magazine and on page 95 
Bill Howard goes on to list some somewhat obvious things the industry as a 
whole should do.  I found a few that would relate to what we do here at the 
Gnome UI design committee and are worth considering.

There are 20 items but only a few relate to us, those that relate to us are 
listed below (plus or minus a few typos):

"7. When you automatically tile multiple applications (by right-clicking on 
a blank spot on the Taskbar), why can't the individual apps realize they'll 
have less screen real estate and offer to get rid of the space-hogging 
scroll bars and toolbars?

8. And why can't you have presets that let you give, say, two-thirds of the 
screen to your word processor and one-third to e-mail, as opposed to always 
giving each tiled app exactly the same amount of space?"

"12. When you're hurriedly doing e-mail online at dial-up modem speed, why 
is it that your finger always brushes F1 (help) when you mean to hit the 
Esc key-and instead of being able to back out with Esc or Ctrl-Break you 
have to wait an agonizing half-minute until help comes up?"

"19. Have you ever owned a non-Windows 2000 PC or notebook where Suspend 
and Resume worked properly for more than a couple of weeks?"


Item 12 is interesting to me.  Why don't we have an Esc key shortcut to 
abort the launching of any program (in that case a help file) from opening?

Item 19 hits home with me.  Though I don't know if this is a problem within 
Linux or Gnome - the fact remains, while using Gnome - Suspend and Resume 
tend not to work correctly.

- Dave

Any opinions stated are personal and not those of OverTech Technologies 
(OTTech)