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by Danno Ferrin.
Original Post: The Disappearance of the Consistent UI?
Feed Title: And They Shall Know Me By My Speling Errors
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Feed Description: Danno Ferrin's Many Reasons he was a Comp Sci Major and not an English Major
Damien noticed my entry on Netbeans does SWT!, I wonder if he saw my entry on Eclipse does Swing! Damien focused on an example from jgoodies about how Karsten made an ugly UI look more like eclipse. The point he wanted to make was how an emulated UI will never look like the "native" UI. Most of hose little nits that he mentnioned however are either fixed in the 1.4 release of java or are an artifact of the custom GUI (probobly because of drop shadows). But there really is a greater issue lurking beneath the surface not constrained to Java.
Remember when all GUIs used to look the same and be consistent? Think way back, think back even farther than that. Think back to the first release of most GUI shells for OSes, and for the first few demo apps released by those companies. Ever since then the GUIs have been changing, and as we get to the present day we have such wildly different looks and feel even from the same OS provider. On my Win2k laptop I am currently running Outlook XP. The toolbar and the menus are wildly different from, say, Internet Explorer. Same company using the same "native" windows look and feel. Even within IE with the right stylesheet arguments you can make the scollbar turn green and take up half the screen as well.
But what is the "native" look and feel? The skin on mozilla I use uses the same native look and feel, looks different from the previous two as well, and it uses MFC as well! I know it does because on my home machine running WinXP I get the nice rounded buttons and funky menus. What's different? Fonts, control borders, insets, margins, colors, etc. Does it look like the "native" widget set? No. But it is!
On WindowsXP not even the window borders are consistent, the command prompt being the worst offender. Microsoft is not alone in this: Apple is a pretty bad offender when it comes to that as well. You can have Platinum/Aqua/brushed metal on your screen all at the same time. I am sure if you tried hard enough you could even get pre-platinum system 7 as well. With the new X11 server you can bring in motif and whatever else you have on the Linux front. And Linux practically uses it's mildly controlled anarchy in the area of "native" widget sets as a marketing bullet.
Is this bad? Has the user sufferd uniformly because of this? No and no. Let me wax philosopical for a minute. Waht is a cow? I mean the most basicness of a cow? Do all cows look alike? Can we agree on one "perfect" form and look of a cow? Is there even one? What about male cows? Are they cows? Does the fact we have to distinguish them as male make them not cows at all or a special kind of cow? If we spent our entire lives living in a cave looking at a shadow cast by a clay figurene of a cow would we be able to recognize a cow if we then went outside and were being charged at by a rodeo bull? Ok, I may have went too far with the last one, but it is a classical question about categorization and characteristics. A point that I want to make that event though the GUIs are not all consistent what they are consistent on are some of the characteristics and idioms. Buttons looks like buttons, menu bars pop up menus, text boxes accept keyboard input, so on and so forth. But even with these items there are some differences. In MacOS you cannot have a button in a dialog gain keyboard focus (you cannot "tab" into it). And then there are other vendors who tried to do there own things with native UIs. Remember Borland's Object Windows Library? Think oversized green check mark.
So where I am going with this is to say that an argument that differences in the JFC PLAF implementation of a Windows look and feel means it is inferior is to say that all GUIs are inferior. It is an argument that is not specific to the JFC and can be applied to every GUI out there to varying degrees. Even the fangled spangeled SWT falls victim to this because there is no least common denominator between all of the GUI platforms it wishes to target. This is becasue some of the requirements of different GUI standards are downright mutually exclusive (the MacOS menu bar being one of the more obvious and flagrant ones). But GUIs have come to the point where for the most part they are consistently usable, if not consistently pleasent to the eye. Jersy milk cows and Angus beef cattle are still, after all, cows.
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