[sldev] Roadmap: 1.19.0 Viewer

[Argent Stonecutter]

On 2008-01-12, at 10:48, Jason Giglio wrote:
> http://www106.pair.com/rhp/free-software-ui.html

There's some good ideas there, but he's also totally wrong in a huge  
number of ways.

I use a Mac. It's what everyone who writes stuff like this is  
thinking about when they write stuff like this, whether they say it  
or not, and when they do that they're taking exactly the wrong lesson  
from the Mac.

And Gnome has suffered from it.

> Every configuration option has a non-zero cost.

If the design is flexible enough, the cost of a configuration option  
*is* zero. The Mac is full of configuration options. It's missing  
some in important places, and most of them are hard to get to or even  
deliberately hidden, but they're there... and the Mac wouldn't be  
nearly as successful if they weren't there. They're there as a side  
effect of the way the windowing system works. It's been like this  
since Finder 0.9, back in 1984. You used to need resource editors to  
get to the options, but now they're mostly in separate files in plain  
text.

I don't think I know anyone who's used a Mac long term who hasn't got  
a couple of dozen under-the-table customizations that they totally  
depend on. Whether they're Applescripts or DAs or resource patches in  
classic OS, or Applescripts, XML tweaks, preference panes, and  
modified image files in OS X, your average Mac user has always hacked  
their Mac.

And Apple *pays attention*. If it wasn't for Max Rudberg's themes  
that let me tone down the jello theme back in the Puma and Jaguar  
days I'd have gone nuts... and lo and behold, Panther looked like  
they'd applied a wash of Max's "Aluminum Alloy" theme over the user  
interface, and Tiger and Leopard have largely done away with the  
hated "Brushed Aluminum" and replaced it with something that looks  
like it came from maxthemes.com.

Second Life has the XUI files, configuration operations in the XUI  
files are pretty close to free... because they have to be there  
anyway, but they're limited. You can make minor changes, but you  
can't script them, you can add a tear-off for the contacts tab, but  
you can't add a button to open it. And you can't save them... every  
time you get an upgrade they go away. The best thing that LL could do  
*right now* to improve the UI is have it look in your SL application  
profile for skins/* before looking in the Second Life application/ 
resource directory.

And then *see what people do with it*.

And *learn* from it.