ui verisioning

joeyh at 2014-11-20T16:00:37Z

You know, programs could version their UI's.

I was struck in Bram Moolenaar's interview by how much care he's taken to avoid changing vim's behavior at all, while still letting nice new features be added. In the case of vim, you have to learn about features and enable them to change the UI. That works, but it does mean that the default vim experience for a new user lacks a lot of its cool features, and it can be hard to learn about features. (I only learned that vim has persistent undo from that interview.)

Imagine if say, firefox, had a UI version number. New users get the current version, and firefox writes that to its config. So upgrades don't have to change the UI the user has gotten used to. It could prompt on upgrade to let the user try out the fresh new UI version, and if they don't like it, they could revert back. Even if this were only limited to the "chrome" around the web page (no need to version UI for preferences pages that are rarely visited etc), I think it would be a nice win.

Gnome 3 sort of did this with its legacy mode, but it's a poor imitation at best of gnome 2.

I'm sure that UI developers would hate this. Having to maintain old UI code, or implement pixel-perfect imitations of it using the new UI code. Needing to worry about how to shoehorn new features into an old UI that was not designed for them. Etc.

It's much easier to put the cognitive load on the shoulders of the user, who is forced to unlearn old habits, develop new muscle memories, and generally grit their teeth and bear it until the new UI fades into the background and stops distracting.. Just in time for a UI refresh to come around!

Jakukyo Friel, Tyng-Ruey Chuang, Mike Linksvayer, lnxwalt@microca.st and 3 others likes this.

Olivier Mehani, Mike Linksvayer, Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠), Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) shared this.

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If the software version is not the same as the UI version, this is inviting chaos.

Douglas Perkins at 2014-11-20T22:21:12Z

Interesting idea. WordPress sort of does it by having a new template each year, but that's only for the front-end. MediaWiki does same to a lesser extent (new default template much less often) and greater (there isn't really a separate admin UI). I used to think FLOSS projects breaking UI in name of innovation/improvement/progress was mostly a good trend, another thing that received wisdom being that FLOSS can't do, that would be proved wrong. I'm less sure now, that redesign is a good thing, almost ever, for both desktop programs and websites. It is very hard to objectively discern improvement, and trivial to waste massive energy debating gut feelings. I long wondered how some super prominent sites with lots of money on the line could be so seemingly horrible (eg ebay, amazon, dell) but maybe they know something. I can kind of pinpoint when my opinion tilted -- libreplanet 2012 when a presentation about GNOME3 mentioned that it was catching up in accessibility to where GNOME2 was. I was never really sympathetic to all the complaining about GNOME3 til that moment. Not because accessibility is the very most important thing for me, but it's an indicator. This of course isn't specific to FLOSS at all; MSFT has been paying for making wanton changes over and over the last several years.

Mike Linksvayer at 2014-11-20T23:14:17Z

Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠), Douglas Perkins likes this.

Separately, binpress looks curious. Their goal seems to be to make "open core", proprietary relicensing and the like something easy for any ~open source developer to do. I imagine many pumpiverse commentators will think binpress is horrible. See http://www.binpress.com/welcome

Mike Linksvayer at 2014-11-20T23:19:55Z

Evan Prodromou, Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) likes this.

>> Mike Linksvayer:

“Interesting idea. WordPress sort of does it by having a new template each year, but that's only for the front-end.”

WordPress had a really dramatic overhaul of the dashboard for a few years, and it included bringing in a design team that had mixed results, and then the MP6 plugin, which had a better feedback loop, and was responsible for the current dashboard.

The visitor-facing parts of WordPress are of course a separate theme, and I wonder how much of this discussion covers that. Websites are interfaces, of course, but they also allow for visual expression. I'd be upset if WordPress messed with its RSS feeds, which is how I read most websites that I don't host/aren't Wikipedia.

maiki at 2014-11-21T00:21:33Z