[LINK] Are GUI design standards no longer relevanr?

[Fernando Cassia]

On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 7:14 PM, Ivan Trundle <ivan at itrundle.com> wrote:

> I suspect that this debate has moved far away from Fernando's original musings, but I can see that in the narrow world of CUA, it's desirable to have a standard way of operating.

Yes, I never meant to include mobile devices, smartphones or other
space-constrained apps.

My point was the world of desktop and notebook OSs, where CUA became
the de-facto standard, and now "creative" developers want to get rid
of those standards that made software easier to use.

That is, regardless of what "custom" buttons the app designer wanted
to include... the CUA menus were always there. It´s like what happens
with car design... every manufacturer is free to innovate, but the
steering wheel is always in the same place.

I made a point about the Netscape 8.1 "creative" solution of
minimizing vertical space used by re-using part of the application´s
title bar to host the CUA menus as an example, in the hopes of seeing
Mozilla and others copying and adopting that approach, which I found
very clever.

In my view, in the worst case scenario, CUA menus could be
"auto-hidden" by default, but would show up immediately when you press
any of the CUA hotkeys, ie Alt-F to bring the File menu... The VLC
(VideoLan) media player does that when playing videos in Full Screen
mode. And it´s also a very clever way to maximize screen space WITHOUT
dropping CUA menus altogether...

FC