The blog of the developers of Vienna, the free and open-source Mac OSX newsreader.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Vienna UI
Joel Spolsky's recent article summarises some of the challenges in UI design that Vienna has always striven to overcome. If I simply threw in options for choices that everyone has ever requested on the support forum then the Preferences panes would be overloaded. Instead I've been pretty careful to try and keep the choices manageable even to the point of not having choices at all. For example, Vienna 2.1 introduces manual sorting of folders in the folder list. At one point we had a choice of manual and automatic sorting. I spent some time convincing Jeff that we should be able to make it work with just manual sorting and let the program be intelligent about where to add new folders. I don't think we've got it entirely right in 2.1 but I should stress that any faults there are entirely mine.
As we go forward, we'll continue to apply Occam's Razor to the UI as much as is reasonable. I want Vienna to be simple and uncluttered as well as feature rich and powerful. The two need not necessarily be contradictions. It all comes down to design and spending the extra time to think through how features work best. That isn't something that developers are necessarily best at which is why I'm happy to solicit input from people who have no development skills but a raft of experience in making user interfaces work. Good developers will know how to take these designs and make them into workable code but ultimately I prefer that the designers have no preconcieved notions of the limits of the code. The right time to disabuse a designer that a particular design is unworkable is only after the developers have actually taken the time to try and make it work. And not before.
So if you're a user interface designer with a lot of imagination, an appreciation for usable Mac OSX interfaces and no clue for what can or can't be done at the code level then feel free to post your ideas over at the Vienna support forum. While we can't promise that every idea will become reality, you may just ignite the spark that creates the next innovative idea in Vienna!
As we go forward, we'll continue to apply Occam's Razor to the UI as much as is reasonable. I want Vienna to be simple and uncluttered as well as feature rich and powerful. The two need not necessarily be contradictions. It all comes down to design and spending the extra time to think through how features work best. That isn't something that developers are necessarily best at which is why I'm happy to solicit input from people who have no development skills but a raft of experience in making user interfaces work. Good developers will know how to take these designs and make them into workable code but ultimately I prefer that the designers have no preconcieved notions of the limits of the code. The right time to disabuse a designer that a particular design is unworkable is only after the developers have actually taken the time to try and make it work. And not before.
So if you're a user interface designer with a lot of imagination, an appreciation for usable Mac OSX interfaces and no clue for what can or can't be done at the code level then feel free to post your ideas over at the Vienna support forum. While we can't promise that every idea will become reality, you may just ignite the spark that creates the next innovative idea in Vienna!
posted by StevePa # 10:33 PM 
Comments:
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suggestion for the UI view of articles. I'm using Vienna not only has a reader but as an archiver. My preference is set to never delete articles. I do that because I want to be able to come back to old information I have read, a bit like my mailer. Then this type of usage comes with drawbacks. Here a few features that could help.
* A possibility to have a calendar view.
List of articles can be sorted right now by subject, author, folders, date. There could be a calendar view. Where articles would be organized in an threaded outline.
> 2005
\/ 2006
..> January 2006
..> February 2006
..\/ March 2006
....1st March 2006
.......List of articles for this day
....2nd March 2006
.......List of articles for this day
> 2007
smart folders with a bit more tunning. Maybe an expert option. with possibility to act on specific markup in the feeds. when we know it.
A view source the markup.
A cut and past feature for the Web with a blockquote with the right information ready to put in another weblog. I could give the markup.
* A possibility to have a calendar view.
List of articles can be sorted right now by subject, author, folders, date. There could be a calendar view. Where articles would be organized in an threaded outline.
> 2005
\/ 2006
..> January 2006
..> February 2006
..\/ March 2006
....1st March 2006
.......List of articles for this day
....2nd March 2006
.......List of articles for this day
> 2007
smart folders with a bit more tunning. Maybe an expert option. with possibility to act on specific markup in the feeds. when we know it.
A view source the markup.
A cut and past feature for the Web with a blockquote with the right information ready to put in another weblog. I could give the markup.
Interesting feedback. I'm not sure we've considered the calendar view aspect before.
Thanks for the input!
Thanks for the input!
i agree with cow's calendar view suggestion. i'd also like to see an integrated enclosure handler/viewer so Vienna can subscribe to feeds for podcasts, vidcasts, photocasts, pdfcasts, etc., handling all types of file attachements and organize them a la iTunes style, thus becoming my catch-all for feeds which it practically is now. i could go on and on about this but i'll save it for later.
i'll mock and post something up soon.
i'm using NewsFire in addition to Vienna and can say that NewsFire has a pretty UI but its handling of enclosures is clumsy. Vienna could easily trump NewsFire in this area where Vienna wins with its awesome "condensed" view and integrated web browser.
i'll mock and post something up soon.
i'm using NewsFire in addition to Vienna and can say that NewsFire has a pretty UI but its handling of enclosures is clumsy. Vienna could easily trump NewsFire in this area where Vienna wins with its awesome "condensed" view and integrated web browser.
Hey. Just switched to Vienna. Liking it so far. I like cow's suggestion. It reminds me of this article: http://www.glassdog.com/archives/2004/08/25/whats_wrong_with_feed_readers.html . Choice quote: "Feed readers have at their disposal near infinite processing power, well-differentiated and -defined data and... do nothing with them. You can sort your feed items by date. Exciting!"
Also, by the way, bayesian filtering of rss feeds has been my holy grail for a while now, since reading about Rui Carmo's approach (I even used newspipe for feed reading for a while, although I never got around to writing the bayesian filterer). I'd love to help out on that aspect some day (I'm a mac dev, thirdcog.eu).
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Also, by the way, bayesian filtering of rss feeds has been my holy grail for a while now, since reading about Rui Carmo's approach (I even used newspipe for feed reading for a while, although I never got around to writing the bayesian filterer). I'd love to help out on that aspect some day (I'm a mac dev, thirdcog.eu).
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