Linux's New Mouse Configuration Utility Is Getting Some Spit 'n Polish

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux's New Mouse Configuration Utility Is Getting Some Spit 'n Polish

One of the many successful Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects this year by student developers is the work done on Piper, the new GTK3 user-interface for configuring gaming mice under Linux via libratbag...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Piper-Spit-n-Polish

[eydee]

Instead of a pair of random mice, a few pictures of the actual application would have been nice.

[ssokolow]

Yeah, there you have it. GNOME is the tech and HIG for the standard linux desktop.

Which is a darn shame given how often they imitate the surface details of some other design without understanding the deeper rationale (often based on academic research) and miss the point completely. (this is commonly called cargo cult behaviour.)

Two examples being:

1. Putting dialog action buttons in the header bar rather than in the bottom-left/right corner in accordance with the principle that a dialog should read like a paper form, with the last action your perform being at the "end of the last line on the page".
2. Using a green arrow pointing to a hard drive for "save" because they don't grasp that...
   1. Diskettes were originally used as an affordance. That principle doesn't hold for an arrow pointing at a hard drive if none of your users recognize what an internal hard drive is.
   2. Research has shown that once learning the purpose of things has occurred, icons with affordances perform no better than abstract symbols. (This is such a basic thing that it was in the very first HCI textbook I ever had.)
   3. An entire generation has grown up seeing the diskette as the abstract glyph for "save". (To the point that, before they switched to a Download icon, the developers of the Google Chrome PDF reader accidentally put the clipped corner in the wrong place in their simplified "pseudo-silhouette of a diskette" save icon, making us old fogies scratch our heads.)
   4. Diskettes have a more distinctive simplified form, remaining recognizable down to 16x16 px while "arrow pointing at hard drive" does not.
   5. We already have a green arrow icon in the GNOME icon themes: Download. It's easy to get that mixed up with Save when you have a silver hard drive against a grey toolbar.
   6. For those who aren't color-blind, diskettes are often rendered in blue with a red-and-white label, which provides another layer of distinctiveness for easy visual acquisition.
   7. If you need a "save all" or "save project" icon, a cascade of multiple diskettes is a simple, easy-to-understand metaphor that still scales down to 16x16px well. There's no equivalent metaphor for an arrow pointing at a disk that I've ever found.

[Azpegath]

Which is a darn shame given how often they imitate the surface details of some other design without understanding the deeper rationale (often based on academic research) and miss the point completely. (this is commonly called cargo cult behaviour.)

Two examples being:

1. Putting dialog action buttons in the header bar rather than in the bottom-left/right corner in accordance with the principle that a dialog should read like a paper form, with the last action your perform being at the "end of the last line on the page".
2. Using a green arrow pointing to a hard drive for "save" because they don't grasp that...
   1. Diskettes were originally used as an affordance. That principle doesn't hold for an arrow pointing at a hard drive if none of your users don't recognize what an internal hard drive is.
   2. Research has shown that once learning the purpose of things has occurred, icons with affordances perform no better than abstract symbols. (This is such a basic thing that it was in the very first HCI textbook I ever had.)
   3. An entire generation has grown up seeing the diskette as the abstract glyph for "save". (To the point that, before they switched to a Download icon, the developers of the Google Chrome PDF reader accidentally put the clipped corner in the wrong place in their simplified "pseudo-silhouette of a diskette" save icon, making us old fogies scratch our heads.)
   4. Diskettes have a more distinctive simplified form, remaining recognizable down to 16x16 px while "arrow pointing at hard drive" does not.
   5. We already have a green arrow icon in the GNOME icon themes: Download. It's easy to get that mixed up with Save.
   6. For those who aren't color-blind, diskettes are often rendered in blue with a red-and-white label, which provides another layer of distinctiveness for easy visual acquisition.
   7. If you need a "save all" or "save project" icon, a cascade of multiple diskettes is a simple, easy-to-understand metaphor that still scales down to 16x16px well. There's no equivalent metaphor for an arrow pointing at a disk that I've ever found.

It sounds like you should start contributing to the project!

[ssokolow]

It sounds like you should start contributing to the project!

Their vision of what a desktop should be is so divergent from mine that it wouldn't be worth my time. GNOME 2.x lacked some configuration handles necessary for the desktop I wanted and GNOME 3.x has only widened that gulf. (I consider the extension ecosystem to be unacceptably prone to breakage. I use my desktop for work, not as a toy.)

(In fact, because of the "GTK+ 3.x used outside GNOME" regressions I keep seeing, I'm working to migrate as many GTK+ applications as possible to Qt equivalents with the eventual goal of replacing my LXDE with either LXQt or a version of KDE mature enough to satisfy.)

[Snaipersky]

Their vision of what a desktop should be is so divergent from mine that it wouldn't be worth my time. GNOME 2.x lacked some configuration handles necessary for the desktop I wanted and GNOME 3.x has only widened that gulf. (I consider the extension ecosystem to be unacceptably prone to breakage. I use my desktop for work, not as a toy.)

(In fact, because of the "GTK+ 3.x used outside GNOME" regressions I keep seeing, I'm working to migrate as many GTK+ applications as possible to Qt equivalents with the eventual goal of replacing my LXDE with either LXQt or a version of KDE mature enough to satisfy.)

Lumina is another Qt DE option.

[ssokolow]

That said, once I have some good, solid, toolkit-agnostic backend libraries, I plan to approach the GNOME Games devs to see if they'd be receptive to sharing code with my planned game launcher.

(They're working on making the most polished combination of already-proven features, and working outward from being a libretro frontend, while I'm writing a Qt GUI as a way to experiment with pushing the envelope, and working outward from being a launcher for native binaries.)

At the moment, as part of an experiment into generating launchers for games which were just extracted into a folder, I'm working on the heuristic routine to guess a title from a filename. (So far, against a test corpus of 858 filenames, I'm getting 93.36% accuracy with a non-trivial portion of the remaining stuff being obvious bugs which I intend to root out as I continue to refactor for maintainability.)

Once that's done, I'll move on to writing automated tests for and improving the code which identifies which image file within a given root directory is most likely to be the icon.

[sa666666]

Good luck to the users. New uninformed choices to kill the experience. Just remember who did the REAL HARD WORK dealing with the lib and pioneered the GUI. That would be RH/GNOME.

You know, I've always wondered whether die-hard trolls are doing it for attention, or they're basically just shit-disturbers, or maybe just mentally ill. The latter at least could be understood, if not somewhat justified.

[JonathanM]

You know, I've always wondered whether die-hard trolls are doing it for attention, or they're basically just shit-disturbers, or maybe just mentally ill. The latter at least could be understood, if not somewhat justified.

I think it's probably a combination of those 3 things.
I wish this forum had a working personal blacklist and/or would have moderators muting trolls.

[andrei_me]

I wish this forum had a working personal blacklist and/or would have moderators muting trolls.

GhostOfFunks looks like another gnome troll that I forget the name, so you can blacklist one account and they might create another