[vox] XMMS - A rant about usability

[John McDonnell]

On the 12th day of March, Bill Kendrick said to me:

> Ok, I'm just going to rant for a moment to get it off my chest.

rant away, get the bad humours out...

> Why do people design software like XMMS to act the way it does?

oh, because it looks nice... and because the current crop of windowing
systems are attrocious. There's nothing new out there. KDE is doing its
hardest to emulate Windows and I hate it for that reason. Gnome is trying
to be MacOS and I prefer that but it still sucks.

> Why does it have to look and act different than the rest of my
> applications?

Because there's no set of standards that everyone accepts.


> An example:  I just popped up the Playlist Editor window.  I have far more
> tracks loaded (not many, actually) than can be displayed at once, so I need
> to scroll up and down.

heh... a common occurance chez moi - 1872 tracks in the current playlist
;)
>
> I went to grab the bottom of the window (like I can with all other windows
> under KDE 2.2) and stretch it down.

grab the bottom right corner. There should be some kind of visual clue
there as to where to grab. You can stretch away to your heart's content -
well, it seems to snap to certain values for my setup but you can still
enlarge / reduce.

> Hell, the window doesn't even appear in my taskbar!  No way to maximize
> it, or even minimize it!


This bugs me too. You should be able to double-click on the "title-bar"
area to "shade" it

johnmc.
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