I like the concept of the "ribbon" but dislike the way it's organised and laid out in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.
The "ribbon" interface may have been a novel idea for Microsoft, but it did have precedents in ealier software (although the implementation was obviously different).
Here, for example, is a screenshot of Adobe PhotoDeluxe. Adobe discontinued this software in 2002:
http://goo.gl/q1LFn
In many ways, the Microsoft Office "ribbon" takes a similar approach, but anchors the ribbon to the top of the screen rather than in a floating palette.
The examples above aren't identical to the Microsoft "ribbon" design, but they contain seeds of the same idea.
I do think that the court prosecutions in the UK against Twitter and Facebook users have gone too far and that this is a worrying trend.
Overall, the UK has good freedom of speech (not perfect, but then which country has?).
As others have pointed out, you can criticise politicians and the government in the UK without of fear of criminal penalties (unless your language is threatening or racist).
I think in the UK, we tend to show a little less deference towards politicians and high-ranking officials than in the US. And that means people are not afraid to be critical face-to-face with politicians (without fear of reprisals). For example, here's Nick Clegg (the deputy Prime Minister) facing a bunch of angry students who don't mince their words
I really like your discussion system - some great thinking here! The arrows are surprisingly clear in directing you to posts and indicating hierarchy. Also, the comments just feel more visible in this layout; it feels quicker to glance through a discussion.
Is it possible for you to import comments from some popular discussion sites to get a sense of what the layout will look like with different numbers of comments? This might be a good way of "stress testing" the layout to see if, under certain circumstances, the design needs tweaking.
I've always assumed that most users treat page after page of comments a bit like search results: they'll look at page one or page two of the comments and then stop (because there are just too many to wade through). Inevitably some of the interesting comments will get buried or overlooked ("Upvoting" and "editor's pick" are two approaches to remedying this). I like many of your suggestions around trying to make it easier to explore discussions.
Here are some questions that came to mind when I looked at your discussion system (I don't have answers to these questions, they're just food for thought :-)
- Horizontal scrolling: this might work well on a tablet (swiping horizontally), but will it feel awkward on a desktop if the layout stretches quite long?
- Will this comment system work equally well with a few comments as well as a few hundred? How long might the horizontal layout become if you have hundreds of comments?
- What might the layout look like if you have mainly single comments (i.e. no threaded replies)? Will a single horizontal line of comments look awkward? (It may well look fine.)
- I notice that each column is of uniform width (which makes perfect sense), but what happens when some comments get lots of replies? As you begin to indent each reply, is there a point where the indentation becomes a problem? (To be honest this is true of all threaded comment systems, but you're working with a much narrower width to begin with.)
- Many blogs sit within a fixed page width rather than stretch to fill the whole browser window. Can this comment system sit well within this type of design? Will it look awkward if it stretches outside the page width? It may be that this design works well for discussion sites and doesn't need to be a one-size-fits-all for every kind of site.
I hope these thoughts don't sound too negative. Commenting feels ripe for more exploration. There is so much commenting on the web, yet not much has changed in the way discussions are displayed. Could interesting visualisations help (or hinder) the way we read discussions? For example, a colour bar or timeline that charts whether comments expressed are negative or positive (would obviously only work for certain types of comment).
I'm impressed by what you've started so far and hope you continue to explore. Good luck :-)
Here are some thoughts on the things you mentioned:
- It's currently not possible to import comments.
The largest page I've built "manually", is 200 comments; it'd
be interesting to import a 3000 comments page from, say, Reddit,
and have a look :-)
- The comparison with search engine results is interesting, I hadn't thought
about that.
- Re wide pages: On a 50 comments wide page, I think scrolling works fine,
partly because if you scroll large distances, the scrolling software
(Utterscroll) automatically scrolls faster.
- Re many single comments without replies. — It looks okay visually I think,
but it might be easier to "get lost" among all comments (since the page
becomes very wide).
- Re: "when some comments get lots of replies", "does the indentation [become]
a problem"? — I think that in such cases, 1) deeply nested comments could be
collapsed by default. And 2) popular threads could be made wider.
- Re: "Many blogs sit within a fixed page width". Yes, this might deter some
people from using Debiki (the software). — I'm thinking that this discussion
system is intended for people who think that [showing the readers' comments]
is much more imporant than the right hand sidebar. — And it's probably (?)
well suited for discussion sites / forums.
I am not a fan of narrowly-proportioned, single-aspect micro-apartments. I understand that space is at a premium but should we really consider 220 square feet as acceptable? The size of homes (be they apartments or houses) can have a profound effect on the quality of life for their occupants. Is this type of housing really a long-term solution?
I live in the UK where the design of new build housing is generally poor. England and Wales have no minimum space standards for housing and we are very much the worse off for it. This is in contrast to many European countries that do have minimum space standards. (The exception in England is London which has recently adopted minimum space standards for any homes built with Government money.)
I completely agree that it's not just the size of an apartment that is important but the quality of the space. There's much that can be done to make better use of space in homes: it all comes down to design.
Housing is a topic that's very close to my heart. I write a blog about housing in the UK and wrote some thoughts a while ago about the size of a dwelling and the quality of the space:
should we really consider 220 square feet as acceptable?
Yes. If you don't make much money but want to work in SF/NYC/Boston/etc, your only option is to spend a lot of time driving/commuting from somewhere with cheaper housing. For some people, the choice to waste three hours of their life driving in traffic every day is worthwhile because they get a big house with a yard. But others would be happy to sacrifice lots of living space if it meant that they didn't have to blow 3 hours of stressful commuting.
When cities declare "you can't sell a 220 sq ft apartment", they force that choice on everyone, even people who wouldn't choose it for themselves.
Minimum area standards basically impose a floor on the cost of living. In some American suburbs, this is often explicitly used to keep out the undesirables; you require that each house have at least an acre of land and that the structure take up less than X% of the lot so that prices rise to the point that low income folk or recent immigrants can't afford to live in your town.
Of course it's acceptable. Many people (myself included) have happily lived in such small apartments.
Artificial constraints based on illusory and/or narrow-minded premises are far more damaging.
You're not going to want to live in such a place with 4 kids, the grandparents, and a dog, but for many people it's fine.
It gives people the ability to make a tradeoff between, say, size and location, so one can live in a more interesting area without being a billionaire.
I particularly liked this passage from Wirth's essay:
A notorious example for a bad idea was the choice of the equal sign to denote assignment. It goes back to Fortran in 1957 and has blindly been copied by armies of language designers. Why is it a bad idea? Because it overthrows a century old tradition to let "=" denote a comparison for equality, a predicate which is either true or false. But Fortran made it to mean assignment, the enforcing of equality. In this case, the operands are on unequal footing: The left operand (a variable) is to be made equal to the right operand (an expression). x = y does not mean the same thing as y = x. Algol corrected this mistake by the simple solution: Let assignment be denoted by ":=".
Perhaps this may appear as nitpicking to programmers who got used to the equal sign meaning assignment. But mixing up assignment and comparison is a truly bad idea, because it requires that another symbol be used for what traditionally was expressed by the equal sign. Comparison for equality became denoted by the two characters "==" (first in C). This is a consequence of the ugly kind, and it gave rise to similar bad ideas using "++", "--", "&&" etc."
I agree with this, and have never understood why languages perpetuate this practice of using the equal sign to denote something other than its meaning in mathematics.
Meh. This is one of those things that people have been railing about for decades, and I think as "language issues" go, it's pretty minor.
It's one of those things that quickly simply ceases to be a real issue once you're past the "my first program" stage. Humans are flexible, they don't really have a huge problem adapting to disparate usages in disparate situations (mathematics vs. programming).
IOW, it's bikeshedding. Yeah, even Wirth can bikeshed.
[Note that I actually prefer Pascal-style ":=" for assignment and "=" for equality; I just think it's nicer (Wirth gave some examples as to why). However, it's clear that the C-style syntax has the momentum these days, and it just doesn't seem to be much of a problem.]
"Some, but not enough to discount the fact that it is essentially sugar you're eating."
I have to respectfully disagree with you about fruits. Fruit is more than just sugar, it's a source of vitamins and minerals and it should not intentionally be limited from your diet. Of course you need to eat a variety of different fruits (and vegetables).
"A lot of fruits have a GI of candy bars..."
Can you give some examples?
A piece of fruit and a candy bar are not nutritionally equivalent even if they share the same GI. In fact, most fruits are low in GI. See for yourself by going to the University of Sydney GI database.
We all need to eat fruit and vegetables daily as part of a healthy diet. It's misleading to claim that fruit can cause health issues or should be limited in your diet without providing evidence to back it up.
Even people with Type 2 diabetes are not discouraged from eating fruits. See the advice here for example from Diabetes UK (a charity). They are a credible and trustworthy source of advice for people with diabetes in the UK.
One final link, a 2011 report from Cancer Research UK found that over 40% of cancers diagnosed in the UK were from avoidable lifestyle choices. For men, the number one culprit was tobacco. Number two culprit? Lack of fruit and vegetables in the diet.
> Fruit is more than just sugar, it's a source of vitamins and minerals and it should not intentionally be limited from your diet.
You can dump a bunch of vitamins into a bottle of coke, that doesn't mean you can eat it without limit and remain healthy. The carbs are still there, and if fruit makes up a significant number of the calories you intake, you are going to have all the same problems you have when you eat a large number of carbs per day from other sources like candy and pasta, just to a somewhat lesser degree. With fruit, you still don't want to go over the daily number of carbs (~40).
>Even people with Type 2 diabetes are not discouraged from eating fruits. See the advice here for example from Diabetes UK (a charity). They are a credible and trustworthy source of advice for people with diabetes in the UK.
First of all, the site you listed is fairly low quality and significantly out of date:
>All fruit and vegetables are low in fat and calories and a good source of vitamins and minerals.
This isn't the nineties. Fat isn't considered bad for you according to any modern scientific theory except to some degree in relationship to heart disease, and for diabetes patients, is beneficial because it helps stabilize your blood sugar.
Secondly, yes, you should eat small amounts of fruit per day and large amounts of vegetables a day. I never claimed otherwise but the site simply fails to point out that fruit should be taken in significantly lesser quantities than vegetables.
>A piece of fruit and a candy bar are not nutritionally equivalent even if they share the same GI. In fact, most fruits are low in GI. See for yourself by going to the University of Sydney GI database.
Searching for individual foods is a terrible way to compare GI levels. And no, most fruit is not "low in GI", most are high and compare to starchy foods and even candy, as I stated earlier. Fruits like tomatoes that are not sugary/starchy are considered vegetables btw.
>Number two culprit? Lack of fruit and vegetables in the diet.
That's somewhat irrelevant. It's the combination of fruits and vegetables that keeps you healthy, and honestly, you probably could do without sugary fruits entirely if you ate enough quantity and variety of vegetables. It's the fresh plant material rich in minerals/vitamins that's good for you. In any case, small amounts of fruit should be sufficient to add nutritional value and not pose a risk, just as small amounts candy shouldn't pose a risk if eat in very small doses.
The "ribbon" interface may have been a novel idea for Microsoft, but it did have precedents in ealier software (although the implementation was obviously different).
Here, for example, is a screenshot of Adobe PhotoDeluxe. Adobe discontinued this software in 2002: http://goo.gl/q1LFn
And here's a Lotus Word Pro screenshot with it's tabbed, floating "properties" palette: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Word_Pro.png
In many ways, the Microsoft Office "ribbon" takes a similar approach, but anchors the ribbon to the top of the screen rather than in a floating palette.
The examples above aren't identical to the Microsoft "ribbon" design, but they contain seeds of the same idea.