Presentation matters

MATURE USERS OF Unix, Mac OS, and Windows realize that GUIs have not changed appreciably in the past 15 years. Today’s GUIs jam text into rectangles in more or less the same way they always have.

But we can’t discuss Web services, collaboration, portals, or rich clients without considering GUIs. When I fantasize about my personal Bloomberg Channel — one screen with all the data that matters to me — I realize it’s impossible with any existing GUI unless some developer breaks a lot of rules.

Luckily, signs are emerging that interface problems will soon be addressed where they should: at the system level.

Red Hat polarized open-source developers by blurring the differences between Linux’s two leading GUI layers, KDE and GNOME. If you don’t know or care about those differences, you’ve proved Red Hat’s point. Business users’ confusion about KDE and GNOME kept Linux stuck in its “hacker toy” groove. So Red Hat 8.0 makes the two GUIs look and act the same by default.

It’s an important step not only because it knocks down a longstanding barrier to Linux adoption, but also because Red Hat placed business requirements ahead of open-source politics. That’s a welcome sign.

With OS X, Apple decided that the X Window System — the GUI guts of Unix/BSD/Linux and the underpinnings of KDE and GNOME — just can’t hack it in business. Aqua, Apple’s proprietary GUI, runs only on PowerPC Macs. Even on Apple’s value platforms, Aqua can count on hardware-accelerated graphics.

The result is a mixed bag. Aqua does some tricks, such as window-sizing animations, just to show off. But other tricks — such as font-smoothing, window-border transparency, and textured backgrounds — actually benefit users by reducing eye-strain and allowing higher data density.

Apple made good choices about which GUI features would continue to be meaningful after the “wow” wears off — it designed the hardware so worthwhile features won’t drag down performance. Plus, Sun owes Apple a huge debt for making Java Swing, the ugliest application UI in the business, look like Aqua on the Mac. Microsoft can’t bring .Net to OS X without making similar arrangements for the presentation layer.

No matter what role you play in IT, the quality of the GUI affects your experience as a user. Your attitude about the systems and applications you use are shaped by the aesthetics, ergonomics, and responsiveness of the user interface. The GUI is a bottleneck that’s keeping Web services and related concepts from achieving their potential.

But GUIs can’t be fixed by app vendors. As Red Hat and Apple learned, two paths to graphical interfaces on one platform are two too many. Their work represents early steps — but daring and important ones — toward alleviating GUI pain.

Return to the Special report: Apple unpeeled package.

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