A man by the name of Paul Souders recently linked the photo to the right on his blog (click to be taken to flickr). Do you know what that is? It’s an Exposé of 34 different window panes. He complains about the number of panes present in applications, with the soon-to-be-famous quote:
I like panes and all but. Seriously. Enough. Is. Enough.
A flickr commenter raises the point that he likes panes. They’ve got functionality, organization, and options. Paul rebuts with:
[Panes are] not a “problem,” just “excessive.” It reminds me of palettes in the mac world ca. 1999, or dialog boxes ca. 1990. When a good interface solution appears, it starts showing up everywhere.
There are other solutions for showing “elements inside this element” (e.g. collapsible lists) or “properties of the selected element” (e.g. inspectors)…or maybe there are novel interfaces just waiting to happen. Seeing the multi-pane interface almost literally everywhere suggests to me that interface designers aren’t trying very hard, they’re just falling back on “what we know works”.
Precisely. A lack of imagination and creativity in the pane department. When will we see some sort of 3D organtization, or virtual desktops? As computers become a bigger part of our everyday lives, running (and using) 5 or 6 applications simultaneously, we need a better solution for application organization. And let me give software developers a hint: panes are not the answer.
Very good point. I must admit that Panes are a great way to keep things organised and it's just one of the factors about OS X which makes it unique. We might see something unique in Leopard, afterall, we're just beginning to think on Apple's wave length.
I liked when Fraser Speirs noticed this first. ;)