Quote Originally Posted by handrawn View Post
life is a learning process
Yep. What I particularly like though is seeing implementations of the same sort of algorithms I used to program. I have a clear notion on how hard many of these things are to write in a non-crashing way.

I *also* am very impressed with how much attention seems to be paid to avoiding counter-intuitive interfaces these days. Someone somewhere decided to get a clue. . As a once principal software engineer / architect / what have you, it has always been exceedingly difficult to design complex GUI's with a multitude of options and interactions in a way that does not get in the way of the work flow.

GUI's should be "transparent" in that they should never get in the way nor be something you are overly concerned with. They need to *facilitate* something else, not exist in their own right. e.g., Too many apps fall into the category of click-click-click-click-click to get anything done. They often lack drill-down (the ability to dive deeply into abilities you've previously configured), and rarely have the mouse (click/drag/drop) + keyboard smoothly integrated.

Xara does a really good job (AFAICT so far) of rarely violating the law of least surprise.