Mo’z Thinkz

Just another idiot that wants to be heard…

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Sep 2, 2008

Launchy vs Gnome Do: usability vs geniality

After a deadend hackintosh adventure of 3 days, I finally made the jump to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS 64b (and Linux for an OS that is) a couple of days ago. WOW! My Dell XPS 1710 seems to be at least 3 times as fast and stable. Pfff, I should have guessed :P The love for my über apps made me wait and wait, but the increasing instability of my Windows XP setup had me crying. So when I found a good replacement for my ‘first in command’ app Launchy, I was sold. The latest 0.5 version of Gnome Do was the Quicksilver lookalike I was looking for. So I thought.

I don’t understand why hardly anybody complains about this, but I found that Launchy has much more UI friendliness than GnomeDo for most of my day to day uses (which mainly involve the Launchy plugin ‘Weby’):

I am doing searches on the web (info, torrents, anything), so I CTRL+C something, ALT+TAB, enter action shortcut, TAB, CTRL+V, maybe edit, ENTER…
Here’s where Gnome Do fails me, for two reasons:
- I am not able to paste quickly with CTRL+V, which has become second nature. I find it very counter intuitive to have to use the applet itself for a simple ‘paste’ action.
- Secondly, I cannot edit my entered text. Why? This leads to redundant type actions.
Again, I am doing searches on the web, and I didn’t find anything with my last query, so I want to redo/edit my last action.
Hoorah! Launchy keeps state and preselects everything! But Gnome Do just loses everything. Why?
For all of these searches I’m doing, I created shortcuts. So I start my launcher, type ‘g’+TAB and whatever I want to search for in Google. Or ‘ct’+TAB and search for a torrent on completorrent.com.
How do I create shortcuts for url’s in Gnome Do? Like I can with Weby? Even Quicksilver has that possibility! I know about the ‘alias’ functionality in Do, but it cannot be applied to urls. And even if it could, it wouldn’t work the same, because there are no placeholders in aliases.

So handling these use cases alone in GnomeDo cost me a lot of time and agony, and therefore made me install Launchy on Ubuntu. It never hurts to have them side by side.

And now for some reverse psychology:

I have read that GnomeDo was built in Mono, which is some *nix port of dot net, so I’ve heard. And I start to wonder. Maybe the developers are Micros**t developers, and these never seemed to have much of an eye for Interaction Design. Hmmm… Also, most of the geniality behind Gnome Do can be found in Quicksilver (doh!). But why did they leave out the shortcut functionality? And why not improve instead of just imitate?

Well, at the end of the day, I am still a pragmatic, and hopefully awaiting the necessary improvements from the Do team. Since Do is an integrated approach, it promises to become the defacto ‘Action Handler’ for Gnome. And in case you wonder about it’s ‘geniality’ part…go check it out! And do switch to Linux if you have to for that :p

…

Oh darn, now that I completely switched to unix, I have to rewrite my favorite apps section :p

5 Comments, Comment or Ping

David

Hey, I’m the author of GNOME Do. I’m not a MS developer. Mono is the best development environment available on Linux today. I wrote Do for a school project, and Mono made everything simple so I chose it. Do is very young compared to Launchy and QS, so most of the missing features you mention were not left out intentionally, but rather have not yet been included due to lack of time.

Also, if you read the GNOME Do whitepaper, you well see that we put a lot of thought into how Do is designed, and from this post I can tell that you take for granted the most important decisions we made.

Furthermore, Do is one of the best designed apps on Linux today. I’m really not sure why you think our interaction is bad. It’s just different. Maybe if you read the white paper you’ll understand why we did some things the way we did.

Sep 2nd, 2008
Morriz

Aha, so I should take a look at mono then. First of all, I am sorry if I p*ssed you off in any way. I do hope you continue your excellent work and improve on the things I mentioned. I know I am not very diplomatic in my thoughts and writings, but I didn’t want to clutter my criticism by first appraising the 0.5 release. I (and many with me) do think that the points mentioned are a big put-off in the adoption of Gnome Do. I read in your road map that you are trying to get the cut ‘n paste functionality into the 0.7 release, but I strongly urge you and your team to get it into 0.6. You are in the highlights now, and more ppl will scrutinize your work. So don’t take it personally, its just feedback.
In the meantime my -easier and faster to use- Launchy will keep doing most of my launch work, while Gnome Do can search my gmail email/contacts because of the simple fact that Launchy can’t. Wouldn’t it be nice if Gnome Do was as user friendly? You as a programmer should know of all people: users want it to work/feel/look nicely first of all. My advice: don’t reply with ‘it’s just different’, if users give you critique you can work with. I know that I -and I think a lot of other people- really need a shortcut mechanism with placeholders (like launchy’s Weby). And the fact that you put the copy ‘n paste functionality in the roadmap tells me you are listening. You made a point by showing you’re not bending over, but now it’s time to truly open up and accept what’s coming I guess…

Sep 9th, 2008
David

When I said Do is different, I meant that some of the habits you learned in QS or Launchy do not translate — you can often accomplish the same tasks in Do, but we eschew shortcut keys and cryptic abbreviations so the way we do things may seem inferior or roundabout, but a lot of critical thinking went into them.

For example, you say “I am doing searches on the web (info, torrents, anything), so I CTRL+C something, ALT+TAB, enter action shortcut, TAB, CTRL+V, maybe edit, ENTER…”

I don’t know about your grandmother, but to my grandmother, “CTRL+C ALT+TAB CTRL+V” is completely impenetrable gibberish. With Do, we wanted to try to capture this pattern in a simple way that is easier to learn and less difficult to discover and remember than shortcut keys. If you find a snippet of text on the web you want to search for in Do, select it with your mouse (you already do this before you copy it), then, do not copy or paste it — bring up Do, type “search” to bring up your search action, and “Selected Text” will be the suggested item for that action. So, the sequence goes: Select text, bring up Do, find the action you want to run on the selected text, hit enter.

Your “launchy” method: select, ctrl-c, alt-tab, search for action, tab, ctrl-v, enter.
The Do method: select, Do, search for action, enter

Dec 29th, 2008
Morriz

Hey, thanks for replying, and again, thanks for creating this great product. But I thought I was rather clear about the lack of functionality in Do, which I luckily still find in Launchy. My grandmother is long dead, and I was left with my comp to talk with :p And I wish my apps were smart and fast enough to do my tasks at hand. If you investigate the factors that make up usability, you’ll find a rule saying something in the line of: “don’t create yet another ‘smart’ system of handling common problems if fast and proven methods already exist solidly in the minds of your user group.” I mentioned only 3 simple things that take up too many actions/clicks/backsteps to accomplish with Do, even with your suggested workarounds. Again, why not give users these simple things they are used to:
- shortcuts (even quicksilver has em!)
- cut n past functionality the way we’re used to (CTRL-C, CTRL-V)
- keep state of last input
Why the resistance against these simple and obvious needs? I understand the decisions for consistency in your semantic approach, just convert your thoughts into typing and actions will follow, or something like that. It works for many a user, old, smart or stupid. And it is great! It leads to a new way of using computers, but I should thank the Quicksilver team for that ofcourse. But I am a poweruser (pfff, did I say that about myself), and I need speed. Again, Quicksilver has cut n paste, shortcuts, and keeps state if I recall this right. And so does Launchy. Why do you think that is? And why do you think ppl ask for these things? Maybe they want those features? I am surely not the only one, and think I’ve spent enough time on the subject. Hopefully we can see some improvement in the way Do’s design team handles these usability issues.

I rest my case (I hope)…

Dec 29th, 2008
Connor

“Mono is the best development environment available on Linux today.”

Come on now. You’re pulling my leg.

“Do is one of the best designed apps on Linux today.”

Really? A bit full of yourself, aren’t you?

I found Do to be intrusive and unpredictable (buggy). It’s a good application, but I’d suggest focusing on usability, speed and stability, not making it look like Apple.

Dec 14th, 2009