A nice link found tonight: GUIdebook is a website dedicated to preserving and showcasing Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). There is no judgment nor opinion associated with choices made by the various companies. They just show what is and what was the user interfaces, icons, splash screens, etc. of various operating systems and software.
I am looking for a widget toolkit (a software bag of things that allow you to create GUI). I have two desideratas: I want to use C++ and I want to use it on GNU/Linux. I’ve found two big lists of widget toolkits: one on Wikipedia and one on atai.org. For the moment, I think of using gtkmm or wxWidgets but I need more information … Now, some grumpy people will tell me they only use text-based applications ;-)
In What Workplace Coding Practices Do You Use? (Slashdot), there are some interesting notes about coding practices. The main one is, of course, the use of comments (and good ones: synchronised with code update, not too short, not too long, not explaining obvious lines like (if x == 456) except if it has a very special meaning, it may be interesting to write comments first in order to have clear ideas of what we want from the code, etc.). ...
While looking at the User Interface guidelines from various well-known companies, I found this text stating The Importance Of Labels. In his blog, Jensen Harris (apparently working on Outlook at Microsoft) write about his experience with icons: icons only are not used by non-expert people although icons with label are extensively used. When reading the comments at the end, I saw an interesting thread … If we accept that people will preferably use labelled icons, why not try text-only buttons (instead of icons)? I probably won’t work since, when using the two (icon + label), you are simply making an association between the meaning that you can read in text and the symbol. Later on, you’ll simply look for the symbol, knowing that it has a certain meaning in a certain situation. ...