Hey Adobe… Why no startup screen for Photoshop CS4? And about those interfaces…

MS
Posted By
Mike_Skelton
Oct 30, 2008
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826
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23
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Closed
Hey Adobe..

Kind of like the startup screens available on everything in CS4 Premium but Photoshop. Why not on Photoshop? I think it’s pretty handy with the links and recent items lists..

And ( maybe a little whiny here as I have been battling the flu for days now πŸ™‚ is it just me, or does anyone else think the new interfaces look, well, have to be honest, kinda flat, clunky and graceless? I mean, sure they work ok with lots of bells and whistles, but honestly, they look like some stripped down old shareware program interface. Pretty humble for design software. Like paying a premium price for a new Corvette where the only available paint color is primer grey. Maybe somebody oughta offer skins πŸ™‚

Mike

Must-have mockup pack for every graphic designer πŸ”₯πŸ”₯πŸ”₯

Easy-to-use drag-n-drop Photoshop scene creator with more than 2800 items.

JJ
John Joslin
Oct 30, 2008
Can you suggest how a pretty interface will produce a better result out of the work pipeline?

I would have thought the less distraction from the job in hand the better.

Skins are for kids.
F
Freeagent
Oct 30, 2008
I love the new UI, precisely because there are no distractions. It’s all business. Battleship gray rules. Best of all, we got rid of the blue image frame in CS3/Vista.

Occasionally I have to do some work in Office 2007, and I’m snowblind for hours afterwards…
BL
Bob Levine
Oct 30, 2008
I love the new UI, with one exception…everything’s in upper case.

That can be fixed in InDesign but nothing else I know of.

http://indesignsecrets.com/dont-like-all-caps-in-the-interfa ce-try-this-for-some-relief.php

Bob
M
Mylenium
Oct 31, 2008
but honestly, they look like some stripped down old shareware program interface. Pretty humble for design software. Like paying a premium price for a new Corvette where the only available paint color is primer grey. Maybe somebody oughta offer skins

* umm* Completely disagree. The unified interface is the best thing that has happened to Adobe/ Macromedia apps in years. And old shareware interface? I don’t know what programs you have been using then, as most such programs are based on MFC/ GDI+, Windows’ own standard UI libraries for windows, buttons and dialogs and actually look a lot like Windows 2000 many times. I will not share in in Freeagent’s "battle ship gray is the new white" chorus, but it is unobtrusive and serves the purpose quite well, considering. Personally I think Adobe have done a great job – they took inspiration from OSX/ Aqua, but without making it look flamboyant and oversized like a kid’s computer interface and they included Windows much more logical behaviors for docking windows and resizing them, so we get the best of both worlds.

Mylenium
MS
Mike_Skelton
Oct 31, 2008
Sorry, I guess I needed to be more specific though I really didn’t mean for this to get all that detailed. I’m not looking for Candyland or Starwars. It just looks to me like Adobe, a company almost 100% focused on design, kept designers out of the loop and let the programmers handle the look of the new interfaces. I’m hard pressed to imagine a designer at the level Adobe surely is hiring at leaning back and thinking "Damn this a hot look."

After all, elegant and functional are not mutually exclusive thank God. And hell I’m an artist, I’ll take pretty over stark any day.

As far as work flow, rather than distracting, it’s certainly easier and more functional to be able to locate something quickly with some color or design clues rather than search for something specific in a group of flat black text and links and icons on a sea of featureless grey.

When I say it looks like a return to an old shareware look, I am comparing it to something like

<http://www.softcab.com/Cross_A_9473.dialer> ( searched out quickly at random )…

….when they just as easily could have gone more in a direction like…

<http://www.thinkyhead.com/tabletmagic/_img/prefs-setup.png>

…not saying they should have gone with a Mac look or this specifically by any means, but it’s an example of using a grey background yet being functional and elegant and modern without being flashy or distracting.

Bob, Im glad you mentioned the upper case text, that did catch my eye. It looks, I dunno, cheap? Thanks for the tip on the InDesign interface.

I do like the docking functions way better, and I have little complaint about the way the rest of it works and love the many many many tools available. I just think the look could use a little more thought. Actually the lack of the startup screen in Photoshop probably accents the drabness as it provides at least a touch of color to the other programs, temporary as it may be πŸ™‚

Like I said, I’ve been ill for days and that’s probably making me a bit whiney πŸ™‚ Maybe because I miss taste and smell and crave some stimulation πŸ™‚ My last two cents on the subject πŸ™‚

Thanks for the replies folks –

Mike
M
Mylenium
Oct 31, 2008
Well:

<http://xd.adobe.com>

I’m still not sure if I share your views. In usability engineering/ UI design there’s so much going on and just like everywhere else, you can take this road or another one. It’s only natural that one never can satisfy everyone. Sure, some color wouldn’t hurt, but not in the way you meant it. In my view colors should only be used to designate relations of content items and put them in context, but not for config stuff or tool settings.

A good example of where Adobe got it all wrong is e.g. in After Effects by removing the colored tabs in the effects control, layer and footage windows that in versions up to 6.5 would reflect the color of a layer in the timeline. This makes it much more difficult to distinguish between what layer you are currently working on if you have the same effects applied to them and potentially confuse them. another example for "reverse improving" matters is in Dreamweaver when you enable the little "Show head content" option – the pane is all gray and it’s actually not easy to distinguish which item represents a meta tag, a linked CSS file or a script… It’s the little things, you know.

If you really wanted to better express the relation of configuration and tool options, Adobe would have to overcome their fear of using horizontal/ vertical lines and grouping frames. Also they do not carefully enough align and sort options (see the mess that is the adjustments and 3D panels in CS4) and in addition often cram in options on panels that are actually quite filled already but on the other hand have panels sometimes where a single option is presented amidst a sea of gray. Perhaps more than anything else this leads to the impression of inconsistent UI design and confuses the end user. If you will, the user has to explicitly remember the layout of every panel and the position of every damn checkbox which never allows him to click on something "blindfold", but rather requires him to proactively go looking for a specific option.

Probably that’s what you meant by using colors – you are looking for a way to immediately draw the attention to important items by labeling them in red and labeling lesser items in other colors or by arranging them in a more logical (in your view) tabbing order/ top-down order so you don’t miss the important stuff, but can easily ignore options which you never use…

Mylenium
P
Phosphor
Oct 31, 2008
"As far as work flow, rather than distracting, it’s certainly easier and more functional to be able to locate something quickly with some color or design clues rather than search for something specific in a group of flat black text and links and icons on a sea of featureless grey."

Here’s something you may not have ever consciously considered, Mike, though I’ll bet you know it intrinsically:

Despite the fact that color and value can be an eye attractant, much of what makes for smooth, almost unconscious workflow has muchto do with consistency of position than it does with color, value, icons or text labels. This isn’t just some UI philosophy I’m making up; smarter people than IΒ—and entire institutionsΒ—have made deeply detailed studies of this.

Two things you can experiment with that will help you notice what I’m talking about (if you’ve somehow never noticed it before):

Test 1:
Are there bookmarks or folders full of bookmarks in your browser windows’ bookmarks bar that have been in the same place for a long time? Take a minute or two and rearrange them. Maybe add an empty dummy folder or two to the left side of your bookmarks bar. Leave them that way for a few days, so that you kind of forget you rearranged them. I’ll bet you’ll find that when you move to click on a bookmark you use somewhat regularly, your hand will unconsciously start to move your cursor to where it used to be. I’ll bet it takes upwards of a dozen or more instances of traveling to the bookmarks’ new location before your brain re-naturalizes to subconsciously finding that bookmark in its new position. This is because it’s easier for our brains to process a location, rather than having to read and interpret a text label every time it wants to perform a function like this.

Test 2:
Like most of us, I’m sure you have your Palettes/Panels in different applications set just the way you like them. And if you’ve dug into the app, you’ve saved that Workspace set-up so you can return things to where you like them in the event of a reformat, or reinstall, or preferences re-set.

Go ahead and move all your Panels/Palette to significantly different positions. Save this workspace, and use it exclusively for a few days instead of the set up you’re used to. And again, give it a day or three, so you kind of forget you rearranged your workspace. Your brain will find it a bit of a struggle to negotiate the app’s tools and functions because now you’re forcing it to constantly hunt for and make a new interpretation about where everything is located. To do that, your eys first have to scan and hunt for the icon or text label of the tool or function you want to use. Then it has to interpret that visual signal that then tells your voluntary motor control "Oh, that’s where it is, that’s what it is, let’s move our hand so the mouse cursor goes there."

That "sea-of-featureleless-gray-with-black-text," as you call it, serves a very important function precisely because of its unobtrusiveness. It gets the heck out of the way and allows your eyeballs and the analytical part of your brain room to focus on the real task at hand, that is: To make the best adjustments you can to the image you’re working on.

The interface may look different, but give yourself and your (almost)autonomic motor control some honest time to get used to it. As long as you set-up your workspace to suit your needs, I’m willing to bet that soon enough you won’t even have to think about looking for differentiating color or reading text labels on a tool…you’ll just navigate where you need to, almost without thinking about it.
JM
J_Maloney
Oct 31, 2008
Adobe: I WANT STAR WARS. NOW.
BC
Bart_Cross
Oct 31, 2008
I am an artist, I prefer simplicity over design for my working environment. Screw the fancy-schmaltzy interface, I just want it to run so I can do the creative without any problems.
JM
J_Maloney
Oct 31, 2008
Yeah, but Star Wars. Maybe even some buttons that don’t DO anything — just blink and look great. Random R2D2 chirps. Profuse apologies in 6 billion languages. And the Sarlacc for those pesky clients!
MS
Mike_Skelton
Oct 31, 2008
Good points, especially from Mylenium and Phos4dots πŸ™‚ I know years ago when I first bought 3D Studio max it took me forever to find stuff because that was the first program I ever used where palettes changed whenever a specific tool was selected, though it’s pretty much the norm now, which I’m happy with. And yes I expect I’ll get used to it. After 30 years of continuous new software and systems and upgrades I wouldn’t have gotten this far without some flexibility :)And if I wasn’t ready to deal with and consider opposing opinions, I probably would have leapt off something tall sometime during the past eight years :)Glad to have given everybody something to argue about other than the next prez and their shrinking 401k’s πŸ™‚

Thanks for the replies and interesting comments everyone.

Best,

Mike
M
Mylenium
Oct 31, 2008
I am an artist, I prefer simplicity over design for my working environment. Screw the fancy-schmaltzy interface, I just want it to run so I can do the creative without any problems.

I don’t think that any such statement can ever be perfectly honest. πŸ˜‰ The terrible truth is that the perceived "simplicity" is a quite laborious "design" process. For UI items to make sense, you have to balance their level of abstraction with what the user possibly could still recognize as an interactive element with a function behind it plus you have to give the user a way to further distinguish between content and program. That’s the one thing where e.g. many of those custom interfaces in sci-fi or spy flicks fail and never would work in the real world, regardless how much they pretend they could…

Mylenium
P
Phosphor
Oct 31, 2008
I’d throw my computers off a highway overpass if they made a little skweedly-brrrt-deet! noise with every. single. function. like you see in TV shows and movies.

πŸ™‚
BC
Bart_Cross
Oct 31, 2008
I was using WIN2K up until last year because I didn’t like the XP interface.
MS
Mike_Skelton
Oct 31, 2008
Yeah I used Vectorworks cad for a number of years and the sound effects were irritating as hell and the first thing to get turned off.

Another thing about the sci-fi interfaces,they always show these guys grabbing and moving stuff around with both hands on vertical virtual screens. How tired would you be after working like THAT all day πŸ™‚ Very spoiled using a mouse. Last time I set up a canvas on an easel and decided to paint awhile my arm was sore for days πŸ™‚ I gotta get back to the gym πŸ™‚
P
Phosphor
Oct 31, 2008
Hey Mike…think about the body trauma Michelangelo must have gone through working on the Sistine Chapel! Contrary to the popular belief that he laid on his back to paint, he actually stood on scaffolding he had to build <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistine_Chapel#Ceiling> while painting. For 4 years.

YEEE-OWTCH!!!
F
Freeagent
Oct 31, 2008
Now the discussion is getting interesting, even though I definitely side with Bart and Phos on this.

I find the layout of this very forum a good analogy. Some would say it’s pretty dull, but I think it’s excellent design because it’s perfectly functional. Easy to read, no visual clutter. Easy to navigate. Perfect column width, so the eye doesn’t have to move all across the screen (try Luminous Landscape…). That leaves a lot of empty space to give the eye a rest.

It’s simply visually relaxing, and that’s how I feel about the new CS interface also.

BTW, I was very skeptical about the upper case text, but in reality it works more like small caps, so it’s not as intrusive as I thought it would be.
B
beerfueled
Oct 31, 2008
Bart:

I was using WIN2K up until last year because I didn’t like the XP interface.

Wouldn’t the "Windows Classic" theme have helped with that?

< http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1W6WIlz1FFi3iK3PcF jj3c2VMT1zh1>

-larry
JJ
John Joslin
Oct 31, 2008
However, upper case words in any size are quite simply not as quickly legible as upper and lower case.

We read words by shape, not letter by letter.

It is an elementary blunder.
F
Freeagent
Oct 31, 2008
It is an elementary blunder

No argument, I just said I could live with it. Still, it’s a bit strange for a company with roots in typography.
M
Mylenium
Nov 1, 2008
Some would say it’s pretty dull, but I think it’s excellent design because it’s perfectly functional.

Somewhere inbetween, I’d say. The basics are right, navigation is just not particularly elegant, especially in over-organised outposts such as the Encore DVD forums and a few other places. πŸ˜‰ Luckily browsers have tabs these days, so it’s possible to have multiple forums open without problems, but there’s certainly room for improvement…. Users should also be able to tag their posts with categories, which would help to easily forward more techy questions to the nerds like me or official support, whereas more artsy questions would go to people who, unlike me, really seriously do photography.

Mylenium
BC
Bart_Cross
Nov 1, 2008
beerfueled: …but then it was still XP which needed at least the first service pack to make it functional. I had it on another machine (so I could help clients who were having XP related issues), but not my ‘work’ machine.
N
Nypedro
Nov 1, 2008
I’ve been trying to get accustomed to the UI and it has been a pain in the ass, although from the reports I heard I expected something much worse. I feel like more screen space is being eaten up by the toolbars, does anyone else feel that way? Luckily I have 2 screens. The Bridge icon should continually be lite up in a color, not just on a hover.

Something that really pisses me off- Photoshop is not that bad BUT Have you seen Flash and Dreamwaver? (for windows) There is no place to grab the window. WTF? I have to aim my mouse to little spots where there is no button.

Must-have mockup pack for every graphic designer πŸ”₯πŸ”₯πŸ”₯

Easy-to-use drag-n-drop Photoshop scene creator with more than 2800 items.

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