Vincent Gable’s Blog

October 23, 2009

GUI is Dead, Long Live UI

Filed under: Design,Programming,Usability | , , , ,
― Vincent Gable on October 23, 2009

The term GUI, Graphical User Interface, pronounced “Gooey” is laughably anachronistic. All interfaces meant for people on modern computers are graphical. The right abbreviation to use today is simply UI, for User Interface, pronounced “You I”.

Believe me, I understand that a command line interface is still useful today. I use them. I’m a programmer. I get the whole UNIX thing. Even without a pipe, a command-line is the highest-bandwidth input mechanism we have today.

But all command lines live inside a graphical OS. That’s how computers work in the 21st century.
Picture 6.png

Whenever I see “GUI” written I can’t help but wonder if the author is dangerously out of touch. Do they still think graphical interfaces are a novelty that needs to be called out?

March 13, 2008

Useful Mac OS X Text-Editing Shortcuts

Filed under: MacOSX,Tips,UNIX,Usability | , , ,
― Vincent Gable on March 13, 2008

Here is a handful of lesser-known Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts that I’ve found to be very useful for working with text. They work in all standard text-fields, which means they work in most programs. Sadly, they don’t work in Microsoft products, and a few other apps that use non-standard text fields.

option = you will see the mouse cursor into a + , and you can now select columns of text! Unfortunately it only seems to work in editable text-fields, which is a great shame.

ctrl + d = forward delete, even if you don’t have it on your MacBook’s keyboard.

ctrl + a = Go to the beginning of the line the insertion-point is on.

ctrl + e = Go to the beginning end of the line line the insertion-point is on.

ctrl + k = “kill the current line”, deletes everything from the right of the insertion point to the next newline. This is very useful in Terminal, because you can delete the tail of a long command

command + delete = “Delete To Beginning Of Line”. Just like ctrl+k, but backwards, not forwards. (It even puts the killed text on the yank-pasteboard — don’t worry if that makes no sense, it’s an emacs-ism I don’t find useful.)

And yes, that’s ctrl, not command, because these are shortcuts inherited from the old UNIX text-editor emacs. There are more emacs “key bindings” that are available, but I have never found them useful. This long list of Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts includes them.

command + ctrl + d = look up the word under the mouse in the dictionary. I can’t believe that other operating systems haven’t done this for decades, it’s that useful.

It is unfortunate when programs use text-fields that do not support commands the operating system should give to every application. It’s always a mistake. Fundamentally, not supporting ctrl+a (go to beginning) is no different then not supporting command+c (copy).

If you find these commands useful, please teach them, and let developers know it’s a problem when you can’t use them. That will improve computing for everyone.

February 28, 2008

Useful MacOSX Terminal Commands

Filed under: MacOSX,Tips,UNIX | , ,
― Vincent Gable on February 28, 2008

Here are some OS X specific terminal commands that I have found useful, and you might not be aware of. Running man command in the Terminal will give you more information about command as it is on your system.

open
open file will open file the same way it would have been opened if you double-clicked it in the Finder. You can also specify what program to use to open the file.

pbcopy, pbpaste
Bridges the clipboard and the command line; you can pipe the clipboard into stdout, or pipe stdout into the clipboard.

ps -axww
Lists every process running on the system, and gives the full-path to them, and their PSN. I almost never use any other arguments to ps.

osascript
Execute an AppleScript. osascript -e “code-goes-here”, will execute the AppleScript inside the “”. This is a great way to get AppleScript functionality in a good scripting language.

ditto
Can do the work of cp or zip, but it does the right thing on OS X, and won’t throw away Mac-specific bits.
ditto -ckX --rsrc --keepParent path_to_a_bundledFile.bundle bundledFile.bundle.zip will compress path_to_a_bundledFile.bundle, and keep all the Mac-bits intact.

hdiutil
Create and manipulate disk-images; you can even use it to burn a disk-image to CD/DVD.
Inside a perl-script I do:
hdiutil create -ov -fs HFS+ -format UDBZ -volname \”IMLocation v$version (beta)\” -srcfolder $IMLBuildDir ~/Projects/Website/imlocation/IMLocation.dmg
To make the disk-image for IMLocation out of the contents of the directory $IMLBuildDir.

screencapture
Lets you take a screenshot. Unfortunately not very well documented.
screencapture -x /tmp/screen.png
Will silently take a screenshot, and save it to /tmp/screen.png.
I think this could be great for bug-reporting.

system_profiler
Reports system hardware and software configuration; with no arguments it reports everything. Obviously great for bug reports and research.

sw_vers
Prints version information about the Mac OS X.
$ sw_vers
ProductName: Mac OS X
ProductVersion: 10.5
BuildVersion: 9A581
$ sw_vers -productName
Mac OS X
$ sw_vers -productVersion
10.5
$ sw_vers -buildVersion
9A581

systemsetup
Configuration tool for certain machine settings in System Preferences.

defaults
Read and write application preferences. You can use it to discover and activate hidden settings, like Safari’s Debug menu. defaults read > all_defaults.txt will give you a grep-able text-file with every default on your system. It’s also a useful tool for automated testing, since you can twiddle configurations.

class-dump (3rd party tool)
Makes .h files from a binary. Great for reverse-engineering.

In addition to standard UNIX commands, Mac OS X includes many powerful command-line tools. This article only scratches the surface, and ignores many tools like podcast that are probably very useful, but aren’t part of my workflow.

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