SitePen Blog » Blog Archive » why splitpane views suck..
He’s got a point and Gmail is a marvel in it’s range of subtle usability tweaks.
But on the desktop splitpane views are pretty much becoming the norm. And as I’ve said before they suck a whole lot less than floating palettes and overlapping windows.
But they still leave too much of the decision making about use of screen space to the user. Jesse Kuhnert praises Gmail for removing those decisions from you and I must say I’ve never wished I could resize bits of the Gmail UI. Could this strategy work for a wider range of desktop apps too?
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But he eventually recants when one of the comments points out that the original pet peeve with Yahoo Mail Beta is easily fixed. He concludes his response with, “Admittedly it is much easier to criticize than it is to create elegant UI’s yourself.”
Just because he recants, doesn’t mean I have to concur
It more of a semi-recanting though, isn’t it? (and am I the first person to ever type ’semi-recanting?)
Yeah it was really only an apology for being harsh. I still believe 100% in every opinion I gave in the original article.
Interestingly there’s a few results in Google for ’semi-recanting’ but at least I’m number 1