Simon’s Blog

Tim Bray has a great post about the progress being made with Netbeans. He likes it a lot. However, he’s having problems learning some parts of the interface. Quoting Tim,

The NetBeans team loves icons to a fault, and there are a bunch of new CVS-related icons that now hang off your project files and folders, I dunno what they mean, then again the meaning of half the NetBeans icons escapes me; but they don’t get in the way.

Well, there’s a reason for that. Icons are intrinsically difficult to understand. They should be used only where a text description of what buttons do isn’t an option. This is a classic mistake that developers building graphical user interfaces often make. The golden rule for user interface design is, “Easy to learn, and easy to use at all costs”. See the booked cited in a previous blog entry of mine, if you want to understand more about the reasons why icons are so difficult to understand for most people.

For more about the progress being made with Netbeans, see Tim’s full post
.