Quote Originally Posted by Revfan9 View Post
What's the complaint? Just look at it. It goes against every decent UI standard ever made. Let's look at a screenshot, shall we?

Holy fucking crap. This thing is a BEAST. And not in the awkward porno way. It's an insult to good UI design. Let's list through the problems here.

1. Bad placement. The golden rule of GUIs is to place the most important things at the top left, and the least important things at the bottom right. The whole thing is a mess. There's no real logical order to anything.

2. Too many options thrown at the user at once! Things are hidden behind sub-menus in most GUIs for a good reason. Throwing everything right into the users face is more likely to intimidate the user and wastes time, as the user has to spend more time visually scanning trying to find what they need. The only options that should be thrown directly into the user's face are the ones that need constant access.

3. The entire interface is... Cryptic, at best. Everything, when presented to the user, needs to be completely, 100% obvious. Any time that the user spends trying to figure out how to do shit is wasted productivity. Icons are almost always a big no-no, except for the most common, most obvious functions (New, Open, Save, Close Program, etc.)

4. Too big! Keyboard shortcuts are king. While they require a bit of memorization for new users, for experienced ones they're a godsend that shaves hours off of your work time. Not only is this interface not friendly at all to keyboard shortcuts, but the real estate the user has to move their mouse through just to get to stuff is daunting. Taking an extra second to do something may not seem like much, but when that something is something you have to do every few seconds... The wasted time and the frustration adds up quickly.

These are just my major complaints. I could go on all night about this if I felt like it.
These are all things we can take into consideration. The one thing that people seem to not be getting is that Large Mode in its current iteration is not final. Large mode will become the standard because I can no longer stand to shoehorn the GUI into a 320x240 pixel space. That doesn't mean that what you see is what you're gonna get no matter what. Obviously we can't please everyone, but we can look at different options and see what will work and what won't. The comments about things not being obvious, for example, is one I tend to agree with.

But, just to be clear, large mode is here to stay, so everyone please spend time thinking of how it can be improved instead of complaining that we should keep small mode around forever.