Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/GUI

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GUI

Looking for input on content and help trying to iron out any rendering issues (please post in the discussion thinger if you run into any). Also i'm not sure if the "choice" code is actually working as only one of them appears to show up for me. All input greatly appreciated. ¶ 01:10, March 27, 2012 (UTC)

Okay. I'm going to have a look at this one, but the interface dies on iPhone, do it may need some technical tweaking as well. While I'm at it check out Readme.txt and monitor for some alternate options on formatting. Nominally Humane! 11:35 27 Mar

My links are off, but you should be able to locate the articles I meant. Nominally Humane! 04:51 28 Mar

Thanks for the input, this was all essentially done back in 2006, i figured i should ask someone before i started to tinker with it. Thanks for the input. --¶ 23:15, March 28, 2012 (UTC)

Reviewer details:

A little bit about the reviewer before we start.

Okay, so I've been around here for a little while, have just under 30 features, and have reviewed just over 100 articles. I know a bit about coding, about graphic manipulation, and about writing funny stuff. 

I'm using a different template to the standard for reviewing, as I would like to address the formatting first, and then the concept. It still gives the same stuff in the long run, but just in my own way. 

Prose and Formatting:

How good does it look and how well does it read? 5

Okay. This has had me thinking about it overnight and trying to work out if I like it or not. Let me explain the pros and cons, and see if you can understand my dilemma. 

• Pro

The look of it is great. It comes across as a completely text based GUI. There are two alternate pages that have a similar look/structure, that appear to be PC/Mac GUI ideas. There is a text based web browser interface, and a text based desktop.

• Cons
• Random selection as to which page is which. This halves the humour. Why? Because your intended audience should be people unfamiliar with Uncyclopedia. They will (as a general rule) look at a page, and then look elsewhere. This suggests they have no inclination to refresh the page. If they do, there is a 50/50 chance they'll see the same page. Depending on how their browser caches, they may not have a chance of the page changing at all. 

• No interactivity. This is a big issue. A web page of any description is a visual representation of HTML. The HT stand for hypertext. Tim Berners-Lee didn't create much that was new in the first version of HTML except for the hyperlink function. This is a long-winded explanation of anyone seeing a web-page expects to see some links to other content. Anyone stumbling across this page can click away to their hearts content and still not locate any interactive content. 

Additional to this is the aspect of this being a GUI. A GUI is, by it's name, a form of graphical interface. That means that a GUI does things depending of mouse click. 

• Length. I want to be able to scroll down and see the rest of the article. I don't have the ability to do that. To me that is just simply frustrating. Of course, I went into the code to work out what was going on, and noticed that there was no more content, and that it wasn't my browser interface issue. In both versions you have written part of an article. 

So, in short, we have two half articles, both seemingly unrelated to each other, with very little capacity to interact with what should be, by all accounts, an interactive interface. But that said, they both look really good. 

Now I have been using PCs since prior to having a GUI capacity. I learned to code in DOS before starting on Windows 3.11. (To give you an idea of what that means, I learned to program before I learned how to use a mouse.)

That means I have some familiarity with text based GUI-like applications. One that I used a fair bit was WordPerfect 5.1. Although technically a GUI, it was used by people unfamiliar with mouses, and most menu options were accessed by Alt/Ctrl/Shift Function keys. 

So the first and major issue here is that the page looks pretty - or rather looks authentic - but has limited capacity. 

Now there are a few solutions to this issue. The first is making this an interactive page. <pre> makes this difficult. 

Up until recently I had a page in my user space that was an ASCII art game where I struggled with exactly this issue. My solution in the end was to pop the whole shebang into a div with fixed width, colourising the text/background as I desired, and making the font-family courier. (Or maybe courier new - can't quite remember. A monospace font anyway.)

I directed you to a couple of articles that do a similar thing. Readme.txt is done in a similar fashion (ie ASCII art, monospace, etc) that is stuck in a div with scroll. That is one solution to the issue. Monitor (the first and second sections) show how to use monospace and a fixed width div to create a Monochrome/CGA/EGA look graphic. Note that monochrome was traditionally green on black.

I'd be tempted if this were my article, however, to do it slightly different. I'd create several "views" of this, and have links between the different views. The drawback to this is that you may need to work with pop-up text and hide/show divs to get your interactivity working properly. I'd also use {{CGI}} to move between page views to avoid creating sub-pages needlessly. 

You may also want to look at VCMSE as another of this type of page. Also Command Line as yet another. 

Concept

How good an idea is behind the article? 5

Okay, there are two different concept in here at work. The first is the formatting to look like a text-based GUI. I've covered that as far as it goes, so let's now look at the second half of the concept, which is in the text itself.

Now with articles that have funky formatting, they still have text in them as well which makes up a major part of the joke. Tropical Cyclone and Microsoft Knowledge Base are two "funky formatting" articles. Both of these had to have some humour in the text itself to make the articles themselves worth continuing to read until the "joke" started, ot to support keeping people's interest. Game:Alone in the dark is also "funky" and starts off with the funky format prior to the game proper, and then in the game proper it keeps the interest by backing it up with clever text.

This doesn't mean that funky formatting is a bad thing, by the way. Two of the articles I just mentioned have been top ten of the year articles. God's answering machine was a feature, even though it wasn't a top ten, and there are others as well, including ones I've mentioned in this same review.

So onto that half of the concept - well, in the Macintosh half you have the start of a good article. The heading you have suggest that it should have the equivalent length towards the end as well. On the Computer half you have a fairly short section, but a good "iTunes" parody. I'd like to see the article itself extended, and hopefully be able to "close window" on the web browser, hence going back and forth between the two options.

Humour

How funny is it? Why is it funny? How can it be funnier? 6

So let's go into some detail on the humour. I'll break it down into subsections, but given the way this is put together it's a pain to describe what section is what, so I hope my headers make sense.

• Macintosh GUI: Too short. Also the scroll bar makes it look as though there should be more text when you scroll down. This looks like it's meant to be a word processor or notepad file. I'm not sure what to do with this as I'd suggest you're better off keeping that section fairly short - a one liner type of thing. I'd remove the scrollbar though, so that it appears thast that should be the entirity of the text in there.

• Macintosh iToons: I'd really like to see this link up to real UnTunes songs. I we're naming songs in here we need to pimp our own work on the site. Some of the song titles at the moment are a little memeish.

• Uncyclopedia left banner: Does the ad really fit? And if it does, does it need to be in 1337?

• Uncyclopedia article: The humour in here is random. In fact it's very random. I'd feel better about this if you rewrote this to be a spork on Wikipedia:GUI rather than leaving it as is.

Images

How are the images? Are they relevant, with good quality and formatting? 5

Technically there are no images, but there is a fair bit of ASCII artwork here. The Uncyc potato is a good parody of the orignial. The a: icon I like as well.

The WWW icon is not someting I'm over excited about. I'd rather see this as a parody of the explorer e, like this:

 ▄▄
█▄▄█
▀▄▄

Miscellaneous

The article's overall quality - that indefinable something. 7

Altogether, I like where you've gotten so far. There is a way to get it further, and hopefully I've given you enough to get it over the mark.

If you need any helpin formatting, let me know.

Final score

Prose 5	Concept 5	Humour 6	Images 5	Misc 7	Final Score 28

Summary

An overall summation of the article.

This was a PEE review by Nominally Humane! 04:51 28 Mar