User Interfaces

The choice of User eXperience (UX) makes a big difference. Recent technology improvements and price drops have enabled many more choices for consumers. Again, people usually purchase computing devices with operating systems pre-installed: Google Android (every Android device runs Linux), Apple iOS and operating systems from Blackberry (wikipedia), Nokia (wikipedia) or Microsoft (wikipedia).

User interface

User eXperience – a more holistic approach.

  • Command Line Interface (CLI) or Text UI – the original
  • Graphical User Interface (GUI) – common on desktop and laptop computers. Windows and Mac GUIs are common. Desktop Environments (GNOME, Unity, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, Sugar and others) are collections of programs (includes a window manager built on a display server) that provide a GUI for Unix-like systems.
  • Touch UI – phones & tablets. Pinching is often used to zoom and pan across maps.