Dia is a really useful application. Perhaps there is some better one out there, but it's the best app I've seen for drawing diagrams. When I need to draw a diagram for a technical paper or a presentation, dia is essential.

Having said that, it has some really bad interface problems. Not that ui is any kind of expertise of mine, to me it's just common sense and if something gets in my way I think it's badly designed. For that matter, I have read quite a few criticisms of bad ui, but never one that strived to be complete, to give a full review of the application. It seems that ui critique is really about pointing out one or two bad bits. And that's what I'm doing here as well. So obviously this doesn't mean the whole application is useless and everything is wrong.

MDI/SDI

Some people have really strong feelings about this issue. Personally I think it has to be settled on what is best for the application in question. Firefox is Single Document Interface, ie. you have multiple windows. Opera is Multiple Document Interface, where you have one main window and more windows inside of it ("multiple" refers to these sub-windows). To me there is no question that Firefox is much better off for this. Everything you need to do in Firefox is constrained to the one window, you don't need multiple windows visible unless you're doing some kind of copy/paste activity.

But editor apps have other needs. Photoshop is SDI (as are most image editors), the gimp is famously (and painfully) MDI. Dia copies this bad choice. I suppose the argument is that when you have your canvas window separate, you can maximize it and work on your document full screen. However, unlike Firefox, you need a lot of tools to do this, so unless you've memorized keyboard shortcuts to select them, you have to bring the palette, layers and other windows to the front anyway. This is a huge pain when you don't *dedicate* your workspace to editing, but you also have half a dozen other applications open.

No menubar in the canvas window

This is my biggest gripe with dia. For better or for worse, this is the kind of diagrams I draw in dia (below). I rarely use the in built stencils, because they all assume some specific kind of diagram other than what I need.

As it happens, one of the more useful functions in dia are the layers, when dealing with more complicated diagrams. To bring up the layer window, I have to right click on the canvas to get the main menu first. Why this menu isn't fixed at the top perplexes me (apparently it's possible to change this, but defaults are much more important than configuration options). Well, you might think what's the difference, either way it's just one click away. The difference is that when it's a fixed menu, it's always in the same place, it makes it easier to use, you locate items quicker visually.

A lot of useful things are in the main menu. Like alignment of objects. This is found in the Objects > Align submenu. Needless to say this is quite a pain to invoke more than a couple of times. This should probably be made into a palette window.

One thing I really like about dia is the number of different formats it can output. Most of my diagrams are pngs. This is called Export in dia. But to export my diagram (rather than save it in dia's own format), I need to choose File > Export from the menu. There is no keyboard shortcut for this action. If I'm tweaking my diagram to see if it looks good in a report, I have to do this export ritual several times. Awful.

Other quirks

And do you see that zoom control in the lower left corner? I can't change the zoom level with my mousewheel (like in the gimp). Bad.

In the above screenshot, if I wanted to place some object above the rectangle, a distance greater than what I see in the canvas, I have to scroll up. Except that the scrollbar doesn't seem to allow this, it seems to indicate that the canvas can't be larger than this. The mousewheel will actually scroll up, which is inconsistent with the scrollbar.

I came across this really interesting program from 2004 produced by the BBC. The Power of Nightmares explains terrorism and indeed the current geopolitical climate in terms of the US neoconservatives' need to scare us in order to battle liberal values. Interestingly, the current radical Islamist movements are explained to stem from what was a similar movement to protect Arab states from corrupting Western influence.

The program is in three parts (180min), see them all on:

• Google Video, or
• the Internet Archive.

On the other hand, if you're going to be flying anytime soon, you might do better to skip this one, as it will infuriate you even further at all the bullshit you have to go through and have your toothpaste and scissors stolen.

Suppose you want to buy an mp3 player. Your local electronics store only has 3 different mp3 players. So the choice is pretty clear, it's easy to compare the 3 models and find the one that suits you much better than the other 2. But then you learn that abroad they have hundreds of them. So although you're limited to just the 3, *theoretically* there is much more choice. Would that not detract from your satisfaction of choosing the best one of the 3 you can get?

There is compelling talk from TED by Barry Schwartz about how having a lot of choice ruins your experience, because you have to take your pick out of an enormous set of possible choices, which leaves you agonizing over whether you made the right choice or not. There are so many choices, which means that whichever you pick, there is a chance that some other option would have been a little better still. Whereas if you only had a few options to choose from, you would choose the one best for you and know that none of the others could possibly make you any happier, because they weren't as close to your preferences as the option you chose.

So that makes me think about people who work in job agencies. I mean these guys must see tens of jobs everyday, thousands of jobs every year. And it's not so much that they are in a position to choose between all of these, but just *knowing* about them must make you think. Many other jobs may not be as enjoyable, but where else are you constantly confronted with a ton of other jobs out there?

Every debate has a perimiter. Which means it has limits, within which the debate unfolds. There is a left extreme, and a right extreme. These limits are not imposed, but they are naturally respected by most people who engage in the debate. And for those who feel the limits are too narrow, and whose position is found outside of the extremes, generally abstain from engaging in it, because they don't expect to find any support for their standpoint.

What is interesting is that this perimeter is not fixed. The extreme positions of the debate represent the most extreme reasonable positions on the subject. Of course, most people don't find the extremes reasonable at all, they find their own position somewhere in between, but they are reasonable limits to the debate. That is to say, people are inclined to think my position is in between, but I recognize the extremes as the correct limits for this debate.

Now, most people are not concerned with the perimeter at all, because they only care about their own position somewhere in the middle. But the perimeter does affect the debate. Just how far to the right the right is, affects the perception of where the middle is.

Suppose you shift one extreme further outwards than it was to begin with. Anyone who is new to the debate will now perceive the middle to be in a different place than it used to be. Those who were present from the beginning will not, they will still have their own bearings. But the debate has effectively been transformed.

Why is this possible? Because people care about the consensus, not the extremes. The discussion is centered around finding a common ground somewhere in the middle, it may be a bit to the left or a bit to the right, but it isn't anywhere near the edges. The consensus is found on neutral territory, the part that is mostly white. And the discussion is ferocious, you can be sure of that, no one is willing to budge an inch.

Shifting the perimeter is a powerful thing. Suppose there is a heavy debate about an issue. In comes someone who presents a view so extreme that it falls outside the limits of the debate. What will happen? Those engaging in the debate will most likely dismiss the argument out of hand, that guy is insane, no one takes him seriously. But suppose he is able to win a little support for his stand. As soon as a handful of people start taking him seriously, the perimeter has effectively changed. To anyone who hasn't heard the arguments before, it would seem that the debate is broader.

Radical opinions

There is a lot of hype about Ron Paul these days. In the distinct absence of politicians who represent people's real values, Ron Paul has become somewhat of an icon for common sense. So much so that his hype has triggered a counter reaction. You will hear people say things like that Ron Paul thing is getting out of hand, as if I believe that he is the *one* honest politician who actually *will* solve all our problems.

And that's a perfectly reasonable reaction, why *should* Ron Paul be the messiah when every other politician lies through his/her teeth through the election campaign? But under the circumstances, given the current political climate, Ron Paul is very useful, because he steers the debate into a sensible perimeter.

Michael Moore is another radical. People have accused him of playing fast and loose with the facts and being purposely misleading even without outright falsehoods. That may be so, but he's very useful nonetheless as someone vocal to shift the perimeter and throw light on issues that really need to be looked at. He isn't the voice of reason, but in his radicalism he makes the reasonable *more likely*. The principle is that you have to *exaggerate* to be heard, you have to go past the line so that people notice and it becomes a real choice. Does Moore do this deliberately? Hard to be sure, but I'd say so.

More radical still is, of course, Richard Stallman. What Stallman accomplished is a pretty amazing thing. He shifted the perimeter for what was for most of us the spectrum between pay-to-use and freeware by saying that no, freeware is not free, genuine freedom is only in Free Software.

Stallman gets a lot of flak for being so pig headed. He's completely unwilling to compromise, and he won't even speak to you unless you accept to use his terminology. Unless the software is completely free he won't use it, no matter how small the concession is. And this comes across as silly, people say he would make more friends if he were just a tiny bit more flexible.

But that's precisely why he's so valuable. He *defines* that extreme standpoint. Must all software be free? No, of course not. At the present time, we are still lacking a few things, like hardware support (video drivers) and access to closed formats (flash), but otherwise the free software desktop offers just about the best experience of what *can* be had with proprietary software. So why *should* I be concerned that there is lots of software that isn't free if I have an experience just as good?

You probably don't agree fully with Stallman, but thanks to his position we *have* a debate about free/open source software. Otherwise we would probably be stuck discussing the merits of shareware vs freeware. Stallman might just be the most powerful example of shifting the perimeter in a positive way.

Lawrence Lessig has tried to do the same with copyright as a whole. He may have called it raising awareness, which is a common term for this. He rejected the whole discussion about whether or not people were infringing on copyright as being beside the point, by saying that most works that are still under copyright should be free. Forget fair use, we need to shorten the copyright term and strengthen the public domain. His involvement has given us the Creative Commons, which similar to Stallman's GNU, is about creating new works and ensuring their freedom from the start.

Interestingly, Lessig has quoted Stallman and GNU very widely as the positive example of what he tried to achieve, so it seems clear that Stallman's position has helped this come about.

Ps. Do not confuse this with personality worship, I'm discussing standpoints, not personalities.