As one of the challenges currently facing many OSS applications is the building of a good user interface, I thought it would be good to start a thread to gather suggestion about requested interface ideas for applications and praise for good interface, so that developers might see what is working, and what needs to be done.

Let me get the ball rolling.
1. Praise - Open Office - It remembers your last opened directory even across system restarts. I know this is not that hard, with a stored data file somewhere, but how many applications can you think of that you repeatedly open files, or save files and you have to navigate through a directory structure because they insist on opening in your HOME directory and no where else. More applications should follow this good piece of simple UI design.

2. Complaint - The Gimp - Their use of multiple undocked windows makes the application very disjointed to use, especially when you have to keep clicking in various places to raise the window you need. I know that its form allows for lots of customizeability (is that a word?) but its default configuration should be something more akin to normal applications, with advanced users being able to throw stuff around as they want.

3. Complaint - GFTP (and probably others) that require double clicking (and often multiple attempts at that) to trigger a directory change or file selection. This may have something to do with generic window behaviour (I'm still checking that). Praise - to Konqueror that allows you to configure single click which is much more useful.

So what are your suggestions, praises or complaints?

it would be better/constructive for you to post the advices/complaints to the respective mailing lists or forums of those applications.
What is evident for someone is not always for the others... le'ts pray :-)

While on one level I agree with you and I may well do that as well, I have found that with some application development the personalities are very strong and their course already charted so an individual suggestion or complaint is easily lost.

What I was hoping more was that we might build up a body of suggestions/complaints that can generically apply to many applications, so that app developers might go "Ah ha, so that is the kind of thing that users really want" and then implement it. Otherwise it might be seen as simple application feature copying rather than designing the kind of interface that users want.

The hardest thing with development is trying to "see it" from the user perspective.

"The hardest thing with development is trying to "see it" from the user perspective"

I couldn't agree more. This why a great person like you can help open source projects . Posting your suggestions to developers is not a waste of time.

Well we will see. The following bugzilla reports have been made;
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=319518
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=319519

Now if they are taken up, that may improve that one great application, but if other developers see it here then it might also be implemented in other applications for the benefit of end-users.

Well it has been 4 months and both bugzilla reports are still unconfirmed. They have been assigned, so someone has looked at them, but I doubt there has been any action.

Does anyone else have any UI suggestiosns.

Nope, I love everything I have set up as is. I only use GTK apps so here I am praising GTK I also use Gftp and I don't need to click more than twice on a directory, is it really that much harder than a single click?

You can use .gtk-bookmarks file to define your favorite places - this makes opening files from various places very convenient. (No idea how it can be done for QT.)

I don't think there is anything in GFTP that will let you do that. It has bookmarks but they are for FTP sites, not for directory listings. It only has a startup directory option, with only one entry allowed.

Thanks for the bookmarks idea. That works really well in Konqueror by setting bookmarks for various well used directories, like my Windows\My Documents directory. Amazing the simple things that you miss until someone mentions them.