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Mac OS X Desktop and GUI Design
Khelder sent us a nifty little bit about the MacOS X Desktop. It talks quite a bit about
UI Design (mirror) from a Mac-Centric but also a general perspective. It's quite interesting stuff for anyone into MacOS-X, but also it has lots of practical stuff for anyone who's ever tried to create a usable theme for one of today's modern window managers.
One of the most disappointing things I find with UI design in Linux in general, is that it has so much potential to be better, yet this is not used. Even though KDE etc. is appealing to newbies it still remains 'by hackers, for hackers'. In most situations, if Linux developers aren't sure of what they should be doing in terms of UI design, they copy Microsoft.
The open source development model of KDE/Gnome allows for some *real* innovation to take place on the UI front, yet it is being neglected. Look at most WMs, and count how many of them use taskbars, or start menu-ish controls. I don't think we can count on MS or Apple to break out of the mind set that "this is what a GUI looks like". Of course to attract users UIs have to be intuitive and natural to use for people experienced with win/mac UIs, but that can not be used as an excuse to halt UI development at the stage it is now.
I really have faith in projects such as KDE to break out of non-sensical conventions, as is the trend with OSS, and I hope that as well as doing a great programming job, the developers put some research into UI design as well. Remember that computers are slaves to us, not vice-versa.
My question is this: can this be done in X? Would enlightenment be able to do this through a theme? I would think, to get menu and specific programs to display transparently, you would need to use something like a GTK theme, yes? So maybe the Gnome themes this could be done?
I don't know very much about X and Gnome, but I would be interested if this can be done in X. If anyone has and ideas, please let me know.
It occurs to the that there's an extension that lets you do that with option-arrows... damned if I can remember what it's called...
Just wanna remind you that their main site is www.linuxppc.com (although I think it sucks compared to linuxppc.org :)
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Jezzball
ls:
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(A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore?
The ammount of memory that the finder takes up is irrelevent.... in the context of Quake 3. Mac treats Finder just like any other program, an therefore it is possible to exit out of it. I used this trick a lot when i had an old LCII (15mhz i think) so that i could run a single program and not use memory on the others. For mac 7.1 (which is what i had) all i needed to do was download finderquitter or something that sounded like that, I think i got it from the whacked mac archives, but i am really not sure anymore, if you search for it you should be able to find it, and if it doesn't work in OS/X you can bet that it will be created soon.
:) the finder is important as well as its memory consumption.
On the other hand though, when running actual productive apps (i know this doesn't apply to most of you
recycling bin/icon. It's been there since at least NEXTSTEP 3.0 (when I began using NeXT software).
For instance, you could put any gnome-panel on any of the sides of the screen and have any buttons or taskbars or menus or documents or anything on them you darn well please. You could make them any size, and have them autohide at any speed.
With both QT and GTK, I know that you can "rip" toolbars out of their default position and move them into a vertical position on the right or left, just as the author suggested. As far as the round menus go, I just don't know what he was talking about. But, with differnt themes of the respective toolkit, one cold put thick borders on buttons.
In short, I agree with you as far as UI designers knowing UI and learning about it. That's obvious, it could always help. But I feel that the inherent flexibility that GNOME and KDE provide go a long way to making the UI usable, no matter what you preferences or prejudices or habits or preconcievied notions of what a UI should be.
While GNOME and KDE can be improved (what can't be improved?), they also deserve a high-five for their work so far.
Got HTML? Want LaTeX? Try html2latex
This fella is correct. Look for some old screenshots of pre-1.5 versions of Lisa Office Manager (the Lisa's GUI/Desktop).
Apple is not really about technology. They are a company built on pure hype. You know, the off beat grammar "think different", the gay iMacs and so on. Here's a screen shot of an Aqua "skin".
Hey Saxton,
I read recently on AppleInsider (www.appleinsider.com) that Apple has increased the stated memory requirements from 32 MB to 64MB of physical RAM. Here is a quote from the article AppleInsider (http://www.appleinsider.com/macosx.shtml):
------quote------
Mac OS X Hardware Requirements
The iMac will be the ideal machine to run Mac OS X. Apple is telling customers with questions on Mac OS X hardware requirements to look at the iMac.
* 233 MHz Apple Power Macintosh G3 System or Greater
* 64MB of Pyysical RAM (up from 32 MB)
* 1-2 GByte Hard Disk (though anything over a GByte should do)
* CD-ROM Drive
* 15" Monitor (this does not apply to Apple PowerBooks)
Please Note: These requirements were taken directly from Apple in early '99. Whether they have decided to change them since then is unknown.
------/quote-------
I searched around Apple's pages on Mac OS X (http://www.apple.com/macosx) and couldn't find any specific information on memory requirements. This isn't really surprising, as the OS is still in early development and the requirements could change drastically. There is this little blurb on the new Virtual Memory manager, though.
-----quote----
We Didn't Forget Virtual Memory
Along with the protected memory mechanism, Darwin provides a super-efficient virtual memory manager to handle that protected memory space. So you no longer have to worry about how much memory an application like Photoshop needs to open large files. When an applications needs memory, the virtual memory manager automatically allocates precisely the amount of memory needed by the application--no more, and no less. The result? Out-of-memory messages are out of here.
------/quote-------
Hope this helps.
-chris
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I'm sorry if I'm taking up too much space with this offtopic question, but could you point me to a good resource(s) for a programmer wanting to learn LISP? I've tried to comprehend the stuff in the emacs-lisp-tutorial, but just can't quite grab a solid foundation from it. Any great starters or tutorials would be appreciated; send URLs to spirilis@scitus.yi.org, or flames/spam to (cat /dev/zero > /dev/hda)
the real at&t mix
The best thing I've ever done for my Mac is buy a 3 button mouse with a roller wheel. Left button: normal Mac button Right Button: control-click Wheel - scroll (works great) Wheel Click - browser back button. I've got a logitech one. Once you use it you won't go back!
The CompUSA rep you spoke with must have been quite confused as the Apple suggested list price for the G3 keyboard is $82.15. Your local Apple dealer would probably sell it for a few bucks less as service parts have a huge markup (the price often includes overnight shipping from an Apple warehouse to the dealer). At any rate, even $20 would be too much for that laptop-style keyboard. I personally have both a MacAlly iKey which I liked until I tried the Sun Microsystems "Type 6" USB keyboard (the type that ship with Sun SunRay1s). Sun also sells it with the standard Sun SPARCstation/UltraSPARC connector for Sun workstations. It's a great keyboard. The lack of a power button doesn't worry me, G3s, G4s, and iMacs have power buttons up front.
How can you get by with only TWO buttons? How else can you cut and paste with two quick clicks???
I actually like the iKey... it's the same mechanism that the old Power Computing mac clones had in their keyboards. Has a really good feel. As for the power button, the G3s and iMacs have a power button right beside the front speakers.
Where are you buying mice and keyboards that cost a couple hundred dollars? o.o
Compared to the Mac interface, NEXTSTEP was an incredible ugly, dysfunctional hack. If anyone from Apple is reading this, don't listen to this moron! The problem with Aqua is that it copies WAY TOO MUCH from the NeXT "experience".
NEXTSTEP was a failure, let it die already.
Hey, can I buy one of them leftover keyboards from you? I want an external kbd for my powerbook, but blowing $70 on that damn iKey is looney. Any USB kbd will supposedly work now with a Mac, but "any" kbd doesn't come with the power button on the keyboard.
___________________
rooooar
Oh sure, I started using Greg's Buttons on my Mac II in 92 (what a great machine..). I think the scope of the Appearance Manager is much more than just what Kaleidoscope allows you to manipulate, it probably just exposes, say, 20% of what the Appearance Mgr allows for, but in a nice easy way so as to integrate nicely with the default appearance, Platinum. In other words, Kaleidoscope just acts as an interface for the most easily customizable parts of the Appearance Manager.
In Aqua, for instance the open/save dialog, all the drawing routines and graphic resources have changed so that it takes advantage of the new graphics layer. Kaleidoscope for OSX probably wouldn't want to take on allowing users to customize that, it will just allow changing the graphic resources (but maybe in a vector based format rather than a pixel based format). If people really want to change the graphic routines, they can write directly to the Appearance Manager, but I'm guessing they have to write an entirely new appearance.
But I probably won't use anything like that, I think the Aqua interface looks splendid as is.
cheers,
-o
Has anyone here actually used OpenStep or NEXTSTEP? It's BEAUTIFUL without being gaudy. I love the idea of MacOS X, Quartz, and all sorts of 16-register SIMD on the PowerPC 7400"G4"'s AltiVec unit.... but that candy-coated Hello Kitty interface isn't for me. I'm sure the existing 2.5 Million iMac users would love it though. But for me, I'd like an alternative.
/bags/NS4.0-DR.jpg
Here's a screenshot of OpenStep 4.0. The shelf (bottom) is sort of messy in this screenshot and OS 4.2 has a nicer shelf look to it.
http://peanuts.leo.org/faq-serve
But the power button on PowerBooks is inside the computer, meaning there is no way to use the "hook up a monitor, mouse, and keyboard and keep the screen closed" feature of the powerbook unless you have a kbd with a power button on it... ah well. I don't have an extra monitor laying around anyway.
___________________
rooooar
Aqua is implimented as an appearance in MacOSX. Whether one will be able to change the appearance remains to be seen, but part of the Carbon API is GetTheme, and SetTheme, so people might be able to write an appearance switcher for OSX fairly easily.
UI-wise, Apple has never pulled the rug under users and developers. The only reason that Apple survived through the bad times in 1996-97 is that there were fanatical users who knew the UI by heart. Changing the UI experience too much will alienate the old-timers and Apple knows that it can't survive on trying to ensnare first-time computer buyers.
--Bud, a non-active Apple fan
ANY is a bit strong. I defected from Windows precisely because it was perceptably more sluggish than Linux on the same hardware and depending on the app load, perceptably slower than Linux on much better hardware. Corel ~ linux.
He formed the HI Group at Apple after the Mac shipped, and helped document and dogmatise the Mac UI.
Jobs was a lot closer to the Mac UI design than Tog ever was.
I'd say the argument here is whether you want a PL to be "user-friendly" in the same way as a GUI. For me, the sole purpose of the interface (graphical or not) is to get out of my way when I know what I'm doing and help me otherwise. I would regard the primary purpose of the PL to be allowing me to write a working program in the least amount of time. In a lot of ways, these are similar goals.
I just want the window to go away when I'm done using it. I don't care how it does that, as long as it doesn't go away when I don't want it to. In a PL I don't really care what the syntax looks like as long as I can write my program correctly. Thus I want things like type checking (and in SML, all the wonderful other things that it checks, like making sure my if statements make sense) and don't really care about how much it looks like English.
In both, I want to get my task done quickly above all else, but in a PL the intuitiveness of the interface is not so much a concern due to the higher level of knowledge required to use it anyway. However, for those of us who are programmers, we understand programming and syntax, etc., and thus we want our interfaces to act like programming languages. For us, it's honestly easier that way. Now, when I'm using, say, WebTV, I don't want to bother with total control, I'd just rather surf. I'm not sure what this has to do with Aqua, but I do think it speaks to the disagreement between the text and GUI folks.
Walt
Well, there once was a theme named WinAqua up at skinz.org. Now they have something similar at http://www.skinz.org/skins.php3?login=&id=&skin=QT Aqua&area=wb .
n load.html
This is intented to be used with the rather nice shareware WindowBlinds offered by Stardock at http://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/dow
For several X-Windowmanagers there are Aqua-like themes available at themes.org. For example Aquatic for WindowMaker...
Johann
I'm german, could you please enlighten me what the "german point of view" on the holocaust is?
i think this was covered a bit in the mac os x rollout story. anyway in case someone missed it here's the real place to look for critiques on apple's UI and the OS in general. see:
http://forum.appleinsider.com/ ubb/Forum2/HTML/001104.html
Agreed the dock, what I can see of it, is a ugly mess. As soon as I laid eyes on it I groaned, They've forgotten what F*ING ICONS are! Icons have a strictly reduced, systematized palette of colors and range of shapes so that you can have a bunch of them in front of you and see them as data, a system of representations, not a jumble of clashing garish images. Anthropologists speak of cultures which, when first encountered, show signs of having once had but lost certain skills and arts. They might actually retain the function of the lost skill but not at the same level that their artefacts show they once had. For example they might have once practiced ceremonial tatooing, but the disruption of war or disease reduced them to painting the skin. The specialized knowledge of permanent pigments and hygienic piercing was lost along with individuals who carried it, and the degree of labor specialization that enabled it.
I know it's a stretch but certain parts, especially the dock cause it really sticks out, of Aqua made me think, Jeezeus their old designers must have walked out en masse, or died together in a planecrash. It's like they forgot, or lost some important notes and formulae.
Frankly, I'm afraid that this whole "Aqua" GUI qualifies as "too little, too late". I took a look at it, and I was not impressed. In my humble opinion, Window Maker looks a lot prettier. There's nothin as cool looking as a semi-transparant Xterm, although it limits the choice of background quite considerably... I also agree with the concerns mentioned in the article. All this chrome (transparancy etc.) eats CPU power and actually makes the system more difficult to use. I'm now back to using a plain solid background and non-transparant windows.
Last time I checked Alt-F4 closed the current window in Win9x and on the MacOS Command-W (Command being the Butterfly thing) closed the current window. Where is the Alt-?? for close all windows? or the Alt-?? for drag window/close window with out giving it focus? I know CTRL-Double click opens the next window in the current on in the file manager which is kind of like option-double click in the Finder on the MacOS but in the MacOS it really opens the other window and closes the previous one, instead of opening the next window in the current one.
Option on the MacOS means: I only want to see what I am switching to. It doesn't just mean that for opening windows in Finder it also applies to switching to another app. When holding down option makes the current app hide when switching to the app chosen out of the application menu.
AC who can't count the number of time he uses option in the Finder on MacOS every day.
Beautiful? It's uglier than Windows. BTW, take a look at the button placement in the title bar. THAT's where the Aqua designers are coming from!
Am I the *only* one who thinks, overall, the new Mac OSX GUI sucks? Semitransparent menus are a neat trick, and Lord knows MacOS needed updating, but it reminds me of a plain chick, not too shabby looking, just a little plain, who wants to look prettier, so she throws on 5 pounds of makeup and winds up looking like a dirty whore.
The problem with MacOS pre-10 were:
Most of the OS was emulated
Most of the OS was designed around a single-application paradigm with hacks to support 2+ programs in memory at once
Backward compatability prevented stuff like memory protection
If you look at Mac OSX server, it's got the Darwin (BSD over Mach) kernel with a Macish OpenStep GUI (or is that an OpenStep Mac GUI?) and it looks quite nice.
I'm sure the "think same" Mac sycophants will religiously proclaim it the greatest thing ever (just like the linux/open source sycophants claimed Netscape was the best browser when Mozilla src was released, and AOL was the best ISP when they released their web server...), but I say, from a GUI standpoint, it's a step backwards.
through a random quirk of fate, though, it ended up (at the moment) to be a 2 (funny) so figure that one out....
I'd imagine the interface is lighter on the system than you'd think just by looking at it, thanks to Quartz.
I believe there already is a Aqua theme for Enlightenment. Check out e.themes.org.
Could you please expand on this (I Just want to know out of interest)?
It's worth noting that Tog, who wrote the article that's linked to, was one of the (if not the only) designers of the original Mac OS GUI. If anyone has a foundation for constructive criticism of a GUI, this man does. If I were Jobs, or anyone else at Apple for that matter, I'd pay attention to what Tog has to say.
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WWhhaatt ddooeess dduupplleexx mmeeaann??
This sig intentionally left justified.
Enlightenment is more like a baroque cathedral than anything modern... it looks good in photos, but people don't get real work done around E (instead they have to turn their display contrast/brightness knobs to maximum and buy a 20-inch screen to read the default font).
:)
general perspective. It's quite interesting stuff for anyone into MacOS-X, but also it has lots of practical stuff for anyone who's ever tried to create a usable theme for one of today's modern window managers
How partisan. The link is to enlightenment.org. I suppose that using windowmaker, as I do, means forgoing the amenities which can be found in a modern wm, no, THE modern wm, Enlightenment! Or is it just that I don't use the MOST modern wm? Please, fill me in. I'm dying of curiousity here.
Sigs suck.
That was a great article. I read the whole thing, and loved it all.
One thing that he didn't address was the title bar. One of the most useful funcitons of the title bar is to provide a "grabable" section of the window which I can click on to activate the window, without risking any other action to the window.
The problem is that it's only at the top of the window. When I have numerous windows on the desktop, it can be a real pain to move some windows aside to find the title bar of another. The is especially true in the current MacOS GUI, which has no funcitonal equivalent of the Task Bar. It is also apparent in Windows, when I am using child windows of an application, which normally do not have a Task Bar.
So wouldn't it be great to stretch the title bar around to the left side of the window, too? Maybe have the window icon at the vertex, and some more window functions at the bottom...
Thoughts?
===
-Ravagin
Karma: T-rexcellent.
Oh wait, did you say Mac OS X? I meant to say, Mac OS X sucks!
Actually most of them got fired by Steve Jobs himself. They were probably replaced by some lackeys from his NeXT design team.
Since at least System 6, (and I'm pretty sure before that) the Mac has had 255-character file names and a collapsible "explorer" style directory navigator. Yet he says they are new in OS X. Am I missing something, or is he?
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Both NeWS(Network extensible Window System) and OpenLook predate Tog's tenure at Sun by several years.
/. crowd, the car used was a Consulier GT, a composite ultralight, but kinda ugly car that absolutely demolished it's competition on the racetrack in the late 80's and early 90's. They tried really hard to make it look good for the film, but it was too big a challenge...)
You may not like them, but NeWS was James Gosling's creation and was arguably ahead of its time - Java bears more than a passing resemblance to NeWS in a number of respects. (Remember that NeWS was more than a windowing system - it provided network extensibility and transparency to applications as well, and was arguably the first serious attempt at writing a viable OO network-aware GUI.)
Personally, I think both OpenLook and NeWS were great to work with: I still haven't found scrollbars anywhere else that work that well, and the pushpin/tearoff menu metaphor that's so common now is from OL/NeWS. NeWS in particular had some very cool capabilities: several years ago it did a lot of what we're just now getting around to reinventing in KDE and GNOME. Unfortunately for NeWS in particular, it overestimated the cycles available under Moore's law, and so it was based on Display PostScript (quite cool, really) at a time when it would be several years befoer the horsepower was present to run DPS quickly. As a result (much like GNOME today?), it got a reputation for being dog-slow, and there was little interest in writing apps for it as a result.
Remember that Xerox was the other half of the OpenLook team. OL/NeWS looks a bit dated by today's standards, but it was arguably the most advanced GUI in the insustry when it was released, and broke new ground in important ways, some of which were even picked up by the Mac! It was a quantum leap improvement in Unix GUIs and was light years ahead of SunWin and the original SGI and IBM GUIs, which in their early days were hardly worthy of the name. (something as simple as TWM is a HUGE improvement on SGI's orginal windowing system...)
FYI, Tog's major project at Sun was to play movie producer and make a video short titled "Starfire", which demonstrated a vision of future UI technology in a badly acted setting of corporate politics and intrigue surrounding the near cancellation of a low-pollution car.
(For the car guys in the
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Sure it's skinnable but it sucks to use it with Gnome compared to other window managers such as Sawmill. In fact Sawmill runs rings around E and is more modern yet.
I think GUI all comes down to how you look at a computer. What is a computer to me? Is it a cewl toy to dig into and tweak just about every possible setting in the system? Or is it, as to most normal users just a tool to help them to do their stuff as easy as possible with least possible hassle? I think of a computer as mearly a tool like a wrench or whatever, and as for now Apple is the only bigger company i know of who focus on making computers simple to normal users. Its inevitable that the computers start to adapt to man and not vice versa. And M$, making it possible to copy a file in a zillion ways isnt to make it easy.
Thank you for the links. I found one of your comments particularly interesting;
>This leaves the lower left and upper right hand corner mostly ignored. This makes them ideal for placement of say menu's
This partly explains Microsoft's bizarre 'Start' menu operation. In every operating system which I had used prior to starting in my curent workplace, menus had cascaded DOWN from the cursor location.
But on NT 4.0 (and everything else based on the Chicago UI) I found that the Start menu, one of the most-used facilities on the desktop, by default rises vertically upwards from the cursor position. I tried to get used to this converse way of operating, but eventually I just hauled the taskbar to the top of the screen so that when I hit the Windows key it folds down.
They appear to have painted themselves into a corner with this upwards-opening menu. It must have been realised that the Programs option off the menu would also have to open upwards if it was the first (i.e. bottom) option on the Start menu. So they put it at the top of the menu and have it cascade downwards, despite having just opened its parent menu upwards. I despair.
Now, if the Start menu was a little-used system facility I might understand its default bottom-left position. But this button was the focus of most of MS's advertising campaign for Chicago, therefore underlining it's importance as part of the UI. So why place it in the area of the screen least frequently scanned by the user and then have to make it operate in a less-than-intuitive manner?
Thanks.
I happen to own a next box with the All in one directory browser. I just have one thing to say.. It stinks. After having used explorer,finder,xfm, and any other relatively descent file browser, getting used to the Next browser was like pulling teeth.. One major reason why most of my next operations are performed from the (sh) rather than from it.
I like to have things in separate windows, having to rely on copy, cut, and paste for physical files seems totally illogical to me (even in windows). I want to have multiple windows.
This is likely the biggest mistake in thier new interface.. but i guess well just have to wait for the final product.
LW
Mac OS X _looks_ like it sucks. Can we at least say that?
Actually, the technology behind it is cool, using what amounts to Display PDF. It looks OK, but yellow, red, and clear buttons on the window wouldn't help me sit down for the first time at this machine and figure out what I can do to the windows.
Also, if you can find the application which obviously doesn't fit on this desktop, you probably have at least some minimal mental capacities.
I'll agree, I'll have to find one in a Sears when the Macs start shipping and try the new interface, but it's not what I hoped for. I was expecting it to be more NeXTish.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
The distinction between "human interface" and "programming language" is so blurry as to be meaningless.
Maybe to you -- I still see them as separate realms. Yes, there are links between the two -- like UNIX command shells -- but even then I would argue that these shells are just two-faced tools: one face is that of a command-line interface, and another face is that of a programming language.
First of all, 'language' is a very wide concept, almost so wide as to be meaningless. I could call the correct sequence of buttons on my VCR a language and still have some justification in doing so. For the purposes of our discussion I would define a language as a set of symbols and accompanying them rules that can be used by humans to express complicated concepts. Of course this is also very vague, but will serve its purpose.
I would probably say that the two major qualities dividing interfaces and languages are complexity and responsiveness. Interfaces are much more simple and more limited than languages. Besides, interfaces are oriented towards the command -> response -> next command -> next response type of operation, while languages work in a different way (formulate -> solve -> implement -> test -> etc.).
Consider this. When you are using a computer as an interface, you, in a sense, directly control it like you would control a car: open this window, delete this file, connect to that host. When you use a programming language to solve a problem, what you do is express a solution to the problem, and the computer is just an incidental tool that happens to execute this program.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
an article doing more than advertising OS X. I have some of my own complaints about Mac OS, I have been using it since 5.something and have had plenty of time to learn to dislike certain aspects of it. Alot of my gripes were handled in OS 8, sticky menus, shortcuts on the Apple menu, scalable slide bars, ect. One thing in Windows that I really like interface wise is the two button mouse. I know a single button mouse has been a Mac stable since before the Mac was even a wet dream but it makes the Mac too keyboard dependant. I can of course take the time to pearn all of the keyboard commands for all of my programs (I know them by now) but the first time you use a particular program can be non-intuitive. The functionality at a mouseclick is something Microsoft added to Windows 95 that gave it a big advantage over 3.11 and Mac OS 7 when it first came out. By right clicking in a window you could control all the aspects of a file or add filters and such to an image, not to mention the ability to close down a program with a single click. OS 8 added similar functions to the window close box for some of their programs but you still need to Apple+Q most programs. I share the author's complaints about professionals not liking Aqua, if I want to get something done in Photoshop I don't want to wrestle with the GUI's icons and pictures to do it. Completely aside from GUI are my questions about what else is being revised in OS X. Networking for Mac sucks and most of the time you need extra software just to communicate with other computers on your network. It's a hassle for me to network my Powerbook and PCs together. OS X needs to have a greatly improved interface for controls too, half of the controls have been updated while the rest of them harken back to the days of OS 6 and 7. And another thing, I want to be able to access my programs from a small text/icon based menu in easy reach, not a huge launcher window or having to hunt through the Apple menu down to the favourites list.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
The Mac OS X dock is an update of the NeXT dock, which was present from the very beginning of NeXTSTEP.
The Windoze taskbar is a half-assed knock-off of the NeXT dock.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
3rd generation my butt. NeWS, Display PostScript, etc. have been primarily vector-based for a long time. And transparencies and mouse-overs aren't new technology either.
I prefer vector-based interfaces in general, but don't believe the hype when they claim it's great new next-generation stuff. It's really just what the motorcycle crowd call the BNG models (where the only real change is Bold New Graphics). It still works the same, just prettier.
Are you sure that much current HCI work is driven by the needs of naive users? Tog works for Healthpoint, and wrote an article about developing a web-based form which is on asktog (no link, as his server is overloaded). The article talked about user tests being done with three different groups, only one of which was naive. I'm sure that most professional HCI projects take into account the needs of different users in their design. MacOS, for instance, appears to be simple, but graphics professionals, using their machines heavily every day, are keen on it as well. Simple appearance != simple != only for naive users.
On your second point, the key strength of Linux is also a potential weakness: GUIs gain power from consistency, and that's difficult to achieve with many strong-minded individuals all making their own changes.
Actually ~klee I recommend everyone read the link you put in your post. Our "infatuation" with all things "pictorial" has confined our thinking, that breaking out and going off into directions that might set computing (and hence HCI) ahead a couple decades will be greatly difficult.
FYI: You can cycle through Netscape browser windows (on the Mac) with command-1.
Tell application "Finder" to quit
I hope this isn't tagged as flaimbait as I have some rather valid rhetorical questions. As far as the situation I'm in (a database developer, using mainly Solaris and Linux), MacOS is quite irrelevant. Sure, Apple sold 3 million colorful machines this past year... but that's out of what, 20 million sold in this country? I don't see why the Linux and Windows user base like to fight (even amongst each other) over details as minor as MacOS X's GUI! Some graphic artists obviously like Macs, some schools and homes must like them, too. Fine for them, choice is a good thing! But it doesn't affect me. Apple could replace their mouse with a small glass sphere and it still wouldn't disrupt my day. My point is, why are we all getting up in arms over something that is most likely not going to affect us in any way?
He did explain the menu thing, kinda. If the menu's at the top of the screen, you can move the mouse there really fast without worrying about overshooting it. Tog describes it as being "infinitely deep".
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
About Face and
The Inmates are Running the Asylum
Both of these texts are written by a man named Alan Cooper, and go into details of how a good UI should work and why. This background is needed not only to truly understand the issues of UI design but also allows a good standpoint for defending and argueing the views of the author. Overall his article is very well written, and holds a much more open view than your typical Mac OS design piece. (Which usually sum up that: All GUIs are poor imitations of Mac) While I do not completely agree with the author there is little need to critcize it. I think some extra view points would be more benefical so here are some other view points.
One consideration I see overlooked time and time again in all GUI designs is object placement. The human eye normally moves from the upper left hand corner to the lower left hand corner. diagnally. This leaves the lower left and upper right hand corner mostly ignored. This makes them ideal for placement of say menu's because you tend to need to use a menu less frequently than applications and is defensable as why they were chosen in many enviroments as menu locations.
There are reasons to advocate the design of most interfaces but what would be more beneficial to all of us is a well researched and well implented UI. Much of this research has been done, and is discussed in Cooper's books. And envirments such as X give us the freedom to evaluate new ideas and concepts.
This is why enviroments like Entlightenment and Sawmill are so powerful. They provide the ablity to take a good easily and continously improve on the windowing provided by a GUI. And with KDE and Gnome moving along nicely the entire feel should soon allow for this concept to be putforth across entire enviroments.
So again if you are truly interested in all the aspects of UI design please read Cooper's books, they are some of the best references on the topic.
Oh, and don't let the fact that he works for M$ sway you, I'm fairly convinced no one listens to him there.
Funny, I don't see how a cool toy has to be counter to something simple for normal users. I think of a computer as a "cewl" toy that I can dig into, but seriously wish that MacOS X were available on x86 because it looks so damn pretty. I'll give you BeOS as an OS thats the best example of "cewl" there is now. Its fast, its easy to use, and it follows a lot of UNIX configuration stuff underneath all the GUI applets so you can tweek to your hearts content. (Okay, so it often doesn't work but thats not my point.) I just don't see why Linux nerds think that its either customizable, or easy to use. Whats the major point of customizability? Something that is flexible, something that you can tweek to be as fast as possible, and something thats fits you needs. Well, BeOS is all of those things. Unlike many other OSs it can do app scripting. So for example, if you don't like the Workspace's default features, you can send it BMessages to change them. Or say you have a hypothetical web server. Everything that the app supports is done through a GUI. However, it also supports app scripting. So you can write your own scripts to access different stuff from the web server. You can look at the usage reports on the usage tab, or you can send it messages that have it write usage statistics to a file and then you can parse those for you own needs. Maybe adjust server properties based on those, again, you can do that with app scripting. So yes, it's HARD to make an environment that both easy, fast and customizable, but hey, if you have a good design, and can and HAS been done.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
What you've described is called a pie menu. One of the Zork games uses them in it's preference section.
Don Hopkins has more to say about them.
http://catalog.com/hopkins/piemenus/index.html
What the hell? What FMWV freak moderated this up? A GUI SHOWLD be cool, sexy, exiting, amusing, and animated. IF you want it to. Or it should be boring. IF you want it to. Thats why I love the concept (but not the implementation) of the Linux window managers. The whole skining thing is GOOD. With window managers that support themeing, you can download a theme to suit your taste. The button set does not change (the close button is still the close button it just looks different) so its easy to learn, and its customizable, so its easy to look at. You want your desktop boring, FINE! I like it a little lively, I enjoy using my computer. The current state of GUIs is RIDICULOUS! Take a hint from the car market. A Jag XKR looks a hell of a lot nicer than a Civic, but they all have basically the same functionality (I mean the buttons and knobs, the shifter, the dashboard, etc.) and basically the same place. It takes you 5 minutes to learn the button layout of a new car. Thats what your GUI should be like. Its a big intrusion into a persons working environment to mess with the asthetics of their tool. Its like back in the model T days, all you could get was black. But these days, every tool has an asthetic, and GUIs should be no different. But all tools also have a standard layout and GUIs should still be no different. So fine, if you like FWMV, good for you. I LIKE working in a lively enivronment, so good for me. My only problem with you is that you are trying to force YOUR work enivronment on ME.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
OK, I started looking around at Cooper's work and I navigate to www.cooper.com. Due to bandwidth limitations, I usually surf with images off.
What do I get at the website? The phrase "Directly offer enough information for the user to avoid mistakes" on a white page.
11 unloaded linked-images.
No standard text-links.
Mr Cooper, I am disappointed at your UI design. But, in your parlance, I am a Survivor. So I'll navigate your site by some means.
I've never found an OEM mouse that worked a quarter as well as Kensington's Thinking Mouse with their excellent MouseWorks software. Imagine: 4-buttons, plus chording, unlimited programability on each button or chord (two buttons at once), buttons or chords+keys for even more options, build your own pop-up menus of commands, keystrokes, OS and application actions, and in each and (just about) every application you use, it can be completely different. And completely ergonomic... left or right hands, the same shape. I use mine to have my Macs and Windows PCs (essentially) work the same, and to get my hands off the Control key for contextual menus on the Mac, something I rarely see normal Mac users do with a single-button mouse. Granted they don't have scroll wheels, but their new ones do. (Something entirely addictive.) And risking their earlier version of software completely nuked my NT 4.0 box until blue screen was all I got and I had to rebuild from scratch, but hey... it was worth it. I also have the MS Explorer (incorrectly billed as "programmable," it is merely configurable) and while it's okay and better than just a two-button job, it's not the ultimate. However when I bought 8 Thinking Mice for my Word Processing work crew, they complained about the confusion, and my wife can never remember which button is just for clicking and which is for logging into a server, entering a password, hitting enter, and running a script for syncing files. And we have a drawer stocked with spare B/W G3 keyboards and Yo-Yo mice. Folks ask if we can just hang them on the wall for cute decor. Thank God for ADB on G3s.
I love how some people attempt one thing, or one method, and then instantly assume that an entire zone of reality is corrupted, or tainted by that one experience. Take for example, the person I am replying too:
I installed Corel Linux last weekend. Fast install. Only one reboot. The UI sucks, redraws (on a P133/64MB) take too long, severe UI inconsistancies.
So, you had a bad experience with Corel Linux, what did you do to rectify that situation? Did you attempt to tweak it at all? Maybe stop using the default KDE interface and look into some of the lighter meaner offerings in Window Managers? By the tone of your note I highly doubt it, but I had to ask.
Windows or the MacOSX are light years away from any Linux shell.
Ah, here we go. This is the blanket statement. This is roughly akin to saying, "I bought a Red Ford the other day and I had problems painting it blue.....Cars Suck!! I am going back to horses."
Sir, if you had a bad experience with Corel Linux, you need to explain what you did to try and fix it, if you did nothing, then you have no excuse to be whining and bickering about it. If you did try, and it was too hard, well then maybe Linux isn't for you.
One side note, seamless integration with a GUI is not a good thing. This is one of the reasons why both Windows and the Mac have stability problems. The GUI interface should be a seperate affair.
V
2000-01-17 18:30:47 News on Mac OS X GUI (articles,apple) (rejected)
i tried to post it, but wasnt succesfull...
A GUI should not be Sexy, Exciting, Amusing, Animated, and especially not Cool.
It should be boring.
I do not want to be entertained by my UI, i want toget work done in a quite neutral environment.
Richard Feynman said rightly:
For a sucessful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Point and Grunt
Could you, perhaps, explain what you're trying to get at here?
I found Tog's article to be well expressed, logical, and backed up with relevant facts. Almost everything Tog said in that article was structured in a proper critical thinking manner: facts lead to premises lead to conclusions. This is something one would expect from an author of two bestselling technical books.
Now, if you're a technical writer by profession, or an English major, I probably could somehwat understand your reaction [since they seem to have an uncanny ability to analyze the language beyond the mainstream]. Even then, however, I think your reaction just doesn't make a whole lot of sense (maybe that was your intention?)
Anyhow.
-Stu
enlightenment?
I remember when I first saw enlightenment almost 3 years ago now, and I thought WOW.
Then when I installed it, I figured out it was ALL just about eye candy. And I could get more functionality by just taking those candy screenshots and making them my desktop background.
In the 3 years since then, enlightenment has made *some* progress but about 0.2% of the progress I'd expect from 3 years.
I'm sure rasterman has a lot of fun developing the HUGE open source project that is enlightenment. I'm sure the other guy on the E team is also having fun.
Pie menus are not what they're cracked up to be. Imagine trying to epresent more than 6 or so menu items at once. There's also no ordering where the most common items are listed first, no way to order a MRU list -- which may have maybe a dozen items. Imagine the zig-zagging one must do to implement a hierarchical menu.
Pie menus may be useful for some operations, but aren't universally useful. And when you start having to mix navigation metaphors, that inconsistency is worse than having no pie menus at all.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
So much can be attributed to X There are so many interesting, intuitive ideas as to UI design that can be easily stated, but no-one has a clue how to actually implement in X (let alone simply, efficiently,properly,etc.)
Given that X allows for rectangles to be allocated and a little rudimentry communication between them, it is suprising that people have got so far as they have. Then there are the 'but X is a standard' people that insist that X should be that center of the UI. They can, in a number of cases, appear to back this up by showing that a given feature can be done with X. But what is basically impossible (see what KDE/GNOME are doing to try and manage this) is integration -- when the centre of the UI management has no concept of applications, documents, menus and cannot be told about them. Too true. What is lacking is documentation of decisions relating to the design, justification of those decisions, and discussions of alternatives, and why not them. The discipline alone in doing this would go a long way to improving design (and would probably resunt in X being dropped a whole lot quicker) What is needed is for it to be easier by a long way to make simple changes that are extended over the UI, or ove the system (given the relevant permissions) such that differences can be experimented with easily.John
John_Chalisque
-"The new aqua appearance is cool and clean, in sharp contrast to the ponderously-heavy 3D chrome look that Microsoft visited on the world and Macintosh quickly emulated".... I have been using macs since the 512k, everybody knows Macintosh GUI was not an emulation of the Microsoft GUI, at that time, THERE WAS NO MICRO$OFT GUI!!!!! -themeistre
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity" -MLK
There's something Deeply Wrong if anyone (not just M$) can patent a language, what with `language being the tool of thought', and all.
With respect to Basic, according to Foldoc, it was ``designed by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1963''. I assume that even the infamous US Patent Office would recognise that as Prior Art. Whether Basic is an Art form at all is a moot point...
Having said that, I learned to program in Basic, and my brain isn't as damaged as some people claim it should be. That could be because I learned a reasonably structured Basic (Acorn's BBC Basic V), complete with (gasp) local variables, (ooh) procedures, (aah) and other nice features. I managed to write some reasonable size programs with not a single GOTO. The type system was a bit basic (pun intended), though.
Disclaimer: I know nothing about VB, and long may it stay that way.
So there you go...
Stephen
That's true, but icons also do have advantages. Once you know what an icon means, it is much faster for you to recognize the meaning of an image than a piece of text you have to read and interpret before understading what it is. The best would probably be use both forms at the same time..
I can see your point in being critical of Tog, and while I tend to agree more with him than disagree with him, here's something I just thought of to spur debate:
You say programming languages are also a form of HCI. I agree with this, and I also agree that Tog isn't properly treating the subject by saying that, in effect, "BASIC rules all".
Perhaps there's a cognitive dissonance going on here. A programming language is an HCI that imposes a "schema" on the user, meaning that a user has to accomodate this new interface into his mental processes. The focus is on taking a mental model and sticking with it, in order to concentrate on the application of that language. Examples of this trend are evident in Functional vs. Object oriented vs. Imperative vs. Declarative vs. Logic programming.
Contrast this to a non-instructional HCI like a GUI, which most HCI literature aims at making "intuitive", or in other words, an interface that is easy to "assimilate" into one's mental processes. The focus here is for the user interface designer to do the "accomodating", not the user him or herself.
From this latter perspective, I think it's quite easy to see why Tog can claim that "BASIC rules all". It is the most English-like language available, and hence the most intuitive.
However, programming language theory has advanced to a point that we know that what is intuitive isn't always the best language: there are trade-offs with performance, expressibility and power when designing languages. So, in effect, Tog is wrong from the PL point of view.
Thoughts?
-Stu
I think imitating Windows/MacOS and applying current HCI principles in systems like KDE and Gnome will be nice in that it makes Linux accessible and comparable to those other desktop platforms.
But I hope that in the medium term, Linux will serve as a platform for more interesting and more important UI breakthroughs, including UIs geared towards expert users. Linux is probably in the best position for that because it seems a lot more flexible and extensible than those other systems. And, more importantly, Linux has expert users that can often themselves modify and improve the UI and share those modifications.
Hrm, okay, he's terribly misinformed, ignorant, illogical, etc.
That's all well and good, but could you explain what specifically you thought was so completely wrong?
What was wrong with the topic/problem? A lot of people have had criticisms of the Aqua GUI - even (perhaps especially) veteran Mac users.
What was wrong with the conclusion? It didn't sound to me like he laid a death sentence on Apple, he simply said it could become their 'New Coke'. Seems possible to me, whether or not it is likely.
So, what's the problem?
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
I've found the hockey puck mouse isn't that awful, if you hold it sideways. Sure, you have to internally (brainwise) remap left-right to up-down and vice-versa, but that's not /too/ difficult.
--
"HORSE."
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
LOL. I don't know who you are, but congradulations. This is very funny. :)
They're not so bad, since they're color coded. Too bad if you're color blind though. You want real mystery, check out the "halos" in the morphic interface of squeak smalltalk
Gotta admit though, it's absolutely the most flexible GUI around, even if it is dog slow. THAT is an interface that's way behind the Moore curve. But boy is is something. Lets you drag, resize, and rotate every window and every widget in them.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
> As far as the round menus go, I just don't know what he was talking about. But, with differnt themes of the respective toolkit, one cold put thick borders on buttons.
I'm not sure, but what I think he's talking about here is an application of Fitt's Law that he mentioned in his "A test to give you fitts" article.
Rather than have your menu arranged vertically (or horizontally) as is the case with 99% of menus today, you have the items arranged in a circle, around the cursor.
This works best with popup menus, where you click the button, and come up with something like the following (where the asterisk is the cursor point):
|
Menu|Menu
-_Item1|Item2_-
--___|___--
Menu--_/\_--Menu
Item_|*|_Item
6_--\____/--_3
_--| --_
-Menu|Menu -
Item5|Item4
|
The idea here is that (1)the distance the mouse has to move to the menu item is drastically reduced, and (2) each option is associated with both a distance and a direction, amking them easier to remember, even if the user isn't looking at the screen.
It's a neat idea, and one that I don't think either GNOME or KDE are capable of, without a lot of kludging.
The only desktop environment I know of that does this is UDE but that suffers from other problems, notably that it's nowhere near being complete, not to mention the fact that development on it seems to be all but nonexistent these days.
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
> Be has its own reasons for switching to Intel, and shifted the blame elsewhere for their own convenience
I won't defend Gasse's incessant whining about it, but Apple wanted Be to pay up to develop for their hardware, if such specs could even be bought for any price. Intel paid Be millions to develop for their hardware. Which would you choose?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I mean sure, I wouldnt have any problem with it, I've already memorized which ones do what just from reading an article about it (green = maximize, red = close, yellow = minimize), but I've had to help people learn computers that could'nt even remember the buttons with the static icons! I'd tell them to go ahead and close the window and they'd still ask which button that was. It took a long time for them to catch on. I just don't think its very intuitive in the way of usability.
I don't know much about nothin', but since aqua is supposed to have some open-source parts, can it be ported over to linux? Can it do (in desktop category) what GNOME and KDE are currently trying to do (again, not applications, just WM).
I don't mind GNOME/KDE, but it's just that Apple seems to have ALOT more experience in UI design. In fact, KDE/GNOME people may be great programmers, but the ease of use and the general, inviting, look and feel still isn't there (granter some themes are really cool). Here I am talking about making linux work for the masses, not just 'hackers.' I think there is a HUGE market for linux desktops in the third-world, especially since copy rights are going to be more strictly enforced. Again, I don't want flames, but I would like to hear what actual developers of GNOME and KDE have to say about this.
Does NeXT predate twm? 'cause twm does that...
According to the keynote, the old view styles will be present. You're not limited to a NeXT-style Miller column, and you can have multiple windows open at any given time.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Yeah, customisation for the user's a real bitch... I really oved the way Macs insisted on searing my eyes out with white backgrounds. Stupid M$ let me correct that problem, so of course it's a bad idea...
I'm no X programmer, but if you could make the mouse ptr move slightly slower on buttons etc.,you could "simulate" large size and they'd be easier to click due to Fitt's Law...
NeXt implimented it in 91, windows didn't till well windows 95 Not only that but it was around in diffent Unix GUI enviroments in the 80's
There's a difference between "It's been done before", and "It's been done on a consumer OS on consumer hardware."
If programming languages are not his field of expertise, then why is he commenting on them? This sort of thing can't help but cast a pall over everything he writes - if I catch him making big mistakes in programming languages, how do I know that he isn't also wrong about GUI design, but simply unable to catch it due to my relative lack of knowledge of GUI design?
Well let's see. He asked people to be reasonable, moderate and obey at least the LCD of civilized behavior.
Yep, in this enviroment that's flame bait.
In this neighborhood we insist that our machines play nice together while demanding our rights to hit each other over the head with rocks. Welcome to the future.
Having a L-shaped title bar would mean less space to see what's behind the window, or to maximize the window, for a relatively minor gain in functionality. I believe the Mac's click-to-focus mode doesn't pass through the focusing click...
What bothers me about the Mac/OSX design is the dearth of resize bars. I might be spoiled from using fvwm2 with an ungodly high BorderWidth value, but anything that doesn't allow full eight-way window resizing comes up short for me.
iSKUNK!
Erm, make that the Western-European eye. I strongly suspect the Israeli (and Arabic?) eye normally moves from the upper right-hand corner to the lower left-hand corner, and while I'm not competent to hypothesize about the Japanese/Chinese/Korean eye, I wouldn't be surprised if they have their own modi operandi.
(One reason to make everything user-selectable. It's just tough to do well.)
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
Re: #1, blame Be. LinuxPPC, Yellow Dog Linux, etc. didn't have much trouble. If Apple is so afraid of the competition, they'd have never released Darwin. They probably wouldn't have moved to ROM in RAM either.
Be has its own reasons for switching to Intel, and shifted the blame elsewhere for their own convenience. If they were expecting free R&D from Apple they should have expected otherwise. Not to mention their investment by Intel - Be's recent (ie. within this month) announcements seem to indicate that they are at the mercy of their shareholders.
Seriously though, why would Apple care? BeOS running on Apple hardware doesn't lose them any money. You're assuming a murder when there wasn't even a motive.
Re: #2, current share prices, increasing marketshare, and sales numbers indicate otherwise.
Re: #3, it's subjective. Nobody in the public has even used it, anyhow.
Re: #4, hard to say. Refer to #3.
...if you want to point out mistakes, try not carefully introducing cloning in '88 or '89 (you can blame Jean-Louis Gasee of Be for that one). How about Copland? How about over-pricing?
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Then get a two/three button mouse. Duh.
Although I am not entirely sure, I think that the menu that it produces is just the regular menu (ie, not a contextual menu) so it would be like having the menubar appear under your mouse. _That_ is the feature that would probably not make it.
I don't think that anyone has ever said that linux has done anything particularly inovative... maybe some cute things, but nothing overly original, at least in the technology arena. Mostly, imo, Linux has been original in the philosophy area... but it wasn't the first, it was just the first publicly known about product like that.
However comma I have been having the same problem with @home in Northern Virginia. Leenucks fails to get out to the 'net, but Win2k cranks right along every time.
Diggs
If guns are so evil, how come Sarah Brady can hold one and not turn into a raving lunatic?? Oh yeah, she is one already.
Nobody is going to setup a HCI lab and testing facility for free.
Not all kinds of workers are as happy about working for free as we programmers are.
BTW: I had read this article a few days ago, and some of the things in it are in discussion with other KDE developers both in kde-core-devel and on private email.
Sometimes stuff just becomes linked on a few site and /. links it, but they need to use a little more editorial control and not link to stuff that is blatantly false. Doug
One side note, seamless integration with a GUI is not a good thing. This is one of the reasons why both Windows and the Mac have stability problems. The GUI interface should be a seperate affair.
That's not a valid statement. BeOS, for instance, has a fully integrated graphical user interface on par with Windows or the Macintosh and does not suffer from the same stability issues that plague Windows/MacOS.
Both the Windows and the Mac OS have accumulated cruft over the years as they've been required to do more and more with the same shaky foundation. BeOS started fresh with modern ideas incorporated into it rather than stapled on top. Mac OS X may be analogous, and from what I've read about it seems to, indeed, be more of a rewrite than simply a modern regurgitation of old code.
I can't believe this guy didn't know to hold option to close windows behind you. That for me is one of the most important time saving features, but it gives the user the flexibility to leave open the windows he wants open also.
In addition, in the MacOS the command he didn't know is just that, the command key. Hold it and you can move or windowshade(minimize) background windows without switching to them.
Apple tells users shortcuts very clearly in it's help system, just go in there and search, you'd be surprised how many things you can do just by holding a button.
But anyway, he definitely raises some valid criticisms of OS X, and I definitely don't want to have a "Finder/Browser" type file navigation system. I also think Apple will be total idiots if they don't include a way to use something that is almost exactly like the current platinum look, or at least have a theme system that would let a third party do that. There are some bitter arguments going on in the MacOS community right now(www.maccentral.com/forum/) about the OS X interface, and no matter what Apple does it is going to piss off a whole ton of people.
Oh, BTW:
system folder: 5,138 files
total on main HD partition: 29,957 files
Wow.
I spilled cereal on my shitty yosemite g3 keyboard and the guy at CompUSA said that a new one from Apple costs $250!!!!!!! I walked right past a $9.99 windows keyboard promotion, checked out the $30 cheap-0 Mac ADB keyboard, and bought the $60 Macally keyboard so I could FINALLY have some KEYBOARD SATISFACTION!!! Ahhhhhhh............ Steve Jobs must still be taking them drugs if he thinks those keyboards are worth $260.
Well, if you want quality, the new MS Intellimouse Explorers are $70 retail. We've been getting the Intellimouse w/ Intellieye too, those are somewhat cheaper. A good keyboard can easily run ~$70 or so, I have yet to see a USB Mac keyboard that I'm impressed with, our Adesso ergonomic keyboards failed en masse and we shipped them back. The iKey boards work, but their not ergonomic at all, and they're all ugly as sin. Right now I'm leaning toward getting a Kinesis keyboard to preserve my wrists, since there don't seem to be many viable economical models.
---
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
A less than 50MhZ Sun IPX with 32MB of RAM ran NeWS just fine. A 70MhZ Sun SPARCstation 5 ran Display PostScript well. Vector graphics and transparencies just don't consume a lot of CPU power unless implemented badly.
Read "Dealers of Lightning" by Micheal Hiltzik for the best history yet on PARC. Essetially, Jobs just got there a few months before Gates passed through.
This is a style of popup menu. Normally when you right click for a popup (btw, menus should only exist in popup form) its options come down in a straight vertical stack.
A round popup menu would form a circle of options around your mouse. Users would quickly learn - right click and up for print, for example. It is also faster - less mouse movement. And there is less chance of missing the desired menu because the distance traveled is short.
Every programmer knows that computer languages are one form of human-computer interface.
No, that's not true except in a trivial sense. A programming language is not an interface, it it rather a framework and a set of tools for structuring the problem and the solution. That's a very big difference and probably the one that confused Tog.
Programming languages are not (and should not be) designed to provide a better interface to the machine. They are designed to make problem solving easy, or at least easier. Good languages, essentially, provide a useful framework for thinking about the problem domain and supply you with proper tools to express the solution you have found. None of this has anything to do with human-computer interface.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
255 character filenames in MacOS? Sorry, I don't think you've ever used any MacOS if you think that. MacOS 8.6 has a 31 character limit for filenames, as did all MacOSes back through, at least, 8.0, and I'm sure all the way back to 6. And if you're refering to the NeXT file browser, no, the Mac has never had anything like that.
I don't think you're thinking of the MacOS.
___________________
rooooar
Probably the best place to talk to knowledgeable users is here:
http://www.omnigroup.c om/community/mailinglists/macosx-talk/
...it has a pretty distinct OpenStep/NeXTStep focus, but there are some classic MacOS users there as well. Overall there are a lot of good ideas being floated around there, as well as a few bad ones, but the people are generally intelligent enough to avoid 'MacOS X rulez/sucks' messages.
Much better than Apple Insider, which appears to be more or less frequented by bored 14 year olds (the site itself is pretty decent though).
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
It won't.
Why?
The only slowdown would be from the vector operations on the windows. This doesn't matter because apple can throw operations to hardware. Anyone with a 3d graphics card knows that's all that needs be said.
As for the colors, candy buttons, etc, that's not going to take up jack. They're just colors, it's not like they have to create bitmaps on the fly or anything. What is the difference between doing a solid grey fill and a funky blue gradient fill?
Do _you_ know Fitts's law?
GUI design has been well researched by Apple and others, and the developers of the new desktops should actually read this stuff. It seems that most of the features included in both desktop environments seem to be added because they are "cool" or they are what a particular developer thinks is best. If everyone makes sure that they are playing by these rules, we can ensure that both environments are superior in speed and ease-of-use to both windows and mac.
MacOS has supported long filenames alot longer than WinDOS boxes. Anyone remember the late 80s and early 90s? The Mac folk were enjoying 31 characters while the Wintel crowd were stuck with 8.3 names.
It's not called Micros~1 for nothing.
Funny how the Windows ppl talk down the MacOS when it had features long before Windows did (decent GUI, long filenames, multiple monitors, plug-n-play, etc). It wasn't til after Win95 that MacOS started to lose ground in comparison. Windows still drags along much of that legacy, too.
Constitutionally Correct
Sergio Zyman, the marketing head at Coca Cola when New Coke was released makes an interesting point about it in his book "The End of Marketing as We Know It":
The release of New Coke caused a huge surge of consumer concern for their beloved Coca Cola orginal formula. The release of the NEW drink had effectively resurrected interest in an old drink.
Consequently, the re-release of Coca Cola as "Coca Cola Classic" was one of the most successful marketing moves ever - Coke's sales soared upon its release, leaving Pepsi in the dust.
The lesson: unexpected failure can lead to bigger and better opportunities, IF you're willing to have humility to accept the failure, and then turn it on its head.
-Stu
How is this flamebait? He's fucking asking people to 'tone it down'. Just because someone uses a bunch of exclaimation marks and all-caps in spots doesn't mean it's flamebait. Read the fucking content of the message.
That said, I think open-sourcing the entirety of OSX would be a stupid mistake. What happens when someone gets it running on X86? What will Apple sell? Support?
Anyhow, score me down and score his post up. Try reading the content of a post and thinking about it before moderating it.
you know, consumers have had no discernible trouble with the staggering complexity of two button mice as used in Windows. I don't mean ideal rhetorical consumers, but actual in the flesh people. Around 150,000,000 of them use (are exposed to?) the two button mouse every day, and do not go home to soak their brains in icewater from the strain of it all. Steve should consider that a conclusive HCI test --but first he'd have to take his yam-eatin head outta his hi-fiber ass where he eternally contemplates on the OM.
5. Should not hold the trash can. (The trash can should be on the desktop, where it belongs.)
and
It has a far higher access time than the foolish location Windows uses...
and you have to wonder why, because he doesn't tell you what's going on. I always appreciate Tog's work but he shouldn't assume we know why he thinks things, especially in a field as relatively obscure as GUI design. (Most of the geeks I know, including myself, tend to adapt no matter how irritating the system, and while we do bitch about it, we also have little trouble adapting. Also, some of Tog's comments indicate that he is thinking more in terms of professional use, not everyday use by the masses. Still, he's definitely better at this than I am.)
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Boy are YOU right! Apple sure is on death's door now, isn't it?
The iMac's were such a failure too.
Give me a break...
I think that for all the article's faults that the person tends to have some decent opinions on UI. Both the Gnome and especially the KDE folks tend to worry too much about copying the formulas that have worked for the Windows and Mac interfaces. While not reinventing the wheel can be good, nobody seems to be thinking out of the box on how to take the interface to the next step. Even my beloved WindowMaker is a copy of the way old NextStep interface. I am not a UI expert at all.
That out of the way it seems like ideas of incorporating voice control to basic UI functions (Closing screens, Saving Files)and the idea of eliminating the archaic pointing device seem to be obvious. Other more mundane things like the positioning of screen elements and other things are important as well. Once again, I do not feel that any of the major UI players in the Linux environment are paying enough attention to breaking free or improving on the basic interface experience.
We can't just make an interface as good as Windoze or the Mac but we need to show we can do it better to get wider support for the GNU/Linux experience.
ACK
Unfortunatly, I don't have any prereleases of OS/X client... and I know the latest developer release doesn't have the Aqua GUI... but if anyone has their hands on GUI, or heard and rumours...
Does anyone know how much memory the GUI eats?
To the looks of it... perhaps running Quake 3 as your Finder may take less memory.
Any answers?
-Saxton
_________
My name is Aaron Landry, and I approve this message.
Your point is very valid. However I did not say that seamless integration necessarily == instability. I said that is one reason for Mac/Windows instability. It is not a good thing, expecially for a server product where no GUI is even necessary, much less wanted. Why waste the extra 20 odd megabytes of data for a machine that sits in a closet without a moniter.
This of course raises the issue that Corel Linux is not a server product, well his comments were directed more towards the Linux GUI in general, and GUIs in general. Yes, Corel Linux is a desktop oriented distribution, and there is contraversy over such a thing should even exist, but that is another topic for another time.
For the BeOS, that is fine that it is integrated, it is not a server. For a graphic workstation it is not as much of a problem, but there still comes a time when it is good to drop as many services as possible(telinit 1) and do maintenance. Therefore I think that BeOS could benefit from a seperated architecture, though, as you said it is not entirely necessary for all occasions.
With a graphics workstation it almost becomes just an option, but it isn't, that is my point.
V
Am I the only one that's NOT going to pass judgement on the new OS just from seeing a couple of screen shots and some dude saying what he liked and didn't like from watching a DEMO?
Come on...I thought you people were a little more intelligent than this.
Apple wanted Be to pay to develop on the hardware? I'm kind of curious where you heard that.
I could see why Apple may have wanted some cash to help Be out. Engineer time isn't free, after all, and there's no telling how much Be needed/wanted.
In the end though, I think it came down to marketshare. I can't blame Be for that, although it may not have been the smartest move (Macs are very common in Be's target market - err, old target market). In the end, they were seduced by the large raw marketshare of the Intel market.
I think it may have hurt them though - their move to IA's may have been due to the inability to keep up with driver development on the PC platform.
What I *am* pissed about is Be's wishy-washy attitude about it. When they first added X86 support, they were saying that they were dual platform, that it was one of their core stengths, etc. Since then they have kept the PPC version very stagnant, and haven't evangelized it at all. I just wish they'd get around to officially dropping support and the charade that goes along with it.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Sun is hardly at the leading edge of user interface design. Whoever was resposible for the abominations called NeWS and OpenLook should be taken out and shot.
Apple sure is on death's door now, isn't it?
Eh?
What kind of expression is that?
Learn about a concept called CONTEXT.
Apple's corporate success was not the issue at hand here, imachead- Their pathetic UI is the issue, and maybe had you that idea in mind, you wouldn't have missed the point that Jobs brings no new life to apple in the UI sense as he did with NeXT.
I'll get OSX the first chance I get, of course..
but I really hope all the stupid windows-imitation animations and stuff can be turned off, I want a fast responsive system, no slow animated system.
Hepp.
I find it really amusing how so many people (including Tog) are experts on something they haven't even used. I also find it amusing that poeple are willing to blast Apple for being too radical with a new look in the face of the success of Apple's hardware line.
Many of the people that I've encountered, or whose articles I have read that don't like Aqua, ultimately state that they want Apple to keep the Platinum look. That just doesn't make any sense. So Apple is just supposed to keep the same basic UI for 20 years? I'm sorry folks, that's just not the way things work.
As I said in another post, I have no sympathy for people that complain about the UI just because they never want it to change. I just don't get that.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I have, I think, created the most accurate random dice throw simulator ever known to the computer world. It is held inside a tiny black box, with a serial connection and an Ethernet port.
Questions please?
Q: How does it work?
A: It is sent signals from the programmer that set the method used to determine the result, and to get a new throw.
Q: What do I have to do to use it in program X?
A: Sending it a zero over the serial port will get a new random throw. Sending it any other number from 1 to 11 will set the method it uses.
Q: What methods does it use?
A: The number sets it, and it increases in randomness with the number; i.e. 1 just does a fairly simple random generator, while 10 takes a minute to mathematically simulate the dice on an atomic scale as it flies through the air!
Q: Why does it need Ethernet then?
A: That's for when you send it the signal 11, the most random mode. It posts a comment to Slashdot, enters a wait state for two hours, then comes back, takes the moderation score and adds 1.
Please refer to my previous comments regarding Xerox PARC. APPLE made it popular, XEROX invented the concept. PARC did not ship products, so no one in the public domain would have know of their interface ideas. Apple deserves all the credit for popularizing GUIs.
Why don't you save your final judgements for when OSX is actually released to the public. Until then, NOBODY, except Steve Jobs and the developers at Apple, REALLY know how *usable* the interface is. Unlike many others, I prefer to wait and judge after I've actually used it.
It seems to me that a lot of slashdotters see usability and attractiveness as mutually exclusive. They're not!
...and they also provide 3rd generation display layers. This is mentioned in the article. Did you read it?
"They" don't claim any such thing. "Third generation" means just that: "third." Not "totally new" or "never been seen before."
The MacAlly mouses are excellent, too, and much cheaper if that's what you're looking for. Two buttons plus a scroller/button, snap on accents to match them to your display/keyboard, and they're very high resolution, so you can use them on a big hi-res display without picking them up all the time. The Control Panel is really excellent, too. They're $24 at Outpost.
The "Dock," which is being touted as so revolutionary -- that doesn't strike you as a ripoff of the Windows "taskbar?" I realize other operating systems have similar systems, but the taskbar sure is handy. I don't particularly like "The Dock," and the "genie" effect looks like a staggering waste of cycles. Hopefully it can be disabled.
___________________
rooooar
I'd rather Apple/Englightenment/KDE[/Gnome] spent their energy in developing a more usable *interface* than a prettier one.
This point needs to be emphasized. Many times.
For a good overview of what's available, try this page.
(although it seems to be down at the moment...?)
----
Sorry to burst your pro-MS bubble, but this was a design Apple tested for the Lisa GUI. There's an article the ACM published which has screenshots of these old 1980-82 era prototypes.
Spoken with the true inflammatory ire of an AC. I am not pro-MS by any means. I pointed out that Windows deployed the idea of a fixed dock before NeXT, and it did. By your standard, Apple deserves no credit for the popularity of the GUI, because it was all invented by Xerox.
~k.lee
(remove nospam for email)
I used to respect Tognazzini a great deal. However, close reading of his writing, over an extended period of time, has led me to believe that he has questionable judgment about many issues. Just examine his article, How Programmers Stole the Web, where he claims that:
These are only a sample of the glaring Deep Wrongness in the article I link to above.
In addition, Tog is a relentless Apple partisan, despite his objections to the new Aqua interface. This clouds his perception of all Apple-related issues. For example, among other things, he says in the Aqua/OS X interface article that "Apple could argue, and few would deny it, that Apple was first and Microsoft is the one who made things difficult by failing to accurately copy the Mac interface." Ignoring, of course, the fact that Microsoft would have been perfectly happy to copy the Apple interface exactly, except that Apple is one of the most litigious companies in the IT industry (have you seen Microsoft threaten to sue KDE over their Windows98 theme?).
IMHO, Tognazzini has suffered from a lesser form of the same brain rot that has affected Jon Katz since becoming published on the web: free to spout off without an editor, never forced to confront dissenting opinions before publication, he has become something of an autodidact. This may seem a bit harsh, but I urge the programmers in the audience to read the "How Programmers Stole the Web" article. It reveals a great deal about the didacticism of Tognazzini's thought habits, and will probably cast a very different light on his supposedly authoritative interface design ideas.
I once respected Tog. Occasionally, he comes up with some good insights. However, don't let his impressive resume blind you to his often misled assertions.
~k.lee(remove nospam for email)
Funny, I prefer mine on the floor. Do you still throw disks in there to eject them? Oh, that's right no floppy drive! Hmmm, there's a flaw in every metaphor...
Can anybody tell me, will MacOS X use a two-button mouse? I have a MS IntelliPoint Explorer Mouse (which I think is great, btw) so I get some right-click functionality through MS's mouse software, but I want them to SHIP the computer with a NORMAL-SIZED/SHAPED TWO-BUTTON SCROLLING MOUSE. The iMac hockeypuck HURTS my hand. If MacOS X is based on a UNIX variant, and if UNIX is so heavily reliant on multiple mouse buttons, I would hope they would get the hint and include multibutton mouse support. One thing I like about Windows is the right-click copy/paste menu that can be used in almost every application. That alone would be worth rewriting the OS!
___________________
rooooar
That's for when you send it the signal 11, the most random mode. It posts a comment to Slashdot, enters a wait state for two hours, then comes back, takes the moderation score and adds 1.
It's ironic, then, that this particular comment is 99% certain to be marked "-1, Offtopic" sometime within the next 10 minutes. Not very random, no?
I'm not surprised by Apple's sudden lack of UI commonsense. They completely fired the original UI team that made the Mac as _the_ standard for good UI design. Please see http://www.iarchitect.com/new.htm for another reason why Apple is going in the wrong direction.
---
actually it's rather easy to block specific OS's
He talks about the QT4 player, Mac OS X, and GUIs in general. Listen in.
No problems in Ithaca, NY.
Probably because they'd lose half their customers in the area to Light.Speed (DSL) if they tried to pull crap like that.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Apple's gumdrop button look like a bad case of "Mystery Meat Navigation". Check out this website... it's pretty funny (check out the mouseover-based streetsign), and interesting:
l
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/badnavigation.htm
My first impression upon activating the theme was the expected "that looks cool," and I also noticed that it was a bit brighter looking than the current "platinum" look of OS 9. Not that it was a bad thing, it wasn't blindingly bright, just a little unfamiliar at first. That soon changed however, as I began to actually use it. The theme isn't the most accurate representation of Aqua, for example it doesn't have the slowly throbbing default buttons, but it did have the same "traffic light" buttons on the windows. Some have expressed concern that the buttons are too close together and that someone could miss and accidently close a window, but that did not happen to me once. I got used to the new setup very quickly (to contrast, I never seem to get used to it when I have to use Windows). In fact, I took a liking to the buttons and that pinstripe background. They aren't noticable while doing work, but when you want them you know exactly where to look.
The other main thing that the theme altered was the icons. Even without Quartz and 128x128 (scalable) icons, the new icons look great! That's not one of the things anyone has really been arguing over though...
Unfortunately, the theme cannot simulate translucency, shadows or the "sheet" dialogs - although from the pictures the sheets look really good. The tranclucency might need some playing with, but again I could not try it in person. So on to the browser...
I found the browser useful for quickly navigating a heirarchy of folders - just move the arrow keys towards where you want to go. On the other hand, it wasn't so great for copying/moving files to other places - in most cases a new browser window must be opened. Of course the limitations of this browser might not be the same as Apple's, and the browser view is just an addition to the traditional icon, list, and button views. I'll probably end up using a combination them all, much like I do now.
Keeping all this in mind, it's imporant to remember that Aqua is still in development. Mac OS X is scheduled to be released this summer (not next year as Tog said, that's when it will be preinstalled on all shipping Macs), so there's still time to make any criticisms you might have heard - that is probably one of the reasons for showing Aqua so far in advance.
-Rafi Remove the Spanish to email me.
Does OS X have a way of switching windows from the keyboard a la Alt-Tab in Windows, Enlightenment, Sawmill, and KDE (and probably all the other WMs)? In OS 8.6, which is the Mac OS I'm currently most familiar with, there is no keyboard-bassed way that I know of of switching windows. Apple-Tab works for switching applications, but not for windows. This is a pain for me, because my web-browsing style is to open a new Netscape window for almost every link I want to read. I don't like to have to pick an item from a menu just to switch windows, so the de facto maximum number of windows I can have open is four. I hope OS X will have a solution for this problem. They wouldn't even have to add a new key-combo -- better to just replace Apple-Tab, because after a while, you'd find the program you wanted, even if you went through a few windows of the same program first. Of course, this is a minor issue. They can solve it however they want.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
Actually, the dock may just be the one interface convention actually invented by Microsoft. Windows 1.0, which predates NeXT by about 4 years, had all its icons (including open applications) fixed in a row at the bottom of the screen. They didn't look like buttons, but since you couldn't move them up out of this area, it functioned much like a Dock/taskbar.
It's kind of funny, at the time Mac interface designers blasted Windows 1.0 for not allowing you to move those icons around. Of course, Windows 1.0 was a total interface disaster in almost every other way, but it had a fixed dock. It's pretty hard to track down pictures of the Windows 1.0 interface, but here are a few:
~k.lee
(remove nospam for email)
KDE can be evaluated. It's out. Mac OS X is *not* yet out. You cannot evaluate it. You cannot determine if it sucks. (-1, troll)
Whatever he has to say about BASIC is completely irrelevant, because that is simply not his field of expertise. He is first and foremost a human factors engineer. He has done HCI research at Apple for many years, he founded the Human Interface Group, he played a major part in the Lisa project, which later served as the scientific foundation for the MacOS.
What have YOU done that qualifies you to make disparaging remarks about the man who helped define the Graphical User Interface as we know it?
It appears that is what TOG is discussing here as well. He seems to be pointing out that Aqua places too much emphasis on the usefulness of graphical representations (which look gorgeous but do not relay much information).
That is why I have always found primitive interfaces such as TWM so useful - more often than not, informative text takes the palce of a pretty (but useless) graphic.
By the way, anyone who has the chance to see Edward Tufte speak should do so. For $500 you get all his books and a great lecture that was really worth $500, as hard as that might be to swallow. I can actually say that I learned a great deal about interface design.
MacOS X Server (in an earlier incarnation) was the first Unix I used on my desktop. It got me really aware that there were Unixes with good GUIs. Unfortunately, Linux lags WAY behind in the seamless integration that even buggy betas of Rhapsody had.
I came to Linux from MacOS X and I suspect a lot of other people will too.
Be patient little penguins. MacOS X is no threat to Linux.
_Deirdre
Apple was going to add themes to (I belive) 8.5 but left them out so you could sit yourself down at almost any Mac and not have to relearn the interface.
Don't you hate it when you forget to close tags?
Unless you plastered them all over the gui, there's no way to find out BUT to read the docs or find out from somebody else.
If you have ever used a SGI Indy running Irix paired with that amazingly *ahem* interesting 4DWM desktop windowing environment the dynamic resizing of icons should be familiar to you.
I used to have access to one back in the mid 90's... whoa... that sounds cool.
I know when I took people by the lab to see it they would immediately go "COOL!!!" when they saw the scrolly thingie make the folder icons look bigger then smaller then bigger then... you get the i dea.
It's no wonder SGI's never caught on... it must have been the amazing easy to install no issues approach to software they have always used. I know I am not alone in feeling this way.
http://www.mp3.com/fudge/
http://fudge.org
I am on RoadRunner using Linux (RH6.1) and running fine. Road Runner went down in my area last night (as they do once every week or so) and I had to do an ifdown/ifup this morning to get back my net connection.
I doubt they are blocking Linux access. E-mail me (fxml@excite.com) if you need more specific help.
The filesystem supports long file names, but the OS currently does not.
Daniel.
I must say, i learned a lot from the report the Arsificial Intelligentia over at arstechnica.com put up.
Check it here.
Its got a great deal of info on how MacOS X and Quartz are a 3rd generation GUI, relying on vectors, and a great deal of pdf technology to speed things up. This decreases the amount of power needed to run a transformation like the genie effect by great amounts.
Good stuff.
The first mention of anything having to do with Macs or Apple is how they fixed most of the problems with QT 4.
Apple's biggest mistakes were:
:^)
1. dumping BeOS
2. Bringing back Steve Jobs as Lord and Savior (erm, CEO
3. Putting that butt-ugly interface on top of OpenStep
4. Apparently not going to beta-testing, or even testing at all, on anyone other than developers that stood around slack-jawed saying, "coooool."
Sorry, but that's how I feel about the subject. My extreme hope is that GNUstep doesn't go to themeing toolkits just because OpenStep is themed now...it might be nice, but, c'mon, the NeXT toolkit is nice, usable, and fairly intuitive. The only improvement I could see is making menus either Mac-style or Windows-style, with the additional option of "traditional" NeXT-style menus.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
The weight of the puck is nice, the intellipoint feels like really cruddy plastic. Of course, when I need the extra buttons (Q3), USB allows hot swapping.
-- open source? sounds like the real book --
But why the heck should you have to do that?!?!?! Press two buttons to get the functionality provided by ONE on the PC? That, like the iMac iRSI iMouse is a truly bizarre design.
Pressing the control key when you press the left mouse button brings up a contextual menu, much like the right click on a PC. With some software (logitech provides some with thier USB mice, don't know about alternatives) you can even use the scolling wheel in a folder or browser window.
You can switch off Platnum in Mac OS 8-9. I don't know about memory, but it speeds up older machines if you off Platnum and turn down the details on icons. I'm hoping you can shut off the fancy-pants gui stuff, not only to save memory but so the OS wont be a dog on less than new machines.
Actually, it's more like this:
1. Pay Xerox in the form of Apple stock.
2. Take a few notes on what Xerox has done. No code.
3. Mix in a large number of ideas by Jef Raskin and others.
4. Develop the Lisa/Mac.
5. Bill Gates takes a look, and...
6. The rest is history.
Hope that clears things up a little more.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
I have NEVER read such total drivel and nonsense from a supposedly technically inclined person on a technical subject. My jaw was literally on the floor as I was reading the article... the premise, the 'facts', the argument, the conclusions, even the topic/problem itself... so horribly illogical and twisted...
Words fail describing this... how could ANYONE read that and make any sense out of it.
The guy may be an authority (on guis), but he certainly doesn't have a clue about what he's writing in that article.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
CNN Entertainment Troll story
CNN Entertainment GUI
Unfortunately, Linux lags WAY behind in the seamless integration that even buggy betas of Rhapsody had."
I installed Corel Linux last weekend. Fast install. Only one reboot. The UI sucks, redraws (on a P133/64MB) take too long, severe UI inconsistancies. Windows or the MacOSX are light years away from any Linux shell.
I am a die hard mac user. I have been using both Macs and PC's for the past 13 years and I am ever more firm in my position but I will admit Steve needs to wake up and listen to the users. Two button mice are a must. Apple did the right thing getting rid of the floppy drive and serial connections. Now lets take a few more steps into updating the computer experiance. The new GUI has many problems. Astheticly it is nice but the large icons will have to go. Also I hope that they give the option to open each folder in it's own window. I like multiple windows. He does bring up a point which most posts seem to miss. This is a DEMO. Demos are always exagerated. Apple has touted the technical aspects of OSX for some time now to no success. They resorted to hype. Shame on Apple for trying to draw lots of attention to their product.
STEVE: keep listening to your comptetors custormers but to not assume every mac user will follow you blindly when you do something stupid. AND MAKE OSX OPEN SOURCE LIKE DARWIN IS!!!!!!
WINTEL FLAMERS: Tone it down. Don't argue unless you know both systems.
MAC FLAMERS: Tone it down. Defend the mac on merits not faith! Don't argue unless you both systems.
Linux People? I don't know linux well but I would like to see the Linux and Mac communites closer together in open source efforts.
How bout a post-modern window manager like Sawmill
note: by post-modern I don't mean actually post-modern in an artistic sense, I just mean the natural progession after E. Less bloat, easy config, equal graphic capabilities.
---- sonoffreak
When NeXT was introduced, Steve & crew introduced a machine that was, while expensive, intuitive and easy to use.
:^) The look of these things rock.
With MacOS X, we get an interface we want to lick.
Don't know about you, folks, but I want the usable interface. Personally, I don't run GTK/KDE widget themes, other than NeXT themes to make those apps fit in with Window Maker & FSViewer.app.
I find the notion of scaleable dock items interesting, but fairly useless, and an addition to the clutter that Macs have always been known for. When I'm sitting in front of my Mac at work, when I'm not working on something, I see a gazillion icons. I long for the nice, clean dock and the nice, clean look of FSViewer (a clone of NeXT's file manager.) That dock, friends, is not clean. It's a mess.
And why, oh why, was the top row of "shortcuts" taken away for a web-browser-style button bar??? Yowza, the "classic" look was better, IMHO. It took some of the concepts of Finder, added on, and improved. Need to make aliases to files? No prob. Need aliases to folders? Again, no prob. Do you have to roll up a window, or series of windows, to do so? No. I personally can't see a "favorites" menu being more intuitive.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Have you ever seen an old apple tree that's so old and knarly and overgrown that it has to be propped up, and even though its almost dead, it still keeps making apples?
That's kind of what I think of apple.
Why not sell a Mac environment for Linux and yield to a better OS? Why make a career out of jerking around customers with bad, confusing, and costly ideas? Everything that apple wants to do can be done under Linux w/ add-ons. Isn't that painfully obvious?
Let us not forget the warm popularity QuickTime 4 has received from users on every platform.
(http://www.iarchitect.com/qtimeno.htm)
While I always found NeXT machines and Operating Systems pretty neat (especially for the time) and definitely more stable than any Mac OS, it's disappointing to see that Jobs was unable to bring similar new life to Apple itself.
I must concur with many- MacOS X is gonna suck.
Tognazzini calls it "inexplicable" that VBScript is not cross-browser and cross-platform, and seems to imply that this is due to engineers ... not on the Microsoft attempt to turn the Web into their proprietary fiefdom.
I doubt that MS has any patents on BASIC (correct me if I'm wrong) and other organizations could start making VBScript interpreters since MS does not.
Besides... VB is great for quick and dirty solutions, especially for companies that use simple databases. You don't have to go through that much effort to make a functional program. Of course it is a given that they are not as efficient or as stable as a mySQL solution... but I guarantee that I could build most simple projects MUCH faster with VB, and VBscript.
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
SDI is superior in every way, it is simply implemented poorly in windows.
BeOS has a very nice way of managing application windows, which I encourage others to emulate. Each application gets its own slot in the taskbar (or whatever you like to call it). Every time the app pops open a window, it goes under the applications entry in the taskbar. So instead of having dozens of browser windows lined up in your taskbar (each informatively displaying the first two letters of the webpage being viewed), you have one browser application button, then you click that to access all the currently open browser windows.
Be also has a smooth alt-tab feature which allows you to switch between windows within apps as well as apps.
I do not see how SDI becomes "nastily disorganized very quickly", perhaps you could present some examples to support your argument? And no, I do not know what "There is no homougeny between programs" means...
As it is the duty of the UI lover, I lay down the SDI/MDI challenge: show me a single instance where it is more convenient or necessary to have MDI instead of SDI.
In the article he mentions an aqua skin for windows. Does anyone know where to get it? Does it patch DLLs to get a closer look, or is it simply a color scheme/background pic change? By the same token is there an Enlightenment skin available.