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Rasterman Speaks On E17 And The Future
JigSaw writes: "The team consisting of TheRasterman and Mandrake (among others) are hard at work to bring Enlightenment 0.17 to the Linux desktop. E17 will be a lot more than a window manager, something closer to a complete GUI solution for X. OSNews hosts an interesting interview with Rasterman and also features some (unseen-before) screenshots of E17. Some say that E17 will be the next big thing in the GUI design (even if Rasterman states in the interview that Linux won't probably take over the Desktop), with plans to incorporate libraries like eVas, which look very modern in concept, design and implementation."
While it might rejoince some that everybody is jumping the alpha-blending anti-aliasing bandwagon behind Apple's OS X, what annoys me it that they do not copy the intelligent concept behind Aqua: display PDF.
What Apple has done is define an abstraction for graphical applications. What other copy is some of the nice uses of those abstractions: anti-aliasing and alpha-blending.
It's really a shame the only thing they understand is the surface...
Ahh but us programmers like our gui's to work they way we want them to. That means our gui's meet the needs of programmers. This is a result of the "scratch an itch" development model.
The GUI you're asking for needs to be developed specifically for ease-of-use. Not programmer usability. That means a programmer will need to spend a lot of time working with people of little technical background to find out what works for them. The biggest problem with that is that these people don't know what they want, they only know what their used too.
$sig=$1 if($brain =~
Both the Gnome and KDE usability groups have been very active lately. Their desktops are getting closer and closer to the point where they really are ready for your mom to run.
Neither project seems to be lacking in programmers. Instead, they are advancing so fast that it is a big job just to stay on top of the improvements. Hell, the improvements in KDE from 2.1 to 2.2 were larger than those from Win95 to Win98 -- and the Windows update took 3 years while the KDE update took closer to 3 months, and was only a point release.
Now, given the incredible rate of improvement in the desktops, and the increasing efforts of the usability teams, tell me why having two of them makes it *less* likely Linux will find a place in the desktop market. It seems rather the other way around to me.
I have been using "e" from Dr14 on, Even when trapped in WIN32 hell, I emulated the Look and feel of "E" under Litestep.(even thought there was a win32 port E-Seance) DR17 is really really fast. And very impressive. If you do a CVS build and give it a honest go, I think you will find that it is much faster than your current windows manager. Even runing evas_test app shows you the differance in rendering technics. I am very Impressed with the latest offerings from the E team, But I agree that new logo blows!
My two Cents!
If you can figure out windows, you can figure out most any other window manager I've run across that even remotely considered itself "for the typical user". Windows is horribly unusable, especially for those of us used to Macintosh. The very design of Windows with its BS document-window-inside-application-window is a major drag on its usability, imho... If you're not in maximized mode you spend time hunting for your toolbar-- and now with Win2K you'll be clicking at the bottom of your menu to actually get to see the whole menu. Thank god for right-clicking, but that's no real compensation for a crippled menu bar.
Windows is one of the worst window manager in existence. It doesn't do one thing and do it well, it doesn't have any shining features whatsoever. NOT ONE. So, my point is simple. The fact that Windows is so widespread has nothing to do with usability. The fact that many users are comfortable in Windows has nothing to do with usability. But they've learned to use it, so they consider it natural. But it's a computer. Using it is going to take practice-- and maybe even training. It's a very complex machine.
Nobody expects to be able to drive a car five minutes after taking it out of the box, unless they've driven before. And yes, if you go changing all the controls radically, the driver's going to need retraining. So look at it this way. Would you expect to be able to drive an F1 just because you can drive a Ford Escort? I wouldn't. Same goes for powerful window managers like E versus crap like Windows.
My biggest problem with E is that there don't seem to be any E applications. If I use E I still need to load half of KDE to run Konqueror, and then I'll need gtk for GIMP, and then there's all those applications that have pretty windows around them, but are really just ugly X applications. I cut my losses and just run KDE, but I'd rather run E.
I do not have a signature
So change it.
That is one thing the E has going for it, everything can be changed.
Granted it wasn't the easiest thing to do in previous versions. But E17 is supposed to have drag and drop theme designing.
Unfortunitly every thing is now stored in EDB (databases) so I can't tweak my themes with vi. But there is a nice little database editor included. I'll just have to get used to that.
but of course most Windows users never have to
Bingo! So why hold Linux to the same standard as Windows when it comes to ease of installation? In my experience, as of RH 7.1, Linux has surpassed Windows in both ease of installation and time to install. Yes, there are some hardware combos that will trip up even modern Linux distros, but the same can be said of Win2K & XP. On average I find Linux easier to install than Windows.
I suspect that almost anybody can pop an install CD into the drive, boot the box, click the Install [Gnome|KDE] Workstation button and click OK. That's just about all it takes nowadays given that you don't have any hardware that it doesn't recognize. I know that most of us would want to tweak our install quite a bit more than that, but doing a base install is pretty trivial these days.
I think this whole "Linux-is-hard-to-install" myth needs to die. It was once that way, but the times they are a-changin, folks.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
So - the question remains: who's doing anything more than cosmetic work on modern user interfaces? Several people have commented on the fact that it's a huge hurdle for a truly non-technical person to understand any of the existing UIs. I completely agree.
Raise your hand if you've tried getting your parents to understand how to use a desktop UI (those with parents younger than 40 need not apply...) And I don't mean just to memorize how to perform a particular action, but to really know it well enough to go off and do things you may have not taught them how to do. I've tried, and friends of mine have tried, and we've all come to the same conclusion: UIs have gone virtually nowhere since early days of the Macintosh.
So we've got alpha blending, anti-aliasing, 32-bit color, and more fonts than you can shake a stick at. That makes things very pretty, but it doesn't actually help you accomplish much more. It doesn't make computers any easier to understand for anyone, techies or non-techies.
I don't think anything will deserve the title of "Next Big Thing" until it actually does something new, and prettier graphics ain't new...