Slashdot Mirror
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...
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.
E17 very well might be the technology that makes advanced drawing APIs popular on desktop applications. NeXT never really made it very far into the market, and OS-X, while popular, is still pretty slow. I know 10.1 is supposed to be faster, but there is only so much you can do with software rendering! My only concern with EVAS is whether or not it will hurt the performance of windowed 3D apps (like 3D modelers).
As an aside, this Rasterman guy is the only person in the OSS community that has any asthetic sense. While the Mandrake guys are busy designing lavander icons, the SuSE people are busy with the (ugly) Lizard motif, and the KDE2 guys are trying to make their desktop look like something out of Mattel, E genuinely looks good. I know there are themes, but the "look" of KDE or Mandrake are unescapable. Mandrake freezes you into installing their freaky purple desktop by making every X app depend on mandrake_desk. (No, I don't have the time to try to figure out the menu config file format and change it back!) And with KDE2, everytime something SIGs out, a cute little dragon comes up to inform you that your app crashed. Here's my theory. The KDE project is trying to capitalize on the success of the PaperClip from Hell (TM).
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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
I'm sick of these damn "E looks ugly" comments... Look, yes, the themes Raster comes up with are ugly. Yes! Ugly! But since the whole point of E is themeability, it's just idiotic to condemn the program because of the graphic design preference of one theme maker.
And don't give me crap about the default theme. The first time an E user clicks on the desktop they're going to see the "themes" menu item, and they can change it. There are some very fine and minimal themes for E, and a couple actually come with the download.
As to the time delay... Well, it has been a while, though the team obviously hasn't been sitting on their thumbs. Since everyone else had so much to do to catch up with where E was, they really aren't behind at all.
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
the fact that evas has is "canvas" is nothing new. it's an ancient idea. the fact that i did start it off simple and dind't go completely bezerk with abilities and features (display postscript, display pdf) - just kept the core and basics, meant that i could actually finish it in time to use it for writing the app i needed it for: e 0.17 AND it menat i could also accelerate it via multiple back end rendering paths. it's quiteodd too the apeolpe assume it is ONLY opengl - in fact i woudl not suggest using the gl backed rendering engine on anything but an nvidia driver because so far no driver i have found comes even clsoe to being stable enough or complete enough. but nvidia is about the closest. my own software rendering (imlib2 does that for evas) which is quite fast is what i normally use for evas - so you don't NEED hardware. you can use normal X11 pixmaps and X primitives as a rendering back end for evas too. this keeps it simple - but still makes it able to be extended easily, and has allowed me to make it work and work well in a relatively short period of time with a relatively small amount of resources.
:) the end result is a canvas that is fast.. hardware accelerated or not, that does its primitives well and does the job i need... and can be improved in time with no effect on the programs using it other than positive ones (new features... or faster & better quality rendering etc.)
:)
:)
that is what the power is.. and it can be easily extended. new object types can be added - new things like having clipping paths could be done, extra object attributes can eb added that affect their display.. but the more complex the feature the harder it is to support in the back end rendering... and the less likely it is to be able to be hardware accelerated and instead have to be done more slowly in software - even the software optimizations are lezz liekly to be effective the more complex it is. thus i choose to only impliment what i really need - and that can go a surprisingly long way
evas solves the problem in an elegant way... and rememebr it isn't the same as dps/dpdf - its a canvas. that is a different concept.
i also know a bit more about apples display technology than you think - it defintiely is pretty - and yes... i'm not going to comment much in detail on it as i dont, imho, think i know enough details to make a very concise sumamry of it and get it right 100%. but i know enough to know what they are doing (approximately) and why etc.
evas is a different technology - it is much closer to the java canvas, tk canavs, gnome or qt canvases. it can be extended and wrapped and made more pwoerful with layers ontop that use it as an optimized rendering system... and that is incendentally one of the side projects happening right now
anyway.. just thought i'd comment a bit - don't want to flame - just want to fill in the gaps ininformation that wasn't provided for you before
--------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------
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...