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Thinking About Desktop Eyecandy
An anonymous reader writes "This article ponders over whether excess eye candy and special effects being incorporated on the desktop is a good trend after all? The author explains why he thinks the users are taken for a ride by the OS companies in compelling them to upgrade their hardware in order to enable these processor intensive and memory hungry special effects."
I think my eye has Diabetes, so I will pass on vista, and take Xgl Ligth please.
find -name "*base*" -exec chown us {} \; ; ln -s
I can beat that:
#>
What? Control Panel -> System? No Windows key + Pause/break?
Han shot first.
The hidden benefit is that much of the eye candy in OS X is very soothing. It makes it easier to get work done when you have a soothing background and your actions on the computer generate a continual calming effect.
Yeah.. tell that to clippy.
If it were tasteful, productivity enhancing eyecandy, then yes. Otherwise, drop back and punt.
On a Linux desktop, i was always very much in favor of WindowMaker, as it had just enough chrome to be attractive, but then got out of the way.
Since what we're really talking about here is WindowsTNG (or whatever Vista will be when it ships), then I would say, "NO!" to more eyecandy. I would only think they neede to do more if the first step is they fire whoever the designer in charge currently is, and subcontract the design to the Gnomes at IKEA.
Just think; a Windows Desktop in tasteful, understated, blond wood veneer.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
"it is obvious to the user whether they are taking the right actions or not. For example, when a program crashes in OS X there is a spinning beachball.."
Of course that means a program crashed, its like word association. Beach ball - ball park - giant hotdogs - thirst - cold beer - expensive ballpark beer - beer empty - gag at refill price - hotdogs stuck in throat - call ambulance - hospital room visit - wheeled into ER on crash cart
see its completely intuative
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
The Gnome community is committed to fighting this troubling trend of gratuitous eye candy. We will continue to ensure that Gnome--today, tomorrow and in the future--continues to look like ASS.
Thank you for your support.
Sometimes I like it. I just run xterms or emacs all the time, with the windows stretched to take up the whole display. If I'm in the mood for eyecandy I add -F or even --color to my ls arguments....but generally I don't think it's worth the effort.
YMMV.