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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."
First think i do is dumb it down and make it look as simple and old as posiable.
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can't beat that now can you.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
I played WoW for one year now on a Windows 2000 Professional box. As we all know, Windows 2000 is as about as bland a desktop that has ever existed.I was getting 90 to 100 FPS in WoW and I was happy with it.
Recently, I was forced to upgrade to Windows XP because an application bombed out when trying to install on W2K. Now, I get 30 - 40fps. After turning off all the XP eye candy, I get 40fps steady.
Actually, I do. $ (seriously.:P) ----nubis :)
Here's the problem with your assumptions:
You're using your baseline computing conditions. Letting the GUI eat up cycles opening up firefox is fine. There are other times when you're doing computationally intensive tasks such as: compiling, ripping, packing files, watching video.
I don't want the GUI to compound the problem and fight for system resources when I'm just opening a window or browsing my filesystem. I want to rip a CD and use the computer without the GUI screwing things up. The GUI needs to know it's the assistant and helper, NOT the main event.
B
I always put my Windows box to "Classic" mode in short order.
To me, UIs aren't "interesting" so I like to keep them as minimally distracting as possible. The less time it takes for my brain to say "this is a pushbutton" the better off I am.
I've found that younger people are a bit less conservative about this stuff, and seem to embrace funky looking buttons faster.
So I'm just turning into an old fogey...
Some of the effects though...like making dropdown menus scroll down or fade in just take time. I understand how a total n00b might be impressed or even appreciate the connection (being less "jarring" than something just popping up) but it seems like a large cumulative time waiting for menus to open.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
I completely agree. Also, looking at my iMac CoreDuo CPU monitor, there's not even a blink up in CPU time while doing these operations. My PowerBook G4 400Mhz works better and better with each MacOS X revision, so I guess Eye Candy isn't what is slowing it down ;)
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Actually it doesn't come with it switched on. I run server as my desktop OS, so I know this. You have to start the themes service and you have to configure the video card to "max acceleration" (as it is set to no acceleration on server SKUs by default). You often have to set things like the image aquisition service and others to automatic if you have scanners and the like. All of these things are off on the server sku...
Pshaw... having just moved from a Win2K box to a Powerbook, I don't find that the shiny shiny stuff makes a difference in my life.
Some of it, like the animation that swooshes the dock, just irritiates me.
I personally find the PB keyboard annoying compared to my Logitech, and the mouse button on the trackpad - man was that designed by a deaf person? CLICK! CLICK!
I would love to be able to turn off even more of this flashola than I have already. I don't need my windows to swoosh down to an icon, or for every third item to start bouncing.
I dunno, maybe Mac folks are just easily amused, or I need to ingest more mushrooms.
Oooh - that's it... mushrooms!
Three Squirrels
I used to play WoW on windows XP ... i was getting pissed off becuase i was getting disconnects every 8-10 hours or so, and only about 35 FPS... Then i installed windows 2000 (haha, no activation) i suddenly only disconnect when i tell Wow to, and holy moly, i'm getting another 10fps, just because i canned Xp......
Now, is this the fault of eye-candy, i htink not. i think it's the other extras that get added to Windows, especially by the time you get to sp2, you have so much crap running just for the GpOS! ... well, that's my rant... Go install win2k, you'll love it
...you made a good point, that eye candy is ok, provided that it can be turned off. However, you may not realize that isn't always that simple.
.dlls supported, one for providing a 3d based desktop, and another for providing a 2d desktop.
Let's take a hypethetical situation. Lets say I write a UI that uses a 3d api to render the desktop. (we will call this supposed UI, 'SparrowGrass' so we have a name to work with.)
Using 'SparrowGrass' I can enable all sorts of 'spiffy-wa'(as my console gamer friend calls them) hardware accelerated effects, such as dynamic shadows, translucency, and such. But because they are expecting that there is a 3d card with a good T&L chip in the machine, it will run like a dog without it.
So either because I find such 'spiffy-wa' effects morally offensive when I am trying to remotely reconfigure a DC, or because I lack the latest 3d card, I choose to disable the fancy 3d features of 'SparrowGrass'. However, I am still using a 3d API to render the desktop.
If you looks at one very famous company's 3d API, printing text to the screen involves rendering a couple of polygons, and basically texture mapping the text onto them. While you have turned off the 'spiffy-wa' features, you are still going to be taking a hit for using the 3d API in the first place.
it seems unlikely that there will be two sets of
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
While certainly, many of the "gee whiz" demo's we see of the eye candy are largely useless, and could even be considered a detriment to productivity, there are a number of more subtle side-effects of this eye candy which are and can be very useful and a benefit to productivity.
A good example is the window shadows in OS X. These are created through compositing, which is part of the "eye candy" layer. The drop shadows help define the edge of the window without having to have a thick and useless window border. OS X windows are borderless, which improves screen usage, and the shadows allow you to clearly define the edge.
Another example is Expose. This is handled by the compositing system as well, to resize, scale, and reposition the windows
Translucency is another benefit in certain areas, such as with overlays.
While all these things can be done without a fancy eye candy layer or 3D acceleration, they suck up CPU power. We'll eventually see the 'gee whiz' stuff go away, but the real productivity boosts will stick around.
Also, there's the argument that "Hey, i have all this power, why should I just let it go to waste doing nothing" has some merit as well.
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I dont necessarily disagree that 2000 would run it faster, but I have a hard time swallowing that you'd get 30% better frames. There has been a slew of benchmarks over the past 5 years that ask the question 'Does the OS make a difference in performance of games', and the answer is always a restounding 'no'. I read an article on tomshardware about a year ago, and between 98, Me, 2000, and XP, the biggest difference they could find in any game was about 3%. Ive seen probably half a dozen articles in the past year that look at the OS's impact on games, and in every article with every game they tested, it typically only makes about a 1%-2% difference. Until I see otherwise, Im not going to be inclined to believe that you can get 30% increased performance by switching to 2000 from XP, which are so similar in the first place.
I'm not typical in that I try to do as little customization as possible. Sometimes I have to change stuff (.vimrc, for example) but mostly I'd rather just adapt to the defaults.
There are exceptions, of course: most of the eye candy in XP is actively obnoxious, and making XP look as much as possible like 2K is the first thing I do when installing it. OSX (perhaps because its main design goal was not just to jam in as many features as possible) is much pleasanter to look at. I need very little customization on OSX, mostly getting rid of that !@#$ minimize-to-the-dock "feature."
Linux does strike a good balance: it's much easier to turn stuff off. On the other hand, I prefer Gnome largely because it has so many less stinking options to wade through.
In short, you'll never please everybody.
Microsoft makes a lot of its money selling to computer manufacturers. They want customers to be forced to buy new computers.
This has NOTHING to do with doing the right thing for customers, in my opinion.
Because they want to use it for worthy causes (SETI, folding, etc)? Because due to the bloat of modern PCs you can barely get word processing and an mp3 player to work on 256 MB of RAM? Because you'd rather let the processor idle part of the time and use less power?
Not to mention- I find eye candy to be universally ugly. Simple is beautiful. The fewer bells and whistles the nicer everything looks.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
"That's faaaaar more than my desktop requires."
That's entirely the point isn't it? Suped up desktop graphics for no other reason than to 'mop up' spare power and keep pushing things forward. At some point in the (not too distant) future the entire computer industry is going to have a pretty vast seismic shift in the whole way it works. For the past 20 years hardware has always been the limitation, stopping the software from doing what is desired. As you correctly point out, what the vast majority of people require (web browsing, writing a few emails, letters or creating a couple of graphs in a spreadsheet) can now be very happily be done in any $300 computer that dell are selling. So now they have tried to extend the model by creating a lot of fat graphics demands to ensure that they can continue to sell software products (vista, the new office) and that the hardware market continues to move forward.
This can only last for a couple of iterations before businesses and consumers say "hey, wait a second, I am not buying another machine/os for nothing more than another paint job". Then everything hits the fan. As I see it there are only two options, either the market moves to a more conventional "white goods" sales model, or they move to a car sales model (i.e. build something that is purposefully crap and will fall to bits within a couple of years).
Basically we are very close to reaching a very key point in the future of home computing, the continual "faster, bigger, faster" race is almost at an end, and things will either integrate and dispersed until the thing we know as a PC no longer exists (insert the terminal PC model here) or companies like Intel and microsoft will fall from grace with a stable stagnant market (which is why we have 'fat' vista being released, they are obviously trying to ensure they *never* leave the center stage).
As someone who runs XP in "2000 mode", I agree.... BUT, we are not the common user. I have yet to see an average user remove the Luna theme. Most just use how it is configured by default. Frankly, if they knew that disabling all this crap would *enhance* their user experience, they would disable it. They don't do it because they don't know. They say: "IIiirks, it looks ugly/old now", immediately revert and don't understand that their (older) machine would run like a champ.
P-III 600MHz/512Meg RAM laptop on WinXP Pro in classic mode here... And it frankly beats many default XP desktops I have seen.... (Spyware at fault of course...)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I fucking HATE that. Sometimes Safari loses sanity and I get the dreaded beachball. Guess what -- the system menu is modal to the application, which means I can't select Force Quit. Instead I have to open a terminal and type 'killall Safari'. What the HOLY FUCK?
I'm an individual who looks at computers as the tool they are and as such, I fully evaluate any new feature that's being added to the interface such as Aero in Vista in regards to these factors. 1st) does it improve my efficiency? 2nd) Does it distract me? 3rd)Does it place any minimum limits on hardware?
If the answer to 1 is yes, then I'll test to see if there is any increase in productivity; otherwise both 2 and 3 means stay away from my system. Simply put, I consider my computer to be no more of a tool then that new hammer or cordless drill I'm eyeballing it comes down to this; does the design & features allow me to do more work with less effort? If not then it's a complete waste of effort on the part of the developer.
My preferred desktop UI is Fluxbox 0.1 stable and I use minimal eyecandy there except for the fact that I've begun developing my own themes as they're the easiest way to change the look (eye candy) while not affecting my ability to get work done.