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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.
$>
can't beat that now can you.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
...as long as everything is configurable. The minute something becomes distracting I should be able to disable it. Forced fancy effects that do nothing but distract you and spin away CPU cycles are a waste.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Do people honestly believe that consumers are the ones who benefit most from a new operating system?
I don't mind home users buying this, but why do companies?
It bugs the hell out of me that a select licenced windows server cd comes with eye candy switched on(ok its not much but it's a server!)
why???
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 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 :)
But it sure does help with the overall experience. For example, in what little amount of spare time I have I like making images with Povray. Whenever I want to try out something new it sure helps to have the code open in a mozilla browser window underneath the terminal window that I'm typing into. Also, I don't have much screen real estate.
Is negative and eventually detracts from the user experience.
But there are certain effects that compliment the OS and do serve a purpose. In OS X, when a window is minimized and you get the "genie" effect, notice how it minimizes to the point for which the minimized application will reside? It leads you back, so that you can remember.
-- Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/
OS X has loads of eye candy. The obvious benefit is that users get more feedback on their actions. This means less calls to tech support, because 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, and when a program launches the dock icon bounces.
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. Everything from the click of the keys on my powerbook to the way programs open and close is designed to put the user into a state of flow.
A prettier GUI is often easier on the eyes, and if you have a load of extra resources (do you really need a 3ghz machine with 1 gig of ram just to browse the web?) might as well use them to make the interface more attractive. Though whats attractive to one, may not be attractive to another.
I'm all for eyecandy in my OS so long as it is in moderation. To me, that means 2 things:
1) It's not excessive. I don't need 10-second animations to show a window has popped up.
2) It's not too hardware intensive for the time it's released. Around 3 generations ago for video cards.
3) You can scale it back if needed.
For #1, it shouldn't slow things down or cause a distraction. Something cool, but subtle. OSX's dock bar is a nice example.
For #2, I mean you shouldn't need a current-gen system to render everything. If Vista came out today, I don't want to be required to have an nVidia 6800GT to view the desktop with the defaults on. If you required a Geforce 2 or 3, then fine; they've been out long enough that most should have something as good or better (plus you should be able to turn it down if you don't).
For #3, you should be able to run an OS in a lighter configuration. This is for people that either don't have recent hardware or just want a light experience for performance (or personal preference).
But building more special effects in the OS level will rob the extra power and memory from the applications and games which rightfully require them.
.. the PC I'm typing this reply on has a 2.6GHz CPU and 1Gb of RAM, with a Radeon 9800pro graphics card. That's faaaaar more than my desktop requires. If I didn't "waste" the extra capacity on delightfully shiny effects it'd just go to unused. It's not like Firefox would start using it.
.. I *like* swooshy effects. I'm a PHP developer. I need cheering up. ;)
This guy is incredibly clueless. Effects only take up "power" (argh) and memory when they're in use. The likes of OSX automatically scales down the fancy stuff if your system doesn't have the grunt to run them well, I imagine Vista will do the same. Switch of the swishy bits and your system will use no more RAM or CPU time than if they weren't there in the first place. Besides which
And further to that
http://twitter.com/onion2k
It depends - some can be quite useful. For example, the genie effect when minimizing a window in OS X shows you exactly where the window went, so you know how to get it back. That's awesome for a beginning computer user and very intuitive.
On the other hand, the water ripple effect when dropping a widget in dashboard in os X is pretty much useless. The ONLY possible way you could call this usefull is because it's an indication that you did in fact let go of the mouse button, but that's a serious stretch.
I personally find the smooth movement and eyecandy in os x to be great - sure you could make something like expose work without the eye candy, but the smooth scaling of windows makes it very easy to use and intuitive. I stare at a computer screen for a large portion of my day - I do, in fact, enjoy the fact that it's nice to look at.
Eyecandy incorporated in the proper way can in fact be useful. It can provide extra visual cues to indicate what's going on. It can help new users familiarize themselves with a system. However, for the most part, the ways it's currently being implemented are more of a distraction than a useful feature.
This guy's the limit!
Please, someone correct me if I am wrong, but I thought the actual goal of all this desktop restructuring was to move the processing off of the CPU for the rendering and onto the GPU. The eyecandy was just a fringe benefit of the transition. Unless the benefit is more CPU cycles for non-GUI tasks, I would agree that this is a waste of time.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
Control Panels --> System --> Optimize for Best Performance
It turns off ALL the fuzzy, fading, stupid stuff, and surprises them how much better it responds.
Linux/BSD?
IceWM on top, but with KDE libs underneath, so you can run any KDE or Gnome apps, but don't need all that mem-hogging desktop candy just to run KMail or whatever.
I can beat that:
#>
Whilst desktops can make it more appealing and in a few cases easier to do things.
:D.
You still cant beat a shell prompt, nomater the OS for so many tasks.
rm -f a*.wibble or del a*.wib if you like - painful on a desktop given the ease of a command line.
So the 60's hippies with the teletype consoles and lavalamps productivity wise and eye candy wise were way ahead of us
From the article;
;)
Why is the OS industry obsessed with providing richer, processor intensive graphical effects ?
Because the average user who doesn't give a damn about processes and other things we obsess about ask for them. Plain and simple, market demand.
"Build something idiot proof, and someone will build a better idiot" - Samuel Clemens
Italics are quotes from the article:
But building more special effects in the OS level will rob the extra power and memory from the applications and games which rightfully require them.
I generally play games that require a lot of processing power in fullscreen mode, so the OS using fancy features for display will have very little impact (all of the OS's textures will be swapped off the GPU unless I alt-tab or otherwise task switch away from the fullscreen game). And the vast majority of applications I use just aren't going to have any significant negative impact from a bit of eyecandy. Computers are ridiculously fast these days... Word processors and web browsers have more than enough power to spare some for eye candy. There aren't too many applications for which this kind of eyecandy actually hurts performance on modern systems. Even things like, say, movie encoding or other heavy number-crunching apps aren't impacted significantly because almost all of the work in displaying the eye candy is done on the video GPU which would otherwise be unused anyway.
There are other valid reasons too which prompt me to take the viewpoint that less eye candy is better for the OS. Experience tells me that it is futile to do productive work within a desktop with all the special effects enabled. The last time, I tried it, I was severely distracted and fell short of completing my work. Is it just me or are there others who have been through the same experience ? To do productive work, it always helps to have a fully functional but spartan desktop.
I disagree here too. "Eyecandy" if used well (see MacOS X for some examples) can give subtle cues that actually make me more productive. This part is clearly subjective so YMMV.
But the Windows users do not have this luxury. For example, a person using Windows 2000 will be forced to buy a copy of Vista if he needs the added security and extra features like better search. And to install Vista on his computer, he will most certainly have to embark on a spending spree to upgrade his PC to accomodate the extra special effects that are integrated into the OS
The guy who wrote this should have done some research. You can run Vista without the Aero Glass UI being active, just as Windows XP can be dumbed down to look, feel, act and perform like Windows 2000 (except with much faster booting times).
If you don't want the eyecandy, shut it off. You CAN do this in Windows XP and Vista, despite what the misinformed article states.
I really disagree with the article. Computer interfaces should look good and be efficient. GUI's will always push the envelop of whatever technologies come around. If OS and software vendors aren't pushing the envelope, then they aren't working hard enough at improvement. Who cares about your lame 486's, anyway?
The author then makes the claim that nice interfaces rob the computer of processing power. I disagree. Most of the time the computer (especially desktop) is doing nothing. In anycase, if what I understand is true, upcoming MS windows and some future X implememntations will use hardware acceleration for rendering window graphics-- so, the CPU won't be under any "strain" at all.
Anyways, I paid my dues with the vt100 era. It is now a pleasure to use a nice interface. I would not have it any other way.
Just like the fact people like to decorate their slave boxes... Err... I mean cubicles, people actually like working with fancy high-tech OS technology that they see like the ones in the movies. The affect might wear off after 2,000 hours at working the same dead end job day in and day out, but if it feels like you are on the deck of the enteprise while doing Excel spreadsheets you might feel better about coming into work on time.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
A certain amount of eye candy can make things more pleasant, though. I used twm for years, but now I use enlightenment, because it gives me the simple, uncluttered design that twm does, but has nice shading and other visual effects that make the whole experience more pleasant.
I like uncluttered and simple, but I also like a polished look. I don't use the window switching bar thingy on the top (it wasn't even turned on by default in the version I have now), and the only icons I have on my desktop is a single row of virtual desktops along the bottom edge. Simple, elegant, and lots of uncluttered screen real estate.
If I'm going to stare at a screen for hours each day, I'd like to have what I'm looking at be easy on the eyes. I'm not a GUI nut either--text mode can be visually pleasing too, depending who is writing the software (ever logged into VMS? For the love of God!).
Eye candy is not always necessary, but as long as it's helpful and not distracting, I'm all for it. Good examples are window managers such as fluxbox, windowmaker, and enlightenment. They're pretty simple in some respects, but they look quite nice. Of those three, enlightenment 0.17 is loaded with more eye candy than I've ever seen, though none of it feels obtrusive.
"For example, a person using Windows 2000 will be forced to buy a copy of Vista if he needs the added security and extra features like better search. And to install Vista on his computer, he will most certainly have to embark on a spending spree to upgrade his PC to accomodate the extra special effects that are integrated into the OS."
Apparently, the author failed to notice that Vista has the option of the running classic interface, the XP interface, or the new Aero (ie: processor intencive) interface. So while a 2k user may want to buy a copy of Vista for security concerns, they should not have to upgrade their hardware in order to do so.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I've been testing the next release of the "unnamed proprietary operating system" in question, and I have to say that a great deal of the eye candy goes a long way to making things easier. Getting a live preview of a window if you hover over its taskbar button or flip between windows is a nice feature, as I constantly have a ton of windows open in the same app. Being able to move a window around without spiking the CPU to 60%+ is another subtle but nice benefit. In my testing of this release I've found that the UI is more responsive and smooth when the compositor is active versus when I have it switched off. This is on a 945 chipset's integrated graphics, too - you don't need a GeForce 7800GTXOMGBBQ in order to run the new UI smoothly.
Your hardware is only as old as the software you're running. If I can find a less bloated OS to run on older hardware with all the features I need, then I don't feel the need to upgrade. Most of my machines are 7 years old. I got them all as hand-me-downs from people "needing" newer hardware to run the latest OS. Like me, most of them don't play games and really only need a web browser and an office sweet. I love it when a new OS comes out.... chances are I'm going to get a better computer for free.
Eye candy in OS inevitably slows down a computers performance. Adding more and more features does likewise, so the question has to be asked, why incorporate 3d effects on an interface at all? Microsoft no doubt wants people to believe that the new 3D engne it will use in its new Vista OS will make finding things on the computer easier, however it's not the eye candy that makes an OS better, its the data management system that is underneath the graphical interface. So then, let's call call it as we see it, the only real reason to incoroprate increasingly more eye candy into an OS is for marketability purposes. Much like the endless widgets, gadgets, and other useless add-ons that are often included, but never used in programs like word (or mac OS), the makers of these programs have a need to make the consumer believe that he is getting more value for his puck. more importantly, they want to give the consumer some visual benefit that he recieves for upgrading to a new version. Take word for example, does adding 10 more bells and wistles to Word make it better? No, in fact it clutters the program, and makes it harder to manage, and yet, we have new "features" added all the time. or take a cell phone as an example, the vast majority of people use only a fraction of a cell phones features, and yet OS producers continue to add program in the belief that the consumer will chose their product over others because it offers more stuff (value). The same is true with a computer OS. The marketers say, we need eye candy to make this sucker sell, to give the cnsumer a reason to upgrade, and so the programmers accommidate. But does eye candy make the OS better? Not necessarely. Just like sometimes all you may want is a cell phone that makes calls (and nothing else), many people want an OS that can do email, word, excel, etc, just the basics and nothing more. Adding more flash does not make those tasks any easier or beter to do, what it does do however is introduce one omroe component to the OS that may cause it to crash, or slow down the opperation of the programs that DO actually matter. in my eyes at least, flashy eye candy is not the way to go. sometimes, simplicity is what counts.
Fool me once...shame on you, fool me twice...won't be fooled again (our president)
That's why there's fluxbox
Is eyecandy really necessary?
Depends on the person. Some people like beauty, some people like function, some people (such as myself) like both.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
You're right. There must be a way to disable stupid stuff. I remember back in 386 days that I hated the paper-flying-animation when I first saw it.
But you can have good eyecandy, that is useful, and without switching OS versions. One thing doesn't have to come with the other...
As an example, take a look at Enlightenment DR17. It is beautiful, and it is getting pretty functional. I show it off to clueless people, and they drool all over. And it is very practical and useful already, in fact it feels a lot natural to use, specially in big resolutions. Eye candy does not get in my way. I love it and it is my primary desktop environment now.
find -name "*base*" -exec chown us {} \; ; ln -s
The average user is finally learning to care about security features, but the user can't *see* them. We're used to being able to see upgrades to things we purchase, we can see the trip computer in the new car I bought. But with software, if it looks the same, the customer is going to perceive it as being the same.
It would appear that eye candy is a necessity, but only with the idea that there are different levels of eye candy, that the eye candy can easily be made to go away/less sweetening, and that it will work well with an average hardware base.
/.er might be, there is something to be said about design and usability. How else would you explain the popularity of the iPod? Otherwise we'd all be driving one of these around.
That last idea would be the difficult to figure out. However, how much is decided by the user when they see screenshots, what is the coolness factor when icons appear to be crystal/brushed aluminum/iridecent blue/etc? How great is it when windows will shuffle like pages in a book, or are transparent?
No matter how pragmatic the average
Of course my latest and greatest hardware is circa 2001, I don't know what people consider hardware hogs to be. I can still run BF2 on my PIII 1.4.
The graphics for Mine Sweeper haven't been updated in years.
First, let's all just admit that out GPUs are sitting mostly idle 96% of the time. This is not simply a question of CPU cycles anymore, like it used to be.
Second, lets admit that when you refer to 'eye candy', you are framing the quesiton as a perjorative. It strongly implies that what you are talking about has already been judged as useless decoration.
Good design follows function, as the saying goes. Examples of "good" eye candy - the Dock in OS X's genie effect. Its fast, it tells you where your minimized document is living, and it can be turned off (to straight scaling). Nothing wrong with this at all. Where developers go wrong is usually in two areas. One, developers are not designers. Developers write code, and should not attempt serious design, any more than the Photoshop and Illustrator jockeys should attempt C++. Second, picking an appropriate bit of eye candy should always follow an already identified need. This is the form-follows-function. Animation always draws the eye, it should not be misused to redirect your attention where it is not needed. Here's a great example: pull-down menus in Mac OS X vs the same in Windows XP. On the Mac, pulldowns appear instantly, and fade away once something is selected; this is correct behaviour, as you asked for a menu - there should be no delay. Fading away is fine because the selection has been made, and you have moved on. In XP, the menus fade up, and vanish instantly - totally backwards. That is bad eye candy.
In the end it is always a question of design. Eye candy by itself is nothing, no value judgement can be rendered.. it is the application. So the way this article is framed is mostly useless for purposes of deciding when and where to employ such effects.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
But the Windows users do not have this luxury. For example, a person using Windows 2000 will be forced to buy a copy of Vista if he needs the added security and extra features like better search. And to install Vista on his computer, he will most certainly have to embark on a spending spree to upgrade his PC to accomodate the extra special effects that are integrated into the OS. The alternative being to keep on using the same old OS with reduced features and dwindling security updates.
No, no no and, no.
You just use the "classic" theme or whatever or turn off window effects.
But if you do have a fancy bit of kit, then you can turn it all on so you get to use that kit, all the time, not just in your game...
i beleive "eyecandy" refers to the useless effects, as, its candy for your eyes, and candy is not useful to a healthy diet. On the other hand, some foods are both good for you, and taste great, but i dont have much of a sweet tooth, so i dont know about others.
:(
:( Sorry everyone, i should probably delete this...
Its true some effects are nice, personally i perfer a elegent destkop, but speed and function are my primary concerns, so i have to use a ugly desktop, because all the elegent ones have no function i need, and are to power hungry. (example: i have to use worker as my file manager, its functional and speedy, but down right ugly), shame theres no better file managers that can open files based on their type (worker is very good at this, which is why i have to use it, i dont have the time to assign extentions to thousands of files just so other file managers can get off with being unfunctional). Altho, wmii is a very elegent window manager, if you dont want to waste time managing windows (which i dont), so there are some elegent and functional projects out there, i just wish they would all use the same toolkit, so they could all look the same
owe, poor me, i ranted
I say OS6 would be worlds faster than 10.4.5 if it could run on the same computer.
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
You say that, but I find it utterly frustrating to try to dabble with the Win32 command line as it is. Linux/Unix, on the other hand, I can move around in with ease.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
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 ;)
Menzoberranzan Networks
While I share some of the exasperation of the article's authors about the "need for speed" that Vista is requiring, at the same time, I recognize that this is nothing new or limited to Microsoft.
This has been a function of all operating systems that use a GUI. It's been that way since they started. OSS is no less guilty - look at the specs for running Gnome or KDE, and compare the recent releases with the earlier versions. Compare hardware specs between Mac OS versions. Windows versions. In each one, the need for "more & faster" is consistent.
I like a nice, straightforward UI too, but it's not just the "public" and "marketing" people who are demanding more eye candy. It's the people who develop them as well - just look at the various reviews, with the "ooh...shiny!" comments from various people even on this board. I've lost track of the number of times I've seen a complaint about the processor/graphics requirements answered here with "just upgrade" - for Linux users.
What about lack of choice? Well, this criticism would be valid, if Microsoft wasn't giving you the option to turn off the "Aqua" interface. Which it is. I can think of many points to slam MS about (and have), but that their newest OS needs a more powerful computer to run is unfortunately not one of them. It doesn't mean that I'm going to run out and buy it, or buy/build a new computer just to get it, but any computer I do build would be capable of running it anyways - as well as the newest version of KDE or Gnome or...
On my Pocket PC (iPAQ H2210, Windows Mobile 2003) the defaults both for window-open animation and cleartype are off. Turning on cleartype dramatically increased boot time, but on a 320x200 screen, it's pretty well mandatory. The window-open animation adds maybe a second of startup time to each application, maybe two - but it also lets me know when an application has launched, which is hugely useful since it's windows (even if it is CE) and it does things on its own schedule. And I haven't disabled the desktop backdrop, though it consumes crucial memory and makes desktop ("today") redraws slower, because it looks nice :)
So, even on my tiny little 400MHz/64MB RAM system, I have turned on all available eye candy, because I find it helpful and/or attractive. I turn off most of the crap in XP, because it is neither. On a mac, I'd want to leave it all on, because it's both...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Except he mentions XGL and AIGLX as doing the same thing in the article...
This is, I think, part of the industry's attempt to keep things new and indeed sell os's and hardware. 10 years ago, computers were really just getting going in the mainstream and people were buying and upgrading al the time. Great times for the hardware and software manufacturers. Even better with the Y2K panic. It made the dot.com boom. Now, computers in the home are commonplace, and really, for most people who just browse and do e-mail etc (not hard-core gamers and hobbyists), the computer matured as a product at about the 1.5GHz mark. Possibly earlier. Most people don't need more and the only way you can sell them more if you break their old stuff. Hence the dot.com bust.
They want and need more profit, and will do almost anything to do it. They want to avoid the perils of the mature product market where little distinguishes one product from another. Look at microwave ovens and lots of other products. several hundred bucks t start - 50 bucks now.
So you have Mac OSX visual enhancements, Aeroglass and extreme processor editions. These things really are the same thing car makers did in the 70's when the oil crisis eliminated real stock off-the-lot pavement rippers. A performance car from the factory then was mostly the same as the regular model, but festooned with garish decals and NACA ports that did nothing but look good. They billed these performance models.
The home computer has pretty much grown up and will likely stay this way until the real next big thing (whatever it may be). The only OS immune to this is Linux because it is not sold. On the commercial side of things, expect to see more and more of this, and expect to see hobbyists and gamers strips stuff out of their boxes much like a racer buys a car and starts ripping carpet, goo-gahs etc out of the thing. For now, this is the new world order.
"This article ponders over whether excess eye candy and special effects being incorporated on the desktop is a good trend after all?"
A great deal of us have been saying that working, being stable, secure and performing are much more important than a pretty interface for a very, very long time.
The first thing I do when I install any OS is to turn off all the unnecessary crap.
Computers are now consumer items and as such are designed with consumers in mind, not anal-retentive "efficiency is all" types.
For example, most people care how their cars look first, how they perform second. If you can mix both of these selling points then you have a market winner.
Same thing applies to computers and other tools - Take a stroll through a home improvement store and look at how much industrial design goes into power tools these days, looks sell and this author doesn't seem to get it. An electric drill doesn't have to be colorful and aerodynamic, but that's what sells.
People have graphical screen savers and desktop backgrounds because they enjoy the personal touch it gives their systems and eye candy effects are something that users simply enjoy. Call it beads and shiny baubles, but that's what consumers want.
While an efficient, well written application can have its own aesthetic value, one that combines those qualities with a visually pleasing and interactive front end will garner the most attention and desire from the end users.
Complaining that you can't do "productive work" because of some visual effect that might happen when you close a window or launch a program means that either your "productive work" is too boring to hold your attention, or maybe you have ADD or perhaps you need to disable that fireworks screensaver as a desktop background.
You could go always back to a CGA video card if the shiny bothers you so much.
Desktop eyecandy sells. Sure, UNIX made OS X interesting, but if it wasn't pretty, it would not have gotten the response it did.
I tend to like my OS to be as unobtrusive as possible. Many times, eye candy effects take the focus away from what I should be doing. Some examples:
Any flash sites where the site has a million animations and sounds for the menu but lacking a lot of content, or useful content. Next time, don't spend 4 hours tweaking the window-close animations and add a damn site map.
I really hope in the next version of Office they do a better job of organizing menus better. In my mind, there should only ever be one options or preferences button with everything branching out from that. I can't say how many times I've found a program that has "Setup" and "Options" and "Preferences" and "Settings" menus all doing the same type of thing but without any sense or order.
For all intents and purposes the first thing I do whenever I set-up a freshly formatted XP (after the initial updates) is to switch the window style back to Windows 2000 and earlier and get rid of most of the effects.
If I want to use my computer to go on Slashdot, I don't need a huge blue-and-orange UI to tell me, "WELCOME TO WINDOWS!" and then the browser saying "FIREFOX PRESENTS:". I want my attention focused on Slashdot, not anything else.
(BTW, I highly recommend Aaron Spuler's "Smoke" theme for Moz/Firefox - http://www.spuler.us/themes/smoke/).
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
I don't care about it all. I use the Classic interface in WinXP, with the Eggplant theme. It's the same desktop I've had since Win95 first came out. And I waited with XP until 2 years ago, when I got a new DELL Precision.
Man, those long-hairs in the 60's could delete information so much more efficiently. I'm totally jealous.
I am a Linux user myself at home, and trying to get it worked into the corporate strategy, but I can guarantee you that they weren't "more productive" when each application required reconfiguring for specific hardware, you had slower communications, and no graphical capabilities. No GUI is great for filling out forms with text, but for other office-style tasks, it's much harder for the average user.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
"Tis better to remain silent and appear stupid than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."
I know, I've read on several sites now that the fanciest of the UI effects will only be available if the machine meets the requirements, and that the effects and general UI look and feel has many many steps down it can take in the event that the hardware of the current machine doesnt meet the specifications needed.
Chances are the server OS is based on most of the same technologies, would these people assume that you need a GeForce 7800 GTX in your server just because it runs Vista Server?
I can see it now, a Terminal Server with a Athlon FX-60, 500 gig hard drive, SLI GeForce 7800 GTX's...
Come on you GUI Nazi's get over it, technology evolves, plain moves to pretty, it's been happening for decades now. If your hardware doesn't support it, make it look like windows 95 (or redhat 6 if that floats your boat instead). Not everybody uses their computer with bread and water type work nessesity only. Some of us are into computers because we're enthusiasts, and we like to have lots of UI candy, and we don't give a shit if it takes 24 pixel pipelines to get there, cause we've got em.
Isnt is funny how the people who want and will enjoy a fancy accelerated UI are the same people who will have hardware to run it, and all the folks bashing it and saying it't not nessesary are the ones that are going to get the "windows is laughing at you message" during install that probably will verbatim say ""Microsoft Windows has detected that you are using a legacy video accelerator device. Enhanced display options will not be available at this time.""
Queue the Simpsons bully laugh "Haa-ha!"
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
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'm so surprised that nobody suggested that the REAL desktop eyecandy can be found at http://www.nudeunion.com/
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
Never forget: 2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2.
Eyecandy is not necessary. If you don't need the fancy GUI that will hold your hand for you, install WindowMaker on a 1GHz Celeron or something cheap like that and be very happy.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
...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!
I have two coworkers who did not know didly about the Mac, and yet bought one because thy were wowed by the eye candy in the store.(not for apps or security)
So the eye candy is not just needed to sell faster hardware, it is needed to compete with other OS's.
If I show someone a normal KDE desktop, the response is "ya whatever", if I show them 3d accelerated bouncing stuff with transperancy they start asking questions about what it is and where they can get it. The candy sells.
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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With that being said, I'd like to mirror what others are saying in stating that eye candy is a good thing ONLY if it is functional. Case in point: the compiz "cube" effect. Basically this relays a sense of space between your four user desktops. Whereas most casual users wont even utilize them, the cube effect makes it easy for even the most novice of user to understand the concept of having four desktops.
If you are not familiar with compiz or Xgl, check out this video I found on google
The submitter should realize that one only has to ponder over the idea of something done in excess being good or bad for a short while before they realize what the word 'excess' means.
I use fvwm2 or e17 depending on my mood, my fvwm config uses barely any resources it is very very quick and responsive but at the same time it looks attractive, on occasion I feel like a little more eye candy and at that time I switch to e17 sometimes eye candy makes work easier especially if you are doing something boring at those times a little eye candy lightens the day.
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He does show a bias towards Linux, though. He also ignores the reports that you can disable all the eye candy in Vista and will be able to run it that way on current entry-level video cards.
Linux offers choice in GUIs, but so will Vista (as did XP). What would be really slick is a single, consistent GUI that doesn't remind one of Windows 3.1 or Fisher Price but still runs smoothly, auto-downsizing effects if the system can't handle it. OS X has that, I question whether any OS will ever achieve that though.
mmmmm xgl has the sweetest eyecandy :p~~
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You've got to be kidding, right? The "Search" tool in Windows has been broken since Windows NT 4, being unable to find anything in Unicode text files just ANSI text files. If you want to search Unicode files you've got to open a command prompt and use "find" or "findstr" - I doubt they'll fix this in Vista.
Try this:
Which files did it find? Only the ANSI and UTF-8 ones. :( The UTF-8 only worked because you used ANSI characters to type "hello world".
Yep. The fact that debian, as a successful non-commercial distro, as taken a different approach, where you can just update rather than installing this mythical "new operating system" that companies like MS call the upgrade from 95-98 or 2000-XP is evidence of the BS going on. In Debian, the releases are essentially just a distributable snapshot on physical media, for people who can't stay up to date in other ways.
That model of having an OS and then upgrading to a "different" OS won't last, I suspect.
More relevantly though... I also wonder about this whole upgrade to have modern graphics thing. If you think about it, computer games have been doing highly interactive and smoothly animated graphics for years, with quick response times. Now, we're pushing the envelope a bit, with scalable graphics and higher resolutions and multitasking etc., but I still think a lot could be achieved with older hardware if an effort was made. Sadly, on Linux and other Free desktops, we're still waiting for manufacturers to do the right thing and support their hardware with documentation or at least decent closed, ported, and supported drivers.
Im on my compter to get "work" done - not to have my hard drive spining for the sole perpose of entertainment. And further more, what's with all these special effects in movies these days - i mean - come on - does this really add to the story. sheeeeesh - I wish everything could be as cool as DOS.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
but sometimes a little desktop redux is needed.
I use WMII at work and love how little I touch the mouse. keyboard driven window manager. Nice!
But then I like vim. Notepad users need not apply...
Adding an image. Perhaps even an image that tells me something about the contents of the window could be considered eyecandy OR and extra clue. Was it gnome that colored the entire desktop red if you ran as root? Eyecandy or vital visual feedback?
Stricly speaking everything not in X is eyecandy. Run solaris on a xerox printer machine and you will get the bare basics of a window manager and yes it does everything it needs to but gee gods it is hard on the eyes.
So where do you draw the line?
Personally I liked Enlightenment but now run XFCE4 wich suggests that while I like a pretty picture I don't want it to get in the way of business. KDE 3.* is nice and all but gee gods it loves the animations. Gnome is too inflexible for me.
Give me candy but don't slow me down. No animations. INSTANT popups/slides/whatever.
Then again I do usually have gkrellm open. Lots of flashy blinky shiny thingys. But they don't slow me down and while they are eyecandy also tell me someting about my computer. Since I am on old hardware wich I tend to try to do things it isn't designed for I "use" the gkrellm eyecandy to tell me if I can expect a freeze to happen or when gentoos emerge is about to fill its HD space again.
So usefull eyecandy?
As for pure eyecandy effects like the holy grail of true transparancy. Well. My terminals are semi transparant and I would have it anyother way as I think (just my opinion) that it is easier on the eyes then a monochrome background. True transparancy would perhaps look even nicer and if it was as smooth as a FPS then all the better.
Yes off course it doesn't really matter and I would hardly use a bad terminal emulator over a good one just for the sake of transparancy BUT if two terms are equal is the one that lets you choose your type of background better?
Is the windows manager that then allows your term emulator to offer you transparancy then better for it? Etc all the way down to the kernel.
I personally don't like eyecandy that steals window space OR takes time but I do like eyecandy that makes the desktop less endless grey slabs of unused space.
Should the OS/window manager developers care about eyecandy? Well that is the beauty of OSS isn't it? Use pure X if you hate all eyecandy or use any of the window managers if you want more.
A bit of sugar makes the medicine go down. Yes the medicine still needs to be good but sugar helps.
Will windows new 3d desktop rendering be a good or a bad thing? Well, there was a recent discussion about offloading physics in games onto the gpu. That would help run the game a lot faster. Ages ago, long before GPU's, some video cards started offering windows acceleration wich supposedly helped offload some of the desktop rendering from the CPU onto the vidcard.
It makes sense in a way. If you can save the CPU a boring task then it can spend its cycles on more meaningfull things. I do know for a fact that a true dual CPU machine has a lot less waiting for redraws then a single cpu machine. Would a single CPU machine with GPU desktop rendering be just as responsive? Surely that can't be bad.
In a way I don't see the problem that the author has with it. Sure sure, windows users who want vista "security" (see a few articles below about IE7 for vista and how secure it is) need to upgrade and pay for the eyecandy but that is MS business model. They got more money some some countries so it works. Anyway I am fairly sure MS allows people to turn off all the candy they don't want.
Ultimately the candy has little to do with the underlying OS. How a widget is drawn has
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You know, I was just speaking about a similar issue to my friends... graphics in gaming. I remember the good old days when story lines mattered. Now, it seems everything is OpenGL and fancy-pantsy. Like, sure your graphics are greaaaat. But if the story sucks, I drop the game quickly. It's the same for OS. If an OS is hardcore graphics, they're just feeding into the "you need to upgrade" click. It's really crazy. My 0.02$ anyway, LiNUxG0d
My mom's 6-year-old iMac came with OS 9.whatever installed. Upgrading to OSX actually INCREASED system speed a great deal (not to mention vastly improving security and stability).
If OSX is ramping up system specs, it's doing it at such a slow rate that very few users should realistically be affected. I expect my mom's hard drives to fail before she's forced to upgrade the system to meet OS requirements.
You can turn a lot of that off; play around with the Dock (and vaarious other) settings in System Preferences. Personally I like the "Genie Effect," but I can certainly see where not everyone would.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
XP has eye candy? Where at?
There's one thing in Gnome that's just eye candy for some people, but usefull to me. I've got my mouse configured so that if I tap the control key, a little box spins around the mouse pointer. I use a trackball sitting on my knee. Not only don't I have room for a mouse, I have a shoulder problem and this is more comfortable. Once in a while, of course, the trackball drops on the floor and when I pick it up, it can be hard to see where it's pointing, so this can be quite convenient. I've never seen this in Windows, although it'd be easy to implement. Maybe there's just not enough people out there that could take advantage of it?
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What is Vista if NOT Eye Candy???
... what will Vista give me that XP doesn't?
... what actual features of interest will be in Vista?
I mean, it sounds like they're removing most of the features from it. Except for suddenly requiring a new video card/high-end system
The only real features I remember hearing about are the new eye candy and the fact that IE will be separable from the OS. I can't for the life of me imagine why I'd be motivated to upgrade.
I'm asking for real, not trolling
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I would but I can't shop photos or model solids in DOS...
Collector's Edition
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.
If the freakin system still performs underneath.... I get so many complaints from windows users(yeah, helldesk here on a mixed platform) that windows has locked up while opening another window/file! It froze when I was trying to save! We never hear from the apple users that they experience these problems... even on a FULL windoze server infra-destructure.
Sig Hansen?
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?
Some people like beauty, some people like function
What's the difference?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
* CPU: x86-compatible 32-bit or x64-compatible 64-bit microprocessor(s) (Dual Core systems will be supported)
* Motherboard: ACPI-compatible firmware is required.
* Memory: At least 512 megabytes (Encouraged to use ECC memory [2])
* Graphics Card: A DirectX 9-compatible GPU that is capable of supporting Windows Vista Display Driver Model (WVDDM) (only needed for aero glass) and has 64 megabytes of VRAM
* Hard Drive space: At least 1.5 gigabytes for installation files, possibly more, depending on the version of Windows Vista
And under graphics requirements for 'Classic Windows' mode:
* Does not use the new Desktop Compositing Engine; Flip 3D, live window previews, and tearing-free window dragging are therefore not supported.
* Requires Windows XP Display Driver Model (XPDM) or WVDDM drivers.
* Graphics card requirements are the same as Windows 2000.
* An option for corporate deployments and upgrades.
so yes, I expect Vista to run in classic windows mode on a 1ghz AMD w/ a GForce 5600 graphics card. It won't be blazing fast, but it should run basic apps (office/web browser/email) with out a problem.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
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.
.TIFF icon files.
Boy ain't that the truth. When I was running OS X 10.1, I disabled text anti-aliasing and menu translucency using 3rd party software. The file manager worked nearly twice as fast on my Dual 800Mhz G4 PowerMac.
On my G5 it makes no noticable difference. I only wish I could use that old OS 9 Geneva font, as Lucida looks like crap without AA.
I still prefer to minimize the prettiness of OS X, usually to make windows I'm working in more high contrast and easier to find using peripheral vision (Three monitor setup on my G5).
OS X's file manager still isn't as snappy as OS 9's. Even on the G5, I still miss the speed I got from OS 9 on my four-years-young Dual 800, even though 9 didn't have DP support in the OS. Personally, I blame the
It's all a balance though, without comparatively huge-ass icons and fonts, I couldn't see a thing on my two 1280x960 20" CRTs. Even with all the crap I put in my dock, the icons are still more than 32x32 pixels (OS 9's icon size max limit).
Latewire
I think most developers *should* learn about design (actually, layout is probably a more accurate description in this context, but whatever). I think Photoshop and Illustrator jockeys should take an opportunity to learn how to program (C++ or any other).
The acquisition of knowledge should never be discouraged.
On the other hand, just as a Photoshop guru should not assume that s/he knows best with regard to algorithm analysis, a programmer should not automatically assume that their strengths extend into other non-related fields. To put it bluntly, just because you know the API to GTK+ doesn't mean you are a good UI engineer.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
the users are taken for a ride by the OS companies
Note the use of the plural. This is incorrect. Only Microsoft is demanding the expensive video card upgrade cycle. As demonstrated by the iBook and Mini lines, even eye candy rich Mac OS X can happily get by with a low end video card (it's not the size of your card, son, it's how you use it). And despite the demands of pimply newbies fresh from Microsoft-land, the next releases of KDE and GNOME will only need basic 3D video even with all the new eyecandy turned on.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I dont know about you, but my laptop's battery life drops drasticly when the GPU is used, plus the CPU runs at 600 mhz all the time. So I seriously doubt a laptop will run vista good on battery power. But plug it in? Blazing.
First, this article is a little misinformed. His obvious reference to Vista does not reflect the fact that there will be 3 home versions and one will come without Aero for people with systems that are underpar. However, that version should have all the sercurity and search enhancements. Now, OS X has been using eye-candy for years with minimal system specs. I had bouncing icons, expose, and genie effect running on a 6 year old Powerbook. So, it isn't the resource hog as he paints it. Apples use of eye-candy at the very least has function. Bouncing icons may seem silly but it lets me know that the computer is responding to my request I can stop clicking. Expose is pure genius for window management and is necessary to quickly navigate with a small display. I am not so sure about the hit games either. Games take over the screen so I am pretty sure that the gpu is not rendering the OS but focusing on the game. Memory may be tied up some but it so cheap these days that adding more won't break the bank.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Last time I was on windows (a year ago, or so), I had it set up for "ctrl" to make a circle go around the mouse (in and out), it should be in mouse settings somewhere.
I don't preview or spellcheck.
Personally I prefer my OS to spin and flash so much that its just one step below making me hurl and only three below giving me a seizure.
----
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The reason you got such a performance jump when you installed a fresh copy of Win2k is just because it was a FRESH copy. God know what adware, spyware, random driver programs and other sh|t was running in the background that you had accumulated over the months/years. Do a fresh XP install, do latest security patches, and turn off all crappy third party programs that auto start at windows boot (like the uber super mega helper 5 driver progs for your printer and super mega awesome adobe acrobat 7 suite, etc), (and maybe disable that sh|tty default theme and go for the normal look) and tell me u dont get same benefit.
Chums up, let's do this!
What's the difference?
Example of function: having sex
Example of beauty: supermodel
Example of both: having sex with supermodel
Some people like function, some people like beauty and some people like both.
And how many times a day to you type and retype pwd to see where you are or hostname to figure out what machine you are on or id to figure out who you are?
Personally, I have the eyecandy of a prompt that looks like: $HOSTNAME:$PWD and I have a terminal title of $USER@$HOSTNAME:$PWD and for certain commands, I show the commandline in the window (vi Makefile, for example).
This extra eyecandy allows me to select which window I want when I have tons open. I can cut and paste the $HOSTNAME:$PWD into another shell and scp files to and from there.
I'm very nervous when I see people with dumb shells that don't even do tab completion or when they refuse to put the PWD somewhere in their environment. Feedback is a good thing.
Oh, but the power users that don't put any useful information in their prompts or terminal titles do go out of their way to display a running count of the number of times they pressed the enter key. That has always baffled me, and is a sign of weakness in my opinion.
It's an unnecessary drain on resources, but the kids love it.
Especially freaking animated dinosaur mouse-pointers.
M$ make people buy through their own children.
The cads!
Really? What version? I've never run across it before, but haven't tried every version. (I've never worked on XP, but I have supported it by phone.)
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I'm sure at one point a couple people claimed that windowed systems were 'eyecandy'. People often don't take other people into account when designing programs and operating systems: we like simplicity, we like beauty and we like intuitiveness. What's wrong with embracing these desires? Besides, most operating systems (including Vista) can downgrade to less intense graphics. The choice is there, so what's the problem?
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
Ratpoison.
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.
Right-click My Computer > Properties > Advanced > Performance Settings > Adjust for Best Performance. That gets rid of all the marshmallowy colours, fades, translucencies, and so on. Just my personal preference. Keep it configurable. Some people like the whiz bang effects (or more subtle ones) in their everyday computing, and that's fine as long as I'm not forced to endure it.
~~~
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Why do people always try to improve (eyecandy, functionality, ease-of-use) the desktop but never the applications? Most of the time, anyone sitting in front of a computer looks at an application but almost never at the desktop. Writing this I currently look at a browser, the desktop is barely visible. Even if I want to find something on the disk I look at a filer window. So wouldn't it make much more sense to improve the applications instead of the desktop?
h ttp://tango-project.org/>) improve the eyecandy of the applications? Or why doesn't any application project try to better comply to wyoGuide (ahref=http://wyoguide.sf.net/rel=url2html-1700htt p://wyoguide.sf.net/>)? Why doesn't any of the companies currently improving the desktop instead improve the applications?
You might argue each application has to be improved by itself since each has it's on functionality. Yes, this is true for the functionality but it's not true for the eyecandy and the ease-of-use. So why doesn't the Tango project (ahref=http://tango-project.org/rel=url2html-1700
O. Wyss
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
err :P
:)
you could just have modded me funny.
----nubis
If you think about it, everything is focusing far more on graphics and eyecandy than ever before. Films concentrate less on plot and just go for over-the-top special effects, even everyday objects go for looks over useability. People seem to be so obsessed with something looking nice that they don't think to find out if it's actually any good or not.
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
Regarding matters of taste, to each his own. I use and feel comfortable with both OS X and a Debian box running Fluxbox.
After all, I am strangely colored.
I agree, people will always differing opinions on form vs. function, though I suspect that debates on the subject are about as useful as arguing over the question, "Which internal organ is more important -- the heart or the brain?" My view is that technology is at its best when it looks nice *and* kicks ass.
Interestingly, the ancient Greeks had the same idea when they used the word "techne" -- the root for "technology" -- to mean "making of". The word applied to both art and craft; there was no distinction in their worldview. So, if you were going to make a vase, you would be sure to give it a nice shape and decorate it; if you were sculpting a statue, you might turn it into a support column for a building, etc. Thus, form and function belonged together in everything they made.
"All hands, BRACE FOR IMPACT!"
A lot of what people call "Eye Candy" in XGL, are actual usability improvements. For example:
The cube. While the fastest way to switch virtual desktops is to hide all the current windows and show the windows in the other virtual desktop, the feedback is so little that to the new user it looks like the applications crashed. Rotating a cube makes it really obvious that your windows are still alive but just in another place. And makes it obvious how to get them back (rotate the cube the oposite way)
Drop shadows. Allows the borders to be smaller, and thus increase usable space, while still mantaining a visual clue as to the limits of the window. It also helps the brain identify what window is on top.
Animated minimization. The fastest way to minimize a window is to just hide it. However, visually it looks virtually identical to closing the window. By shrinking the window smoothly into the task bar, it is obvious the relationship between the minimized task bar icon and the window and it lets your brain quickly identify where the window went.
Expose like feature. This one is really obvious, it helps you find windows very quickly, by picture, not by just the text in the task bar.
Some of it though is hard to justify, for example there is no apparent usability improvement from the wiggly windows (someone please correct me), but given that is completelly optional, and it can be done by the video card withought really affecting the CPU, I fail to see the harm of it.
The balance provided in Linux goes far beyond the choice of theme suggested in the article.
The power to choose your own window manager means that these new features aren't a problem at all.
The window manager ecosystem goes far beyond Gnome and KDE battle, and while I was rather impressed by the demo last night of how the latest gnome looked with custom icons and XGL fancyness they aren't features that I find useful and simply aren't features that I would use. That doesn't mean that their existance hurts me, any more than the existance of KDE hurts Gnome.
Freshmeat lists 132 different window managers ranging from the Gnome and KDE environments to the distractingly pretty Enlightenment, Blackbox and all it's forks and the very basic window managers like Ion which is where by preference lies.
I hate to nitpick, but it's not the bloat of modern PCs, it's the bloat of modern OS' Until you've got an OS on the computer, what is there to bloat?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Windows XP didn't do that and that is wrong.
And a P-III 500MHz was definatly not high-end when XP came out... Everyone was running P-IVs by then.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Here at the office, I would have switched everything over to Linux ages ago if it weren't for the idiot management we have. So we're still a Windows shop on the desktop (servers are Linux and FreeBSD), but when I install that clunky software, I put the theme on Windows Classic, turn off all effects, tell it NOT to display icons in all possible colors, and even make it so the title bars in Windows Classic are a solid fill rather than a gradient. But I go even further. I go into the registry and set the menu delay to 0, so that there is no delay between highlighting a menu item with the mouse and having the submenu appear. There are dozens and dozens of these things that I do when setting up a computer, and I've noticed that not only does it make the computer faster in terms of using less resources, but things like the menu delay make the computer "feel" faster even if it really isn't.
Windows is a piece of garbage, though.
My idea of a good desktop interface is one that doesn't slow me down. There are two kinds of eye candy, static and dynamic. Static eye candy in the form of a visually appealing interface that is simple, elegant, and ergonomic is good. Dynamic eye candy in the form of visual effects tend to be bad.
Bad Eye candy:
Example 1, fading menus: The default configuration of Windows XP features menus that fade in and out. Right click on the desktop of a fresh install of XP and you'll see what I mean. This is bad. Why? Because the rendering that is being done takes TIME. It slows down the user who has to wait for it to render. Admittedly it is only a few tenths of a second, but when you're a grand master hacker (!cracker) a few tenths of a second do make a difference. I always turn this 'feature' off.
Example 2, window animation: Gnome has a very annoying "feature" where it animates the resizing of windows. Minimize a window and gnome draws a series of progressively smaller outline boxes on the screen tracing the minimization of the window. I'm not sure what use this is supposed to be. I do know that it slows me down. When I do something it should be as instantaneous as possible. KDE has the same "feature" but unlike Gnome it can be disabled. There are problems that I have with Gnome and the inability to turn off the bothersome BS (of which this is but one example) is a big one.
Good Eye Candy:
Example 1, Bouncing icons: Recent versions of KDE include what I call icon bouncing. When you double click on an icon to open a file or start a program, a miniaturized bouncing version of that icon appears next to the mouse pointer. The reason that this is not bad is because if I've double clicked on something I expect for there to be a lag while the program or file opens. The bouncing cursor does not slow me down. The reason it is good is because it lets me know that the program or file is actually trying to open. There are times when you double click on something and it doesn't quite register that you've done so. Without the bouncing cursor you might sit there for several seconds waiting for something to happen before realizing that it isn't going to. With the bouncing cursor you know immediately whether or not the system has registered your request or not.
Example 2, Icon highlighting: Both Gnome and KDE feature icon highlighting. Whenever the mouse pointer is over an icon, it changes color. This is not bad because it does not slow you down. It is good because it gives that extra little bit of feeback to the user and creates a more interactive environment.
In short user interfaces should be as efficient as they possibly can be. Eye candy that increases efficiency or improves aesthetics without reducing efficiency are good. Eye candy that reduces efficiency is bad, even if it arguably makes the interface more aesthetically pleasing.
Now I realize that some people demand special effects and other such things. There is no reason why they cannot be accommodated. But at the same time the user MUST be able to turn any and all effects OFF. Furthremore I would argue that there should be a simple configuration tool that will provide both fine grained control of the effects as well as a set of general effects level settings (max, medium, low, off) to allow users to quickly set the level of eye candy they have to endure.
I understand that Microsoft is adding in all sorts of eye candy to vista and that this is the primary reason why they recommend you have a Nvidia 12800^e24 super ninja turbo card with vertex dimpling and pixel shader 15 to run it. I have not seen vista yet, but I suspect that this is a grave mistake and that most experienced users will turn most or all of these new fangled 'features' OFF. I know I will.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
The problem is that for most users the Aero Glass interface IS Vista. Look at XP. How many users do you know that would balk at running XP in W2k mode? My wife does. For her it is not really XP if it does not look like XP. You can bet your bottom dollar that Microsoft is going to market the heck out of Vista WITH Aero Glass. Thus, most consumers will not be happy unless they can get teh Aero look too.
In the end, it all means that many users will once again have to upgrade their hardware in order to upgrade their software.
Simple....people are attracted to bright shiny objects...kind of like crows that collect tin foil, and bits of glass. We are easily amused
I believe that option's been available since Win95. Just go to the mouse settings in the control panel, and (in XP) go to the "Pointer Options" tab. The very last option is "Show location of pointer when I press the CTRL key".
The poster is under the false impression that (in this case) microsoft is trying to provide a better operating environment for users and not trying to
a) make money by selling their OS
b) make money by selling hardware and therefor selling their OS
Linux and non-commercial varients are at least not making money, but unfortunately a lot of times they are just keeping up with the commercial OSs to not be left behind and "look old".
"But were they designer frames? You know, Armani?"
"No, uh, Jaguar." They're pretty cool frames, even as a fashion-challenged geek I think they're pretty impressive, but they're not hoity-toity designer ones.
To her, she'd rather forego all the free insurance money and pay an extra $400 to go to the store that carries the right frames, but doesn't take our insurance.
To some people, there is no function, only form.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
Particular offenders of the eye-candy explosion would be Vista and Novells XGL implementation, which both simply have effects for 'fun' and very little functional value, and in Vista's case very-little cosmetic improvement too. (E.g. a white-blended & blurred window border provides an exceptionally bad bedding for the program's title text. So bad that they give it a white-glow to counter it. However this eye-candy further deteriorates the legibility as it interrupts the "white space" around the text, which is how we read words instead of letter-by-letter.
I think the real reason why MS have seemingly spent all their time updating the look of windows is because it implies a perceived change to the average user. With all the features they have dropped out of it since it's original plans back in "Longhorn" days, it's now merely XP with a few bells+whistles and a different GUI. I personally feel that the MS team should take what they already have and make it better, instead of re-inventing their GUI-elements every few years. Afterall, between 95, 2000, XP and Vista(coming in 200x). The only major user interface differences are what images/effects are behind buttons/start bar/etc. Since 95, the start bar (and most dialogues) has remained pretty much the same, still over-abbreviating program titles, but now SHINY and over-abbreviating program titles. The tray is completely useless now, as every program wants a tray icon, so they aren't that quick to access anymore.
I could go on all day about this. What I'm particularly surprised about is that Microsoft spend a lot of money on user interface R&D, however they don't seem to get anywhere with their designs, and they come out of the company excessively flawed (from a design perspective and a users perspective.) It seems they are still the understand why using a "grid" is a good idea. (not the math grid, the design grid.)
If this article flames you up, go right ahead and abuse me :) I'm not a particular mac-fan boy, I just like any company that chooses progress for the consumer over just making a heap of cash.
...you shouldn't have to pay for these upgrades.
Microsoft released things like Windows 98 Second Edition, and realized that people didn't want to pay for an "upgrade" that was merely a bugfix. So now, they continue fixing bugs, but if they're selling an "upgrade", they'll make damned sure it looks like an upgrade.
My Linux hasn't visibly changed over four years and two computers. And yet, there's a lot different under the hood, and I appreciate my constant updates. And yet, I don't think I'd pay hard-earned money for said updates, if nothing was visibly different on the surface.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The blog poster in question is perhaps the type of person to think, "Blast! What are those extra pixels around my aliasing!?" However s/he has a point, because although people can disable the eye candy, there is a distinct psychological incentive to use the smoother, more technically advanced interface.
But eye candy has other, more harmful effects as well: one of the most notable is accessibility problems. You see, where experienced computer users like you and me see clearly defined windows, newbies see a perplexing maze of ever-changing L shapes and rectangles. With the boundaries between windows becoming transparent, that thin blue line between the elderly and a vertical learning curve becomes just that narrower.
Also, the disadvantage of eye candy is that it highlights areas where Microsoft UI programmers have really messed up. Notepad flickering in the Aero Glass interface: not pretty.
The article doesn't actually mention Windows Vista in it, but feels like a silent jab at it anyways. I remember the transition from windows 95 to windows 2000... Back then I though the fading effect of the menues or dropdowns after you's selected an item on them was "eye candy" and at first it was distracting, but now its a natural part of the interface. It didn't improve functionality at all but they're no longer distracting. I think the transition to a 3d desktop will be the same. It'll be distracting at first as 'eye candy' but you'll either get used to it, or disdable it. But perhaps this article should have brought up other merits that should have been offered as a true reason to upgrade OSes. Perhaps time and effort should have gone into developing the interface more rather than making it look nicer with 3d. I'm ever always in search of ways to enhance my interaction with my computer. Mouse gestures and voice recognition are some that I have tried. But how much of those were actually part of the OS? I feel most of the improvements to interacting with my computer has happened through the peripherals, more buttons that are assigned commands to close program, scroll, alt-tab... the list goes on. What I wish for is easier use of the interface. The corners of the desktop are easiest to navigate to, make them useful, I used to put a small icon in the corner so i could blindly mouse to a corner and open it. Where are these kinds of improvements? Not in the OS, though they should be.
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.
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.
Windows XP is really a bitch for this. I dual-boot Linux and XP on a pretty new, low-end laptop. Linux fscks up sometimes, and doesn't always open applications fast, but it's responsive.
XP leaves me hanging on for literally seconds after i right-click, waiting for the menu to open. This is really annoying, because: I'm right in the middle of doing something that I right-clicked for and have to hold the thought, and I can't do anything else in that time, otherwise if I click anywhere else, the menu will (eventually) just open and close again straight away. The Start and Programs menus are the same, and take even longer sometimes.
I don't find Windows to be a bad OS in general, if you can keep it secure, but this is just one of many small things that are incredible bone-headed and frustrating, without which I would never take the trouble to use an alternative OS most of the time.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
The current version of Enlightenment is Developers' Release 16. The next version is DR17. The Enlightenment dev team is apparently claiming that their software is in the alpha stage.
Even if you don't take that into consideration, consider this: DR16 was released six years ago. I personally expect Enlightenment DR17 to be officially released around 2008, or perhaps late 2007.
Why should everyone need a gig of ram, to run the same word processor, email client and web browser they did on Win98 with 64M? Okay, we didn't have Firefox back then ;) and the word processor is probably a newer, more bloated version..
But it's clear that people are getting nowhere near as much bang for their buck.
The software companies are in league with the hardware manufacturers. They all want us to upgrade everything on a 3-year cycle. It's not 1992 anymore. New uses for the higher-powered technology are not being explored every day. It's just a big scam.
Unless you're a gamer or use specific processor-intensive workstation apps most of the time, a six or seven year old computer would meet most anyone's needs with well designed, well supported software.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
rm -f a*.wibble or del a*.wib if you like - painful on a desktop given the ease of a command line.
No, it's trivial. Perhaps *marginally* longer, depending on your proficiency.
There are a few things commandlines do substantially better than GUIs. Most of them, very few people will ever do.
I think that eye candy such as the genie effect in OS X that actually allows one to see where the window minimizes to is useful, but when there are effects that don't help the user interact with the metaphor then they are just waste.
One such piece of eye candy that comes to mind is the way that KDE tool tips sparkle into view, if they just appeared it would allow the user to save a second.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
It looks like you, and probably most people, will benefit more from SVG and sleeker artwork than any effects.
Windows would be much prettier if it had a native, supported theme system (and changing colors doesn't count). You know, like just about every other window system available.
M$ is to make a scaling OS?!! Here I was, reading all of these big fat hardware requirements for Vista but they were all lies. Lies, I tell you! Thanks so much for putting me back in touch with reality.
So, Vista will run on my 233 Pentium II laptop? Will it look as good as Enlightenment? Somehow, I don't think so and there is your problem.
As the original poster said, moderation is good. The results can be beautiful without hogging resources.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Working as a designer, I actually spend a significant amount of my time creating what I guess you would call static eye candy. Part of my job is to make applications (in my case web apps) not just usable but pleasant. At every step of the game, I'm conscious of where I'm diverting the attention of the user and how I'm spending their time. Simple visual effects like an item fading into view or sliding into position can help maintain a kind of continuity in an interface and improve—even if it's on a subconscious level—the user's ability to follow and comprehend the actions of the workings lying beneath that interface. I personally doubt the usefulness of something like a full-3D desktop where you can rotate windows and move them around in more than 2 dimensions, but at the same time Apple's Expose feature in OS X is eye candy, but extremely useful eye candy. I use it nearly constantly.
As users become more sophisticated and, more importantly, the applications they use become more complicated, some little graphical niceties are becoming more and more necessary. Think of something as simple as live window dragging. If you want a purely functional interface, go with the command line; it's faster for a lot of day-to-day OS tasks anyway.
While I agree with you about Vista's borders (I don't like them either), I don't think it's as bad as you make out. I don't have any issue reading the titles. The white glow provides contrast against the background.
Also, very little has actually been chopped out of Vista. Really only WinFS, and arguably Monad (it was never really all that solidly a feature of Vista to begin with). Indigo, Avalon, and a whole host of other stuff will be there when it ships, though it apparently won't be installed by default. This was apparently a concession to those that don't want to use those frameworks and want the OS to be just the OS. Also, seperating the frameworks from the OS made it possible to develop for both XP and Vista. WinFX is still very much alive and kicking.
Vista really is a lot more than just XP SP3. There's certainly a lot more new than there was between NT4 and 2000. Hell there's more new than there was between NT4 and XP.
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As a gamer and amateur game developer, it's to my advantage that MS has moved in this direction. This may put pressure on the PC retail industry to stop using shitty integrated graphics for game developers and the PC game industry to deal with. From: http://www.firingsquad.com/features/epic_games_rei n_interview/
FiringSquad: What is Epic's feeling about PC game hardware and how will the Unreal engine be part of that?
Mark Rein: I wish I could report only good news but that's not the case. [...] Unfortunately the bad side is getting really bad. It is getting harder and harder for the average consumer to buy a computer with a decent graphics chips in it. When I go to major electronics retailers I see that most of the machines being sold are using Intel Integrated graphics - including the vast majority of laptops. Some of the desktop machines don't even have slots for discrete graphics cards which I find personally offensive. Laptops of course are mostly not upgradable so a bad laptop is a bad laptop forever and considering how many people are replacing desktop with laptops this is especially worrisome. It is really sad when you see the moniker "media" or "entertainment" attached to something with Intel Integrated graphics in it. I question the logic of developing dual-core CPUs and saddling them with ultra-low-end graphics especially considering that one of the big benefits of Windows Vista will be a hugely improved graphical user interface that will help improve productivity. There are some seriously expensive desktops and laptops with crappy graphics chips in them - these aren't just the low-priced machines either. Intel salespeople are probably patting themselves on the back for these design wins but the truth is the more successful they are with this strategy the faster they could be killing off the PC games market and nobody has the balls to stand up and cry foul because Intel is so powerful.
If people take those machines home and try to play recent PC games on them they're going to have a horrible experience and possibly give up on PC gaming altogether. Users aren't educated in this area but when their new $1,500 PC says "no" to a decent PC game they're going to just assume the PC games market had passed them by. This is sad because the difference in cost the PC manufacturer to put in a decent graphics chip isn't very much.
Thanks! If and when I ever use XP, I'll remember that. I just checked and it's not available in 98SE.
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I remember it was in Win95. Do you have a accessibilities menu somewhere? Look there.
I'm virtuallly certain that that feature does not just appear on any version of Windows. It's not on 2000 here, and when I set up my Dad's PC with XP, once I had installed the crap that came with the cordless MS mouse and keyboard the option appeared.
Car analogies break down.
I actually liked DOS. But it's a little hard to find modern apps for it.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
The 3D windows in the Vista screenshots are about as useful as a subway in Los Angeles. I weep at the wasted resources spent on both.
Over 90% of the computers out today are an appliance. Who wants a sexy appliance?
No, wait, I didn't just ask that, did I?
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
It's not in Mouse, Tweak or Accesability under Win98SE. Maybe you mouse had a custom driver that included it? Thanx anyway.
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That explains it. I use a Logitech tracball and have never needed to install the Gateswear drivers.
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For those of us who aren't homosexual graphic designers from San Francisco^W^W^W^W^W^W Mac users, could you explain what this "Genie effect" is?
All this eye candy....
A dozen years ago, a friend of mine who was a long-time mainframe systems programmer, told me that not i/o, but in straight CPU power, a 33MHz 386 had the processing power that an IBM 370/168, which most companies ran on in the late seventies.
Instead, we have friggin' eye candy that makes our xGHz 686 run like an 8088, or an 286, if we're *lucky*.
Yeah, you're doin' *so* much more with your computer power.
mark
Enjoy!
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Ever heard of history substitution, quite useful to now what number your command prompt is.
I had a cheap Logitech Laser mouse at the time (still have it).
I don't preview or spellcheck.
So, I'm going to hit the new interface with some patience and learned wisdom before I trash it.
An excellent goal to live one's life by. Just as an FYI, my rant was written from a unique point of view: I have worked with test builds of vista, and I didn't find the new effects to be particularly performance enchancing. The hardware for vista is STEEP. Now, the question is, are the severe system requirements due to the fact that there was debug code in the build, other features were sucking up resources, or because the pretty interface takes a lot of cpu power.
If you can get past the OS sucking the life out of your cpu, the interface looks pretty...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!