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."

Comments

I'm all for it...

[Megaweapon]

...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.

All Candy is Fine - In Moderation

[kannibal_klown]

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).

Not a developer then..

[onion2k]

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.

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 .. 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.

And further to that .. I *like* swooshy effects. I'm a PHP developer. I need cheering up. ;)

Disagree

[GeorgeMcBay]

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.

Author doesn't know what he is talking about

[RingDev]

"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

Re:Necessary?

[TrappedByMyself]

Is eyecandy really necessary?

Depends on the person. Some people like beauty, some people like function, some people (such as myself) like both.

Re:Don't underestimate the value of feedback

[crabpeople]

"it is obvious to the user whether they are taking the right actions or not. For example, when a program crashes in OS X there is a spinning beachball.."

Of course that means a program crashed, its like word association. Beach ball - ball park - giant hotdogs - thirst - cold beer - expensive ballpark beer - beer empty - gag at refill price - hotdogs stuck in throat - call ambulance - hospital room visit - wheeled into ER on crash cart

see its completely intuative