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An Ode To Skulpture
jrepin writes with an excerpt from an an article at OSNews musing on the virtues of those "ugly" old interfaces that were common before Apple's Aqua drove everyone to use visual gloss for its own sake: "Thom Holwerda tends to believe that the best interfaces have already been made. Behaviourally, CDE is the best and most consistent interface ever made. It looked like ass, but it always did exactly as you told it to, and it never did anything unexpected. When it comes to looks, however, the gold standard comes from an entirely different corner — Apple's Platinum and QNX's PhotonUI. Between all the transparency, flat-because-it's-hip, and stitched leather violence of the past few years, one specific KDE theme stood alone in bringing the best of '90s UI design into the 21st century, and updating it to give everything else a run for its money. This is an ode to Christoph Feck's Skulpture."
Consistently awful. Being bad every time is still bad.
Nobody pines for "good ol CDE".
Some guy found a KDE theme he really liked.
Nope, still butt-ugly. It's a matter of taste, agreed, but those KDE fonts... man, they suck. ...And what's with the constant battleship-grey?
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against eye-candy, and I enjoyed using Gnome 3 for a while (believe it or not), but once the newness wore off I found that I really just want something clean and easy on the eyes with few distractions. I ended up switching to XFCE due to Gnome 3's reliance on hardware acceleration and the problems it has with AMD hardware, and really liked the xfce-basic theme. As a bonus, the xfce GTK+ theme engine is extremely fast and makes all my GTK+ apps feel snappy (well, the GTK+2 ones, GTK+3 rewrote their rendering stuff and is slow as hell even on my Intel Core i7 CPU)
People learn to work with new things even if it takes some effort.
Are we measuring the nanoseconds that users are wasting? Or worried about our grandparents? They can adapt too.
All these UI discussions seem more about people trying to impose their preferences on other people than anything remotely rational.
none
CDE is the best and most consistent interface ever made.
OMFG! For about half a second, I thought you were serious, then I recalled clearly my student years were learning *nix was so much more easy with the CLI than with the plain mess that was CDE...
Video of some good progressive thrash music
One geek explores his nostalgia for old user interfaces the rest of us hated with a single screenshot retrospective of one in particular.
>Between all the transparency, flat-because-it's-hip, and stitched leather violence of the past few years
Violence? I get the feeling that this was written by someone who's never taken even a severe beating.
I always thought KDE in general looked like crap; and adding K at the front of all their apps seemed more lame and ridiculous than Apple's iWhoring...
-SaNo
"looks like ass, but..."
Usability is something that really gets short shrift from artists, designers, coders and engineers. In fact, it is often met with hostility and direct resistance.
There are so many elements involved in a truly usable interface. "Doing what I expect" is one. "Giving me exactly the correct information" is another, as is "appropriate and timely feedback."
However, aesthetics also play a huge role in a usable interface. It needs to look usable. Maybe not "attractive," but a button needs to look like something that you WANT to click.
I grew up on CLI. Since I've been doing software development since the early 1980s, I have used some of the scariest CLIs ever made (Is a hex keypad a "CLI"?).
These days, I greatly prefer a GUI. I often need to go into the CLI on a system to do stuff, but prefer to stay out of it.
I have designed skeuomorphic UX (I'm actually a fairly decent graphic designer, so I could make stuff look quite "real"), then trashed that for flat, and am basically settling into a "middle ground," where elements of 3D are used, but sparingly. I have found that performance is also a usability coefficient. When you have big-ass 24-bit PNG images, the software spends a great deal more time tossing stuff around in memory and/or disk. That can slow things down.
I'd like to see everyone agree that GUI and UX is every bit as important as the engine that drives it.
I don't think we're there yet. I suspect this comment thread will bear that out.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
-H. L. Mencken
C'mon, debating CDE vs. KDE vs. Photon has nothing to do with UI design and everything to do with being a skin/theme OCD.
Is this how low we have gotten on Slashdot?
2013 - the year I left.
UI design evolved as the resources justifiably allocated to it multiplied. Transparency requires CPU power, something a ways more scarce on a PII than an i7. A modern AJAX enabled website can spin a 90s computer for a least a little while CPU-wise before loading. For nostalgia though... I remember the icons being a little bit more pixelated in the older Linux GUIs.
And... anybody looking for a similar thing to do with their windows when turning off aero isn't ghetto enough, deviantart has some "classic classic" themes you can try.
Who would have thought that windows 95 interface is so great
It *was* consistent.... Consistently a PITA
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I have been an official Apple Developer for ages.
When Mac OS X was still in development, they gave us pre-release builds.
These did not use the Aqua interface. They basically used the original OS 9 interface.
These prerelease builds were REALLY FAST.
Then, we got the official Aqua release at the WWDC.
The OS had slowed right back down to OS 9 speeds.
Since the original Aqua, Apple has been steadily draining out the eye candy, and moving towards a simpler interface.
The irony is that the hardware can now support eye candy.
This is now the #1 contender for 2013's understatement of the year.
The saddest part of this whole story to me is the screenshot itself. I'm looking at it on a 10-year-old IBM ThinkPad T42, and there's considerable blank space in my browser window both above and below that screen image, plus my browser's title bar, menu, location bar, bookmark bar, my gadgets at the top of the screen, and my bar thingy at the bottom of my screen... The ancient screen is 1050 pixels high; the screenshot is768 pixels. Modern laptop displays are missing a quarter of their vertical pixels! Why did people ever stoop to buying this crap? Nobody sells any laptop with anything close to the 10 year old standard in vertical pixels in any reasonable price range these days.
I guess it matters more now than ever how good a UI is, because it has to work in such tight vertical spaces -- rather like a coal miner. With so many other aspects (pun intended) of computers improving year after year, this one thing -- vertical pixels -- seems to have taken a turn for the utterly stupid. It makes me sad.
Things a windowing UI should do:
Conserve screen pixels:
no start/home bar - let me bring up common apps or shell via a right click (hello, TWM and brethren)
thin window borders
small but simple icons for close/minimize/maximize
NEVER FUCKING STEAL FOCUS
Things your windowing UI should NOT do:
be a web browser
manage my printers or wireless network interfaces
act as a filesystem
block when 1 app wedges
We don't need brushed metal, transparencies, cube-shaped 3d representations of your windows, wiggly xterms, just give me a palette to work with and GO AWAY.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.