Slashdot Mirror
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.
One geek explores his nostalgia for old user interfaces the rest of us hated with a single screenshot retrospective of one in particular.
"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
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.
Someone once experimented with something else than battleship grey. For some reason it didn't catch on.
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.
Someone else did too... but it also didn't catch on (maybe because it didn't ship as a standard feature).
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Right, because Windows 8's new UI is so wonderful and revolutionary that people are trampling themselves trying to buy new devices that use it.
Oh wait...
The UI *is* important. In fact, it's *critically* important, because that is the face of the device you interact with. So much of new technology is different only for the sake of being different, and provide absolutely nothing of value that technology of yesteryear didn't already have.
The iPad practically invented an entire new market segment, despite the entire PC industry trying to do so for decades. Why? Because they made a UI that was both attractive AND intuitive to use.
No UI will perfectly suit everyone. It needs to compliment both the device and the users intended use of said device. Microsoft is discovering that the hard way with their idiotic push to Metro.
There will always be vociferous arguments about UI, because UI is so important that it can make or break a product.
That being said, a lot of the current UI problems are because developers are look at tablets, seeing that people really like the simplified interfaces, and decide that they should do the same thing on PCs, despite the fact that the use cases for the devices are very much different. So now, and unsurprisingly, people are starting to clamor for the UIs of old, when you could still do stuff without the UI trying it's best to hobble you. Hence mass abandonment of Gnome, and articles such as this talking about old and fugly, but otherwise useful, window manager skins.
and adding K at the front of all their apps seemed more lame and ridiculous than Apple's iWhoring...
Why? It followed the older tradidion of X programs having an x in front of their name, like xterm, xcalc, xbiff, xedit, xlogo, etc.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
CDE was pretty dated in 2000.
In 1994, the choices were some MacOS, Windows 3.11 for workgroups, IRIX and CDE. By the standards of the day, Motif with its 3D chiselled look was actually quite nice. IRIX was cooler though.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I don't know how to explain. Slashdot fonts: good. Skulpture screenshots fonts: bad. I am looking at this screenshot: http://skulpture.maxiom.de/images/skulpture-sample-2.png - observe how the "d" has a small protrusion at top, the "p" has a small protrusion at the bottom, etc. Each letter looks crappy, there's a tiny bit of extra information in each letter. Overall, it annoys me.
Take this screenshot: http://skulpture.maxiom.de/images/skulpture-newcheck.png - kerning is messed up. Hint: look at "Text Edit" and "tri-state".
This screenshot: http://skulpture.maxiom.de/images/skulpture-beton-1.png - bold + shadow + heavy text = ugly.
Et caetera.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)