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."

Comments

TL;DR Version

[Anonymous Coward]

Some guy found a KDE theme he really liked.

CLI vs GUI

[ios and web coder]

"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.