2009/11/10 Ryan Leavengood <leavengood@xxxxxxxxx> > Now with all that said, I just really like the square close button. It > is just one of those pieces of BeOS that gives me a nice feeling > inside. Obviously that isn't exactly logical or good interface design, > but I think that still has some bearing on these sorts of decisions. > Based on Meanwhile's email, he feels similarly. I imagine we aren't > alone. > Hey and what about my "tingly feeling" remark? Doesn't anybody read my emails? :-P Ryan's remark was very striking to me. I thought it over today and thought: We must not get too overzealous at adapting to customs and "standard" practices. This will put off or even alienate current users, while causing new users to consider it "just a clone" of any popular OS. Like it or not, but there *is* a legacy. And for a change, "legacy" is not a four-letter word. Legacy is user expectations. The trick is to find the right balance between adaptation versus alienation. Yes, we surely CAN afford making some changes. Of course we can; I think we even should and must! Still, we have an obligation to check this with (representatives of) the BeOS community at large to see what they think about our ideas. The general Haiku mailing list (as Humdinger proposed) is the primary channel to get an opportunity to have others fire away at the designs. But does the list also have a sufficient amount of "common users" that don't do any development but just "use" the system? Eddy P.s.: actually we go beyond brainstorming. Brainstorming is purely spilling ideas and indexing them, without critique, as that would inhibit the human mind's creative divergent thinking patterns. We definitely are prototyping here, coming up with ideas, rating and discussing them, and reiterating toward a better prototype.