There have been various posts about UI and UX design in Haiku over the years, I
wanted to briefly reflect on them.
"Haiku isn't touch friendly"
In the Windows 8 + Gnome 3 wave of "touch screens are the future" it was
brought up in several threads that Haiku's interface needed to be redesigned to
work with touch screens. "The mouse is dead" was a common phrase.
Looking back, the mouse really never died. Users rejected Windows 8 and its
touch centered views. While using a touchscreen for every task sounded
futuristic and exciting, the fad quickly started to die off once users started
doing real work and realized that it just didn't mesh with any real-world
workflow. Touch screens are extremely task focused, and when you begin
performing more than two or three tasks at a time the mouse just can't be beat.
"Stack and tile is a hack"
Looking over the mailing list, there was some push-back to stack and tile as
a fad / hack that no-one would use.
In retrospect, I think Stack and tile is the complete opposite and introduces
an ideal way to get new UX features into Haiku. Instead of introducing radical
changes and forcing them on everyone (Gnome 3 + KDE 4 are good examples of
this), slowly adding features that end users don't notice until they need /
want them is the perfect introduction of new UX. If you hate stack and tile,
simply do nothing and ignore it. If you love it, use it when you need it.
While I think Haiku could use some UI / UX consistency cleanup, the BeOS GUI is
still effective and functional to this day. Personal bias aside, I still find
Haiku to be one of the more sane desktop environments in my daily workflow.
Things are sorted, organized, functional, and exact.
I do feel there are improvements that can be made. Metakey application search /
execution is something I've found *extremely* handy in Gnome and Unity. Once
you work it into your daily workflow, clicking through menus feels slow and
tedious when you already know what you want to run. Metakey application search
within the Deskbar might be one of those nice Stack and tile like changes that
we could "sneak in". Like it? Use it. Don't? You don't even have to know it
exists.
All this comes from me looking at Apples latest mistakes in this iOS 9 article:
http://cheerfulsw.com/2015/destroying-apples-legacy/
Good stuff.
-- Alex
