Look versus feel:
The "look" of the system is that it's out of the 90's (which it is)
It may be an ugly interface by todays standard (lickable icons in mac),
however even if you look at windows 10, you will still see elements this OS
has, in their flat interface
be it scrollbars that are gone or not, most of your ideas won't be able to
be implemented until we have 2d acceleration (let alone 3d accelerated)...
The "feel" of the system is that it's from today
If you haven't used this system you wouldn't understand, it was the first
OS I was ever comfortable running 20+ windows in at the same time
Mac has the dock, which has no consistency, they have a separator for
applications versus folders, versus running apps, versus minimized windows,
clicking on finder rarely does what you want it to do, beautiful design, I
use it every day, but just a mess.
The Haiku deskbar is one of the best implementations of multiple windows
I've ever worked with and it was designed 20 years ago, it can be improved,
however most people don't know what direction to go because it's a very
good design, very hard to improve upon.
I'm not the best at mockups (seriously, mspaint or blurred wunderbrush
stuff), so most of my stuff on the haiku forums doesn't look very good
(this probably never helped my case). It is fully explained why I want it
done in a particular way. I generally have 10-20 minutes a day to work on
anything anymore, so I've fallen behind the times with haiku and my two
versions of the GE deskbar (the windows 7 clone I came up with in 2005, and
the Be, Inc VS apple version), doesn't look like I'll have time to work on
it this year or the next, hopefully it'll be shortly before R1 and I can
start showing what's possible without adding weight to the system.
UX people are an interesting breed, quite a few of them think they are the
best designers in the world, most of them have never even tried to use
their interface, I run across it all the time between phones, apps, games,
car based navigation systems, infotainment systems, set top boxes, ancient
hardware such as the VCR (heck, microwave) clock, etc ad nausium. they
also come up with some really excellent ideas that once you add enough
stuff to the mix it crawls to a stop (look at most PHP based CRMs), or
stuff that is absolutely brilliant, yet poorly optimized (Palm WebOS). I
can come up with hundreds of ideas that should be in the existing systems
we use, but for some reason we just don't want to program in because it's
hard, or because it will just make the system crawl to a stop as soon as we
put in 20 windows.
If we are to make this happen, we need a lot more information, this really
sounds like a good GE idea. If you want to still work with us, we need to
begin with the end in mind, and not something half cocked. The discussion
of what needs to be done is already underway, so take the criticism, or
show us why it's better on your side.
-alphaseinor
