On Sun, Nov 1, 2009 at 7:09 PM, Nicholas Blachford <nicholas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > A connected issue to this is the aesthetics (i.e. beauty) of the system: > A colleague of mine downloaded Haiku and tried it out. He played around > with it a bit but one of the reasons he didn't like it was the fact it > looked "very 90s". BTW he's about as technical a person as you're likely to > find anywhere. I have heard this comment before, but what I would like to know is what exactly is so 90s about the Haiku GUI? Also what makes Mac OS X Snow Leopard or Windows 7 so "2000s" in their GUIs? Excessive and gratuitous use of alpha blending? I find the Vista/7 "blurry transparent" window borders ("Aero Glass") about as stupid and gratuitous as you can get, though the Mac OS X menu bar and Dock are a close second. Maybe it is the "shiny" buttons? How long will it take before those are considered as ugly and dated as the original Mac OS X interface? Remember the pinstripes? Ugh!!! Ubuntu doesn't use much of that crap (to their credit) and because of that I don't see how Ubuntu looks any more "modern" than Haiku. On the other hand I do like some curves here and there, and would like at least the option of some window transparency (without getting stupid about it.) Shadows are also nice. But the point is, a GUI's looks are extremely subjective, and most recent efforts to "modernize" GUIs have been kind of stupid and have resulted in some really bad user interfaces. If Haiku should copy anything it should copy some of the modern smart phone GUIs, which look nice without getting stupid and inefficient about it (because they have to be efficient on a phone.) > However, unfortunately I have to agree, I find the look ugly and worse: > antiquated. Haiku may be nice and new underneath but the look is like a > trip back to 1998 for me. I've always figured it'll eventually be brought > up to date at some point. I guess it's probably an R2 thing though. Well the Haiku GUI has been updated in several ways, both beyond what it was earlier in the project and of course compared to BeOS. I still think a few things could be updated (I don't like the scrollbars much) but I don't think it is as dated as some people think. > It very fashionable in technical circles to try and ignore aesthetics and > concentrate purely on functionality, however to do this is to ignore the > face we are all human beings and as such we are visually orientated > creatures. Aesthetics matter. Aesthetics do matter, and I think it is very unfair to people like Stephan and myself who have done various work on Haiku's aesthetics (him much more than me) to assume no thought has been put into Haiku's aesthetics. As one example I think our icons are quite beautiful without getting into the huge, inefficient and somewhat ridiculous pseudo-photorealistic icons used on some other systems. Our fonts look nice and are rendered in a way unique to Haiku, blending the best of both worlds in having sharp straight lines but anti-aliased curves. Gradients are used in several places without getting gratuitous. > Sorry about the length of this, but it hit a nerve. I liked BeOS because it > was advanced, I'm horrified at the thought that Haiku could ignore all the > advances in GUIs in the last decade and become yet another retro OS. Please enumerate the advances in GUIs in the last decade that you think Haiku lacks. I'll give you my list: - Non-rectangular windows. Used correctly I think these can be nice. They can also be abused (see past versions of Windows Media Player.) Having some curved corners here and there (maybe on windows, the Deskbar and the Twitcher) would be nice and would fit in well with some of "organic" themes represented by Haiku's leaf logo. - The option for transparency. I think the Apple Cmd-Tab window is a nice use of transparency, as well as the overlays for volume changes, contrast changes and Spaces changes. On the other hand the transparent menu bar and Dock are dumb and hurt usability. - Shadows. These help the top level window stand out and make it easier to find the mouse cursor. We at least have a subtle shadow on the Haiku mouse cursor, but not on windows yet. - Tasteful animations. The lack of at least a window hiding animation is indeed a problem. Of course using the power of the video card to do all the above efficiently goes without saying. Most other stuff is just trivial eye candy (such as "shiny" buttons or whatever.) And don't get me started on some of the crap that comes with Linux's Compiz and Beryl (a workspace cube, "burning" windows, wobbly windows and other stupid adolescent crap.) Though I will admit the latest Ubuntu and Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu) have used Compiz fairly tastefully. And the more I look at it the more I think Windows 7 and Vista are just freaking ugly and hard on the eyes. I mean look at this crap (posted earlier in this thread): http://www.activewin.com/winvista/images/Windows%20Explorer%20-%20Preview%20Pane.png And other people have complained about the various gross inconsistencies in Vista (which I'm sure 7 continues to some extent.) -- Regards, Ryan