I’ve been thinking (not that I do that often), and next year, 2020, happens to be the 25th anniversary of the first release of BeOS, DR1, released on October 1995.
So it would be nice to “do something special” to commemorate such an important date in computing history, and the history of Haiku.
Microsoft just provided a Microsoft 1.0 app (first Windows issue) for its 1980s anniversary - to give users a retro desktop look & feel to Windows 10.
Since Haiku has already got the original desktop look & feel, it would be good if it could provide an option of an ultra-modern desktop look & feel. Something like the Poem / Falling Leaves project had. This would show people that Haiku is working towards becoming a modern OS - and not always looking to stay with tradition. Afterall, there are few developers who would want to contribute to a traditional system - they would more likely want to contribute to a modern system.
If someone wants to contribute a “modern” look (whatever that means), have fun doing it. We enabled support for theming recently and here is what we got:
A theme that looks even more like BeOS R5 than what we already have
A theme that looks like Windows 7
A theme that looks like Windows XP
A theme that looks like Windows 3.11
A theme that looks like CDE
Clearly there is much more motivation in making things look even more dated
Personally I’m very happy with the existing look and feel and do not plan to work on major changes.
No it doesn’t. It’s reasonably similar, but it’s not the same. The pre-AA/PR1 releases Desktop experience was quite different, and back int he DR1 days, it was a lot more like the Pre-PPC/BeBoxen builds.
I gotta admit this is so true! I’ve been doing research into the graphical interface of BeOS – and have been finding things I never knew, like that it had a dock at one point! Too bad the only versions I can actually run (since BeOS doesn’t support G3 or higher on the PowerPC side) are R3 and higher.
Yes, that’s the one! Closest I can get to it are old screenshots on the Web or setting the Deskbar like that in Haiku. Stuff like that was pretty cool; really showed how the UI in BeOS evolved over the years.
I like the look, especially the way that I can ALWAYS see the full name of any icon. In Windows, you can’t see this even with with the icon spacing at 100px vertically and horizontally. In windows 10, I can’t even find the icon spacing option anymore - it was under “personalization” in W7/W8.
Let’s keep it this way - function over form, and progressive changes - rather than each new version having the options in a different place. Otherwise, we should all go back to the CLI, because there everything is always findable.
I long thought it’d be nice to have an indirection in BDeskbar, like, to have it use the preferred app for a suite mime type instead of Deskbar’s own, so one could easily replace Deskbar with another app.
Or a theme that looks like Windows 95/NT4.0,and the one that looks like Windows Vista,another that looks like win3.x under 16 colors and the one that with a modern flat design?I think those are all nice to fit such a BeOS-based OS!