Haiku Re-imagined

21

I took the Designs down because it felt to some “insulting” so I didn’t want to harm further.

Boy, I love criticism and debate of ideas but when it goes down to trash talk and insults, I’m out.

The designs are available and ready to keep iterating.

The premise is to take that multitasking force and focus it on a single goal. Out-of-this world performance. To the user it could still feel like is real background multitasking, noticing way more battery life and easy to use OS.

For example:

If I could run on Haiku “Photoshop CS6” (made for Haiku) under this philosophy of “single-tasking” on a 5 year old Macbook that app (Photoshop in this case) becomes the OS, making this app or any particular app extremely powerful on a desktop, more powerful than any other OS running with the same hardware.

Another example would be a DJ app, thats the whole OS for that user, and the list of possible example goes on, (I would love to keep listing :D)

Like in consoles, the games are the “OS”, making the performance better than PC. ( the PC would have to have at lest 5 times more powerful hardware to run the same game) To me this is absurd, and Haiku could take advantage of it, by resolving this issue on general pursues use.

Following your metaphor I would say that home-use multitasking could be like adding horse power and being able to handle more horses at the same time, but there’s always a limit of speed here and when you add more horses to your wagon, you actually are gonna go slower because they all are going to be pulling in different directions.

Single-tasking could be like a rocket launch, all the power focused on a single task, taking you faster than ever before, and to places you’ve never been before.

Another metaphor would be:

Can you drive a car a cook at the same time? You could but you’re gonna be doing both halfway and struggling.
If you have a problem in your eye, do you go to the veterary ? Or the specialist ?

The way I see it is Haiku could transform in what ever that is you’re running. The app becomes the brain; the OS becomes the nervous system. ( Haiku NS) haha :slight_smile:

Maybe we could see a new kind of powerful desktop apps? maybe.

Your kind of inputs are the ones I love to receive and handle.

Cheers

22

[quote=foobear]Common, taking down your concept after a day because of a few critical comments? What did you have in mind, when coming here and showing Haiku users your radical re-imagination and asking for feedback? Seems you are not used to criticism. I don’t think Edison would have succeeded if he was as thin-skinned as you.

It’s not that Haiku users are unwilling to experiment (I assume, because of the advances that are already in Haiku over BeOS), it’s just that you fail to explain how your design is any better than the many others who drop by from time to time and present something “radically new” that’s really just “radiaclly dumbed down”. Try to keep in mind that Haiku is not trying to be just another Hipster touch-and-smear OS, but a heritage to a classic, “real”, and powerful desktop OS. Taking multi tasking out of that equation is like taking the motor from a motorbike. What you get is a bycicle that’s too heavy to pedal … and has no pedals.

Anyways, although I’m in favor of the majority of the other opinions here, I would have liked to see your design. After all Edison didn’t succeed by stopping to try after the first failure.[/quote]

Great inputs, the first iteration are back up, should I make a disclaimer to people about keeping it cool and relaxed ? haha! :stuck_out_tongue:

23

Thanks for rethinking and letting the rest of us in on your ideas.

I seriously think that the open source communities need a lot more professionals from other fields than software engineering. This not only includes UX and UI designers, but also writers, artists, musicians and a lot more.

I mostly like the easy-on-the-eyes look of your mockups, although the background you have chosen is a bit too depressing for my taste.

That being said, I think that it is really something I would expect on a tablet or other small screen device, but not on a desktop computer. You probably need to rethink who your audience is here. Interface designers need to understand that desktop computers are not bigger tablets. “Dumbed down” --or downscaled, as you call it-- interfaces are not some holy grail. They are a compromise to the small screens of mobile computers and their lack of room for traditional input devices. For example that lock screen switch widget doesn’t work at all on desktops. We here in our oldschool keyboard-and-mouse-world use passwords for that. Full screen apps are an inconvenient waste of screen real estate on big screens.

Another thing … the graphic you posted clearly states that UX designers like yourself should focus on the human side while mostly forgetting about technical details. Yet you only justify your concept with things like an internal push service, minimizing CPU cycles, improving battery life through some “cryogenic mode”, fast bootup, etc. These are implementation details, better left to software and hardware developers, because to be totally honest --and please don’t take that as an insult-- you seem to not have a clue of what you’re talking about there.

I like the idea of having a clean desktop that puts important information (i. e. Emails, but not Netflix ads) at my fingertips. Doing away with files is a foolish thing to do, though. Files are the virtual representation for things, works. A text file is like a screenplay that is laying on your desk in the form of dead wood. Saying apps own the files, means the books in that IKEA Billy behind you belong to the printer they came out of. Users need to be able to access their files any way they want and see fit. I want to be able to put books that I currently read on my desktop.

So if you are willing to take my advice, think about the needs of desktop users, take the current Haiku user experience, and start iterating from there instead of starting on a blank canvas.

One last thing … I beg to differ that desktop computers are dying just because sales are down. They will not die, just as workstations didn’t die at the advent of desktops and mainframes didn’t disappear when microcomputers got in the market.

24

[quote=foobear]Thanks for rethinking and letting the rest of us in on your ideas.

I seriously think that the open source communities need a lot more professionals from other fields than software engineering. This not only includes UX and UI designers, but also writers, artists, musicians and a lot more.

I mostly like the easy-on-the-eyes look of your mockups, although the background you have chosen is a bit too depressing for my taste.

That being said, I think that it is really something I would expect on a tablet or other small screen device, but not on a desktop computer. You probably need to rethink who your audience is here. Interface designers need to understand that desktop computers are not bigger tablets. “Dumbed down” --or downscaled, as you call it-- interfaces are not some holy grail. They are a compromise to the small screens of mobile computers and their lack of room for traditional input devices. For example that lock screen switch widget doesn’t work at all on desktops. We here in our oldschool keyboard-and-mouse-world use passwords for that. Full screen apps are an inconvenient waste of screen real estate on big screens.

Another thing … the graphic you posted clearly states that UX designers like yourself should focus on the human side while mostly forgetting about technical details. Yet you only justify your concept with things like an internal push service, minimizing CPU cycles, improving battery life through some “cryogenic mode”, fast bootup, etc. These are implementation details, better left to software and hardware developers, because to be totally honest --and please don’t take that as an insult-- you seem to not have a clue of what you’re talking about there.

I like the idea of having a clean desktop that puts important information (i. e. Emails, but not Netflix ads) at my fingertips. Doing away with files is a foolish thing to do, though. Files are the virtual representation for things, works. A text file is like a screenplay that is laying on your desk in the form of dead wood. Saying apps own the files, means the books in that IKEA Billy behind you belong to the printer they came out of. Users need to be able to access their files any way they want and see fit. I want to be able to put books that I currently read on my desktop.

So if you are willing to take my advice, think about the needs of desktop users, take the current Haiku user experience, and start iterating from there instead of starting on a blank canvas.

One last thing … I beg to differ that desktop computers are dying just because sales are down. They will not die, just as workstations didn’t die at the advent of desktops and mainframes didn’t disappear when microcomputers got in the market.[/quote]

First of they disappeared from the mainstream, and when that happens they are like pandas just a few in the world.
Riskikg the fate of the Mammoth.

But what I’m saying is disappearing as home-use technology. Like a walkman.

I’ll be willing to keep iterating if they premises are met. If not there wouldn’t be a point for me because I just don’t want to make a theme. Just by changing the looks.

—Resolutions
What you are seeing here is just the minimum scale for the OS. if you have a larger screen it will be responsive to that screen.

( a good example of responsive design : www.hbo.com I hate the implementation technology they use but you will get the point)

You can upscale it to whatever resolution you have and see more content according to the size you have.

– File system
What I mean by apps owning files is that you open the app and there are your files to read and write and organize them - and not laying around in random places random folders.

For example on a Mac, iTunes owns your music, iPhoto owns your photos. This have been proof it’s success with the users.

They just need to open the app and there are their files.

Same thing happens to google docs, or emails for that matter, do you want to put your emails all over the place ? No, because all your emails are in one place you don’t need to browse your computer to find emails you just need to open your email app, and organize all that content via that app.

What I’m proposing is to do the same thing but adding a crucial difference, the apps that can read the files have the access to the organization and library of their kind of files.

This also helps in app collaboration for example on iLife apps, like GarageBand, on a click of a button I have quick access to all my iTunes Library, to my music organization to help me make music. I don’t need to browse all my computer to find that mp3 I’m looking for.

But it doesn’t have access to change that organization, have access to change their multi-track projects their own kind of files (which I said previously all the apps that can handle those files should be able to modify the organization of that file-format (.mp3, .aff .wav .etc library)

This is an example of what I’m saying. Does it help understanding it better? let me know

25

I don’t know about others’ views on this, but as I see it, Haiku wants to be a desktop OS, so it’s going with the panda, not caring where the “mainstream” goes. There’s a big enough market for desktop computers and workstations in the future. You know, like for all the people who do actual work with computers. Starting with software developers, 3D artists, movie and music makers, architects, people who use complex fluid simulations to make your sports car run faster and all the others I can’t even think of. They will continue to use those computers because they never can’t have enough RAM, computational power and big enough screens. The walkman hasn’t been superseded by less powerful devices, it has been rendered superfluous by devices which can play the same music in better quality and do a ton of other stuff while at it. The relation between tablets and desktops is not the same, you need to understand that.

I’m not quite sure you understand how open source communities function. Most of them are perfect examples for working meritocracies, meaning that in the end developers with write access to the source code and the skills to change it decide what the “product” is going to be like. Over here in this world you actually need to convince the nerds, the techies. Those people who write the software in their freetime because they like doing so and because they have their own idea, how such software is supposed to look like and behave. To do this you need to actually advance, you need to have real arguments. If that’s what you’re into, because you are looking for satisfaction through real achievement, you’re most probably welcome here. On the other hand, if you just want to push your idea, because as “Head of Product Development & Design” you think you know the one single truth about what’s good for other people’s hobby, than I highly doubt you’ll have fun around here. So it’s not about us wanting you to go on, it’s solely about you.

You keep repeating the same stuff over and over again, yet failing to describe what actual benefits Joe Desktop-PC-User gets from your design. What you describe, to me, sounds a lot like taking a bit Apple-ish totalitarism and wanting to push it onto a community that doesn’t want exactly that.

Did you even bother to try out Haiku and not just look at it for a few minutes, but really use it? I think, like so many before you, you’re trying to solve a problem, without the actual problem in sight.

Disclaimer: I am not a Haiku developer, although I do develop software for a living. I am merely a passive observer in this community, because I like BeOS and Haiku for what they are, and as a Linux user for many, many years I am increasingly disappointed where the UNIX desktops are going currently.

26

No insult is intended at all… your points would probably be quite valid were Haiku just another mobile OS. However it isn’t, its a Desktop OS that might see some mobile development at some point but will probably always have a desktop focus. If it did take on the UX you suggest there probably wouldn’t be any interest at all from former BeOS users it would have lost what it is. Now were you to focus your design efforts on the applications available to HAiku themselves you might be onto something. Because they kinda aren’t all that great exception being Document Viewer by Cipri which is a bit more modern (I’m still skeptical of hte ribbon interface but hey! I am willing to try new things if there is good reason to do so)

You may wonder why the bluntness… well there have been others that wanted about the same thing as you and those threads turned into multi page affairs all for nothing… basically page after page of “meh”. Some of the things you have suggested are ok… however not in the context you presented them. I imagine noone would object to being able to have a blingy loging screen if they could turn it off, or rouneded windows, and your desktop applets functionality wise might make decent replicants. But just about everyone here is going to take issue with forcing UI design down the end users throat. Especially things that change the overall workflow of the OS for instance single tasking… when the main point of the OS is to be able to run many applications at once. Do not that BeOS was designed explicitl you to have many small applications you could use together rather than single monolithic “feature” applications like you often see.

27

Amen.

28

I fail to explain or you fail to see it? Anyways we are not understanding each other so, let’s drop it. I’ll keep iterating ideas without Haiku in mind.

We have very different perspective so. Let’s leave it there.

Cheers.

29

Either you confuse having the whole screen and user focus to one app with having the whole hardware control, or you don’t understand how an app and the below software plateform (that thing called an operating system) work together to bring some user experience…

For a particular app to be come more powerful on a desktop than any other OS running on the same hardware, that particular app should be both an app and the OS, specialy tuned for its own and only it’s own needs.

Aka booting to an app.
Ironically, that was the UX in the early 80’.

Your metaphore is wrong because multitasking is and was never after adding more horse power but is after (time) sharing the available horse(s) to handle several wagons at the same times. It’s about parallelism, not raw performance.

That’s unfortunately a frequent mistake of people.

Sure. But only one single rocket will be fired at once. In a 3rd thermonuclear world war, being able to fire several at once could be more critical than the speed of each rocket.
Reactivity vs raw.

Not the same goal, not the same objective.

Sure.
But you can drive a car and listen to music, talk over phone (thanks to handsfree kit) and follow navigation system suggestions.
In fact, you surely do it yourself.

Why, when you can focus entirely on driving you car as fast as possible instead !?
Because sometimes even being fastest is not what you need. Sometimes, what you need is have some help to do several tasks at once.

Yes, like in actual, real life.

30

This design works well only when only one app knowns how to handle a kind of files. It’s not the case in reality: several apps knowns how to open a text file, an image file, a sound file.
In particular on desktop plateform, where both data files and apps can be in large numbers.

If you have ever tried to use BeOS or Haiku, you should know that it have several smart ways to handle files management :
1), the content is typed by content kind identification, not its name (which is used only in fallback mode).
2) each app publish which supertype/subtype they can handle.
3) On a simple mouse right-click on a file, you will have automatically listed the apps that can open it.
4) each app can also filter the open/save dialog panel to show only the type they supports
5) Live queries allow already to hide in which folder a file is located, making very easy to show user a list of image, text or whatever files, ready to be acted on.

Live queries exists on BeOS since… circa 1997?
One can make a live query for files of type “audio/*” and, ta-da, all you music files in one, single, live window.

Are you sure you’ve used BeOS/Haiku !?

31

To cale,

I saw your designs before you took them down and I thought that they looked pretty nice. However, they seemed to have a shallow relation with what Haiku currently is. You might have better luck if you were to label your design as something other than “Haiku”. We here have an idea in our heads about what Haiku is while you are presenting a radically different vision that seems to take little input from the current vision. Haiku is rooted in the Desktop metaphor, that is a big part of Haiku’s self-identity.

On the other side of the coin you may be right that the Desktop is going the way of the dinosaur and so it is wise to move the OS forward in a way that would cater to a mobile/touch friendly audience. To that end I have some questions for you.

What specifically about Haiku and it’s community makes you want to build your vision on top of it instead of using something based on Linux or to create an original OS?

What do you expect to be happen with your designs once they are completed, how will they be translated into a working OS and made available?

Would your design augment what is currently called Haiku or would it serve as a replacement?

What inputs are used, does it assume a touch screen? Does it assume a keyboard? Does it assume a mouse? What would the hardware your OS runs on look like?

What thoughts do you have about how applications are to be developed? What I mean by that is, on the Apple side Mac OS X is used to build iOS apps and on Android the development environment is Java-based and tries to fit into your existing Windows/Linux/Mac environment. The Apple way is more integrated while the Android side is cross-platform; however both piggy back off OS’s that are rooted in the Desktop metaphor like the current Haiku. Would you follow this approach and provide for applications to be developed based on an OS that resembles the current Haiku with the mouse and keyboard, or would applications be developed on top of the new OS you envision in a new touch friendly way?

32

So let me get this straight, you’re a UX designer (I assume professionally?) and you’re saying that we should not leave well enough alone and stick with known-good and familiar solutions because it might impede some nebulous “innovation?”

“Disregard familiarity and user comfort to pursue pet theories” is exactly the opposite of how interface design is supposed to work. Interfaces are like stagehands: if they’re doing their job right, you don’t even realize that they’re there. Demanding that the user abandon a perfectly workable familiar approach and adjust to some new thing merely because you think you know how to do it “better” completely undermines that ideal.

Not to mention that your basic premises are hardly universally-accepted fact:

“Desktop computer industry is dying and that’s a fact.” People have been claiming that for a decade now - but desktops (and laptops, which work on the same UI principles) are just as commonplace in business and home environments as they’ve always been. Even to the extent that desktop sales are declining, people who aren’t actively preaching the death-of-the-desktop gospel might explain it by pointing out that we’ve basically reached a point where PCs (desktops especially) have enough computing power for most purposes. There’s simply no need to keep up with the biannual upgrade cycle like there was in the past. Hardware sales might be declining, but use is another story.

“Applications run the brave-new world.” And that’s different from the last fifty years of computer history how? Applications have always been the selling point of an operating system, ever since there started to be operating systems. More to the point, what exactly does that have to do with the design of Haiku itself?

“Social is very important to users, 1.6 Billion people that uses social networking are proof of that.” And that’s lovely for them - but it has nothing whatsoever to do with designing a desktop operating system. People who use desktop OSes and social networking already have web browsers, which are the primary medium for every social-networking service out there.

“Windows management and overlapping windows are confusing to new-users and come on it’s 1980’s technology.” This is complete nonsense. Nobody over ten is a newcomer to the concept of window management - and anybody under ten is perfectly capable of learning how it works. I picked up Mac OS in the space of a week when I was eight, and I wasn’t even a particularly adept learner. (Not to mention that all modern windowing desktops are already capable of keeping an application full-screen if the user so desires.)

And I’ll accept an argument like “it’s 1980s technology” when people can explain to me how that is in any way a bad thing. The car dashboard is '20s technology. Keyboards are 1870s technology. Neither of these need to be fundamentally changed, which is why nobody goes around talking about how we can’t stick to what works in car design because “that kind of thinking stops innovation.”

“Filesystem and archives should be handle by applications and not by folders.”/“What I mean by apps owning files is that you open the app and there are your files to read and write and organize them - and not laying around in random places random folders.” Why? Files laying around in random folders is not the OS’s problem - it’s the user’s. No amount of wheedling on the part of the computer can make a bad organizer into a good one, and no good organizer has their files laid out like that OSX picture you posted.

Now, as far as collecting files by type, phoudoin has already pointed out that Haiku can already do that. You could, if you wanted, even code Haiku applications to only open documents by querying the hard drive for files of its type, as you seem to be suggesting - but why would you? If you did that you’d rob the user of the choice to organize their files their way. You’d punish the sensible users in order to coddle the sloppy ones. That’s no way to design software.

“Minimalism is the ultimate goal.” Says who? And what does that mean? I’m all for minimalism to the extent it makes sense and doesn’t impede function, but that’s exactly what your suggested changes would do.

“Single task oriented?” Are you joking? Single-tasking OSes are what we’ve been moving away from since the 1960s. And as for “Keep in mind battery life, if Haiku runs ‘just one’ dedicated app at the time, the battery of a laptop could last for way more hours,” that flat-out contradicts your own “run a single application fast-as-hell” notion. If you’re giving the full power of the CPU to the foreground application, you’re not going to get better battery life. If you crank down the CPU so as to conserve battery, it doesn’t matter one bit how many applications you’re dividing that lesser horsepower across. The only reason your laptop uses more battery under load is because the operating system automatically cranks up the CPU when you’ve got more stuff running so that you don’t suffer slowdown - and the majority of laptops manufactured in the last eight or nine years can be configured not to do that if you place battery life at a premium.

"Just imagine for example the browser app, surfing the web for 10 hours straight in battery life or maybe more :open_mouth:

Or a webApp like Google speadsheets, Youtube Or maybe a Design App, a coding App, you name it. With such perfomance that there won’t be a need for an activity monitor or task monitor to know what app is sucking CPU cycles and the longevity in battery life will be a wonderful value."
This is utter nonsense. You do not get better battery life by running web apps than normal applications, because web apps add the overhead of a web browser to the requirements of the application. Either it’s going to run slower and use the same amount of battery, or the OS will crank up the CPU to keep the speed constant but drain more power. Your idea is like suggesting that you should carry around a 50-pound pack when you go out for a run and it will make you feel less tired - it’s the exact opposite of the truth. You have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about here.

“And people without internet wont use their computers thats another fact.” Even if we take that as a given, how is that relevant?

[quote=cale]I’m a User experience designer.

So, design is not only how it looks its how it works.

And this is not fashion of the day, you need to accept the fact that Haiku is way behind in user experience.[/quote]
If we’re supposed to just accept your argument (that we should abandon a solid, working paradigm that’s stood the test of nearly thirty years to go chasing rabbit trails in the iOS world) as fact because you’re a UX designer, then I want to know: who do you do UX design for? Who employs someone with that kind of mindset? Your LinkedIn page shows a handful of websites and a launcher for a game. Neither of those are at all comparable to the user interface of an operating system.

“I annoyed someone on a forum! That proves that I’m right!”