I want that on my desktop! Maybe that idea needs to be polished up a bit. I love it.
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Even though this bikeshed is already blotched with all the colours of the rainbow…
I always liked the blue leaf on the Deskbar menu. It’s artsy, not smack in the boring middle, but a bit submerged like a leaf on a deskbar-tray-pond. Bright blue, because it’s not your regular tree’s leaf; freaky.
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Certainly parts of this conversation are in bikeshed territory but I don’t think it’s fair to say that about all of it. Deskbar is probably the most visible piece of Haiku. In most setups it’s always running and always visible and I don’t think people should be forced to look at it if they dislike it for some reason. For me personally, I’m not trying to get the blue leaf removed, I just want the option to change it.
There are probably several ways to do it. It actually crossed my mind to write a script to do that. Regardless, you’d still want to be able to change the size/location which would mean recompiling Deskbar from source.
Maybe an interested developer could provide a patch for Deskbar to read the logo as HVIF from a file in the settings folder. I’m not sure how the other Haiku members feel about making a CI-like feature customizable - as was mentioned, the Deskbar is in just about all screenshots. It’d be OK with me…
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I started looking at doing that last night. Most of it could be done with a few lines of code here in BarMenuBar and probably a small change to BarMenuTitle to control whether it gets cut off.
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I use a different theme - Ctrus - using Theme Manager, and I am satisfied with blue color feather. It fits to this light lime green color of Deskbar and also with light turquoise of the desktop.
I don’t care UI madnesses I read here, until I can remain as it is.
I hope devs never obey these frantic and violent opinions and enable to change Haiku to those above.
I do not understand why they want to force their taste to us (especially me ha-ha :D) why they want to set something GLOBALLY, I mean for every Haiku user in the world after their wishful change.
It was strange that
Lrrr has offered a smooth solution that enabled to change it for everyone PERSONALLY, I mean just for them, if so annoying thing this cute little feather … but then … it was refused with apology …
before the exact process was shared at all.
(Me myself also has an opinion about it , but I keep it myself as I assume I would get a notion - again - from the system that my post should be re-edited as it was reported, just as it was in the past 2 times when I was ruthlessly honest, and I posted that truth widely open.
Now I just let everyone take the conclusion themselves.)
I don‘t like that at all. It sets a precedent that all of these unimportant graphics in core applications should be customizable.
They shouldn‘t.
Stopping the deskbar service and launching your own that looks like you want is easy enough that this should not be modified in uostream deskbar at all.
Clearly it’s not “unimportant” to a lot of people. I’m not sure why it’s a bad thing to allow customization.
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No, this ment only
we* don’t want COMPETE AT ALL
→ the devs : they would develop and use an OS, that inspired by BeOS, but that quote it seems not clearly understandable for everyone
→ the users : they would use Haiku as they liked as it is now … and would happy if they could tailor for themselves, but never force their taste
Using an OS is not a sport event where competeing is a must.
We not necessarily want a crowd of people, what many frantic envisioning here. We just want a
bug free
tailorable
but remaining as is Operating System. Operating. Period.
(Otherwise, I used Linux for many years as a desktop, and as a fileserver as well. I was satisfied with Linux for a long time.
I had to break with it due to those “features” which were introduced as the business requirements and user conveniency.
→ Like systemd,
→ and all things which were only a config file earlier, but later scripts and services, daemons.
This way Linux devs/distro builders took out easy tailorable stuffs from our hands.
I was quite happy with UNIX methodology “everything is a file”, this way I liked piping in command line and what we can achieve.
Of course I’m a bit lazy man, so I’m happy if I don’t have to compile a BT driver, so not all Linux improvements hurted me … but systemd … what would rule over all the system parts and conduct from the boot … that was really a headache. Especially as many distros I liked started to lead in…
That was a bad decision - it blocked many times a successful boot for me.)
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How do you perceive the Deskbar logo?
- A considered, proper piece of design work
- Quick ‘n’ dirty
- Not exactly high quality but good enough
0
voters
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The BeOS logo was extremely easy to change but no one ever did. Well, I did but I don’t remember hearing about anyone else doing it.
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I’m actually glad such “features” were introduced, most notably systemd. That’s because they forced me to move on and seek for alternatives free of that… intrusive crapware. Although some GNU/Linux distributions still resist, they are not completely free of such "features (for example some distros have no systemd but elogind is still part of the system); and they are certainly not free of some other annoying “Linuxisms”, not to mention the bloated kernel. This mess turned my attention to BSDs and Haiku, operating systems I was aware of but didn’t really use much before. I was pleasantly surprised by those. So yes, I’m glad GNU/Linux turned that way over the years.
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A hard to distinguish button is on purpose? Because that’s what I meant.
It’s inertia, because when the developers see a user struggling things, and things are reported or observed on other media or reviews, I never ever see a dev taking their time to set things in motion, maybe send an e-mail to the dev list for ideas? Or maybe open a Trac ticket? Even in that case most of the developer team does not read Trac or interact. In other big projects I follow I see regular examples of brainstorming mails or threads, but in Haiku’s case I see none.
What I see is, developers engaging in nearly every thread and writing lengthy replies to every criticisim and making sure each post is replied to. My 2 cent is, that time would be better spent for core developers to write dev-list e-mails and maybe encouraging more developers to step in and act on things, or give ideas.
This is just another way of saying “I don’t care, RTFM.” Maybe it’s better to work on making things intuitive and discoverable?
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All theses replies for a blue leaf ^^ no need to change personally or…
Why not taking colors of old Beos and mixed up for make it purple leaf?
No seriously no need to change it’s simple, light and well like is it for now (my opinion)
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To those who don’t think that the blue colour can cause problem: Open Appearances and play with menu background colour, it’s live updating. It’s not that I dislike the blue nor the leaf, it’s simply that a given colour can’t mix with every other and will always look bad with colours near it. This would happen whatever the logo and whatever the colour picked. If the logo was black, it would be obvious that you need a white version for dark themes and it would probably have been done already.
I like the black background with the leaf outline and the Haiku logo. I also like the plain scaled down Haiku logo. They both work. I’d like to know how I can change it, for myself.
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Get Haiku code, change the logo by the one you want, compile, install. Do that on a regular basis, so you can benefit of updates.
So, we should reply and engage more with users, but we should not reply to threads? You want the d velopers to leave users alone and the developers to remain in the mailing lists instead, so that there is no interaction between the two?
Anyway, yes, there is a known discoverability problem from this menu. Despite it being documented in the quick tour and various other places (weall know, no one ever reads documentation).
Now let’s look at the suggested changes in this thread. First, they do not start from this specific problem, they start from someone not liking the leaf and deciding that it doesn’t match the branding (despite being extracted straight from our logo). So, a different problem altogether.
Let’s look at the suggested solutions:
- various variations of using some other part of th, haiku logo or other icons that are already used in other places to mean something else: not helpful to make the deskbar button look more like a button
- making it customizable: also not helpful since you have to customize it before it changes anything
- making the leaf adjust its color to its surroundings: I’m not sure how that can make it more obvious that there is a button here
- aligning the leaf dead center in the button: again I don’t see how that helps with making this more discoverable
So, what are some more useful options? "e already use the button gradient on all Deskbar parts that are clickable. Admitedly we don’t use the button border around them (Windows 95, for example, did that). If you look carefully at Windows early versions you can see that they also had this problem. They ended up labelling the button “Start”, and then adding an arrow pointing to it with a lable saying “click here to start”. And then animating that label so it would pop up on screen a few seconds after loading the desktop, because, apparently, users where very stubborn and persistent in not clicking that button.
Do we need to go to such extremes? Should we put a desktop wallpaper with a big panel thu, points to the deskbar leaf and says “this is a button, please click on it!!!”? Should we lable the button? Maybe just add a little triangle/arrow as a subtle hint that there is something there? Maybe open the DeskBar menu on first boot so people see it, and hope that they will figure out how to open it again?
I think you can see, this issue has not been completely ignored. I think some of these options have already been disoussed, because I wouldn’t come up with so many ideas in 5 minutes I spend writing this. But, I don’t know if any of these has the right balance, between being efficient at making users understand there is a menu here, and being a bit over-the-top.
Anyway, this is not what this thread is originally about, whigh explains why these have not been brought up here.
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This thread ia about ideas!
What is this “button” idea for?
I thought the HAIKU logo is for the Betas and the leaf for the nightlies?
Like HAIKU and WALTER!?
And still when Windows 95 came out many people didn´t get that they had to click on the Start button. I stopped counting the people I had to explain that to.