Ooh, I really like that stylized aitch. I thought it would be a struggle to come up with a stylized H that wasn’t already used by some for profit company but that zodiac symbol is nice and unlikely to be ownable. Done right that would be a lovely emblem, sort of like Apple’s Menubar logo—simple, instantly recognisable, stylish but not self conciously hipstery. I’m thinking without the background, just the three strokes.
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Studies… ha ha… I’d love to see it but I’m amused at the suggestion because that’s a big ask. Who would conduct a study? Anyone with actual credibility in such a task? Who would respect the resulting data and conclusions, if any were drawn in a credible manner?
Apple themselves don’t even bother to use collective UI knowledge anymore; not even their own, which did involve actual research and expertise. Joni Ive trashed decades of knowledge and design culture at Apple when he reskinned iOS via the print advertising department(!!), and pushed for changes to Mac OS to suit iOS designs. He was an influential person at Apple, with a curious personality, a lot of obsessiveness, and a close association to Steve Jobs. Some people wrongly thought he was equal to Jobs’ in terms of leadership and vision. He wasn’t/isn’t.
Jobs wasn’t a good person but he was good for Apple and computing. He hired good people who did great things and constrained their deficits when he hated something they worked on (this goes anywhere from abuse to decent management; I’m not excusing his managerial behavior, but his 10,000-foot vision was better than any other leadership there).
In my observations, Haiku has no such unified guidance other than BeOS R5 itself, and simply the fact of a handful of people who are committed to it. I’ve watched the vision shift and slide over the years as people with unified and optimistic vision were pushed aside due to conflicts and the problem of vision & leadership vs raw programming capability. The two worlds don’t usually overlap a lot; that’s why Linux is Linux. I’m not picking on programmers/developers. I can’t do what they do, and it’s fine that they can’t do what someone else can do. The problems arise when we know just enough about each other’s areas of expertise to feel we can talk to it 
[Current Apple leadership have no vision other than MBA & Wall Street pathology. Today’s Apple aren’t the Apple that won me over; they’re merely the company with the least bad option for my computing sanity.]
Haiku is a tiny tiny tiny segment of the world’s computer users. It cannot serve as a general purpose OS, or as a specialty OS for the people Be created BeOS for (whoever that was; they kept moving the goal posts and stumbled massively by going public). It’s amazing that Haiku exists at all, let alone that the design has remained as unified as it has. It amazes me that it hasn’t been Linux-ified more than it has over all this time. I currently know nothing of the leadership, so please excuse my talking out of order about it if I’m making wrong assumptions.
IMO, BeOS R5’s design as a model is probably THE unifying force here, and that itself was not yet a refined and robust implementation under Be Inc. They DID borrow from Apple’s knowledge back in the day, and so we benefit from that today… unless we throw a bunch of people at the OS who are conditioned to today’s computing, such as people who are conditioned to back-forward file browsers… the model we are seeing countless websites breaking as they try to appify (how many sites respond correctly to a back step in history?? The Haiku software archive doesn’t!).
Computing has gone from chaos, to near-unification, back to chaos again. I’ve long since grown tired of the chaos. At least back in the old days, the chaos was excused by not knowing any better; learning as things were invented & refined. Today, it’s just laziness/cheapness (with flat design and vector shapes, developers don’t need to hire designers anymore, right???!!?!11!?), a delivery mechanism for advertising, and “designs” are mindless surface (not function) mimicries of parts (not the whole) of other things (and the whole of those other things have become utterly chaotic themselves, whether Mac OS or Windows… and Linux is sort of the definition of this chaos).
I’m tired of computing as a hobby. I left the BeOS & Haiku community because people (including me) obsessing over and fighting about tech BS wasn’t healthy, and I wanted to use my computers as tools, not as curiosities. The curiosity held me with BeOS longer than it should’ve. I abandoned Windows twice as a result of wanting to be free of tech garbage: first for BeOS, then again for Mac OS Snow Leopard. Today, Snow Leopard is a fond memory of long-abandoned expertise & optimization. There’s nowhere else to go that’s an improvement on what Apple offers, and I’m not happy about that. I stay because it’s the least bad option for my computer using sanity (I use Windows exclusively for gaming -and occasionally retro-computing conduits- and I hate every second I’m dealing with anything other than a game).
My recent re-kindled interest in Haiku is likely passing, because it’s not a system I can do my hobbies or online activities on (since “computers” isn’t my hobby or career anymore). However, I still feel very strongly emotionally connected to it and I pop in here every now and then to speak up when something gets my attention.
This topic did. I kinda ranted here. That’s my way. Sorry.
I’m sure many other topics would also interest me, but design and usability are areas I feel I have some actual knowledge in, whereas programming isn’t. Unfortunately, I have no formal credibility and expertise isn’t exactly respected these days anyway. So… 
Good luck, everyone. I’m off to maybe install Haiku on a semi-ancient Frankenstein’s monster-type of PC via putting the drive into another computer, and when I get sick of that, I’ll fade away again, back into the non-alternative OS world, hopefully making music or maybe even doing photography of some kind. Hopefully something more productive than… this.
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The era of personal computing is long over. No commercial entity will design a new OS that empowers the user, they only make OSes that exploit the user.
But living tradition can be preserved, and Haiku does exactly that.
They DID borrow from Apple’s knowledge back in the day, and so we benefit from that today…
Not only Apple’s knowledge. BeOS was influenced quite a bit by AmigaOS. For example, BeOS translators are equivalent of AmigaOS datatypes.
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You can find some research by the university of Auckland where researchers used Haiku for UX studies. It eventually led to the development of Stack and Tile, for example. They also tried other things that didn’t meet as much success, but were interesting to see nonetheless, such as realtime editable window layouts, so you could move buttons and controls as you wanted, and an attempt to autogenerate documentation/online help for programs by scanning the UI using “hey” and having (IIRC) some self-description added to BMessage or something like that (it’s been some time ago, I forgot the specifics of how it worked exactly).
Besides that, I think several of the developers do know a bit about user interface design and user experience, even if we are not formally trained for it. Sure, not all of us, but the one who know a few things can help the others.
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I’m choosing to see the Haiku glass as half full. And unlike BeOS, it won’t die so the Haiku story makes an interesting ‘film’ to watch. The Matter of the Blue Leaf might still get resolved in some way in the future. I’m not holding my breath but you never know; there may be some twists ‘n’ turns to come.
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The leaves always start with green! They are not bright blue!
“Clone” was a big of a strong term to use, but it’s pretty much the same thing. Options that set it apart from the Windows Taskbar notwithstanding, it’s effectively the same thing. Haiku should embrace any familiarity people have with that kind of thing.
Nah. Haiku has character and personality. The Deskbar arrangement is a good example of that. I like being a bit different. But I also think it’s logical. If you’re right-handed, the wrist flick to the top right is the most natural one. Secondly, screens are short and wide, especially nowadays and content (like web pages) is often vertically aligned and often scrolling vertically too, so it makes sense to keep the full height of the screen and put interface affordances on the side.
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I have never been comfortable with the chunk of dock taking up a portion of the side of the screen and leaving desktop visible beneath however long it has grown, nor comfortable with the status bar/clock location moving around on screen depending on the amount of buttons in the dock. I want things like that to remain stationary. It irritates me that Apple has the clock in three different places on their platforms.
I prefer full screen apps, and they often have some kind of palettes or controls on the left and right edges of their windows, and in BeOS, that also tended to mean floating windows for palettes. I don’t want them visually associated with a dock. A taskbar or the Deskbar at the bottom of the screen feels more balanced to me.
I’m also a major fan of full-screen workspaces in Mac OS. I run most apps at full screen wherever possible (something BeOS never really had). I don’t like clutter. Unless I’m managing files & folders, I dislike multiple windows floating around on screen. This is one area where I got kinda frustrated with the Mac Classic and BeOS models.
Of course they didn’t… and that’s their fault. I don’t see why an operating system has to adapt accordingly, making everything looking as in Window$, just because people are used to its awful UI. When you try a new operating system, you should expect some things are done differently and you should do some research to learn the ropes. If you don’t do that in Haiku, you won’t last long anyway - even if the taskbar was where you expect it to be.
I never understood why on Earth a taskbar has to be at the bottom or top, while vertical space is way more important than horizontal. The first thing I do when opening an editor is to maximize it vertically because that’s what matters the most. I don’t want a taskbar taking over part of that vertical real estate, and yet some desktop environments take over both the top and bottom of the screen. Monitors (even the old ones) are much wider than taller, so it makes no sense to waste vertical space. This is bad UI design even if you never use an editor. And yet it is popular in several desktop environments like Gnome (which does everything possible to waste vertical space and it is, in my opinion, is the worst desktop ever in general).
In other operating systems, I either don’t have a taskbar at all or I have one aligned vertically at the left edge of the screen. Monitors are wide, not to mention multiple monitors become more popular, so a vertical taskbar is the obvious choice - if you want a taskbar at all, that is.
Personally, I don’t really care much about the taskbar in Haiku, as I use keyboard shortcuts and Quick Launcher most of the time. I keep it visible mainly because I like its design and I can see what programs are currently running at a glance.
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When it comes to UX, I very much try to avoid blaming the person interacting with the thing. This ensures that improvements actually happen.
With this thinking in mind, a possible suggestion to mitigate this behaviour is to open Quick Tour on first boot. At the very least, newcomers are immediately made aware that it exists. Certainly a window is more noticeable than an icon on the desktop, which with some resolutions can be rather small.
But well, perhaps this should be moved into another topic instead.
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This statement is especially amusement for me
→ who is reading this on Haiku’s forum
→ who using Haiku (64 bit) operating system, which states widely open
on their site home page
"Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing.
so personal computing
→ I do it in Webpositive which does not collect data about me, and such infos had not shared with other firms who pay for it …
→ and if I would fear/worried about of some tailing cookies I can use ported browsers and block them and reject ads, malwares and so on …
So dear @suhr , what are you talking about ?..
what would you require more if you can use Haiku - for personal computing ? … effectively now ?
If you need a program from another platform …
there is wine, boxedwine, dosbox, many kind of emulators, VMs even …
just use a modern machine not a retro one to drive those additional required resources of emulations.
EDIT :
Anyway, I think I spent too much reading this thread all over the end.
I agree with Lrrr
to enabling users to change the UI elements – it rocks ! – and should not be a problem, if does not lead to an unbootable system.
If that will be ugly - it will be ugly for them.
I think it is interesting idea if the Deskbar logo would be different in case Betas and nightlies as well. As someone can use replicant of ‘About System’ to render the system info onto Desktop.
Dear @Lrrr
I would rather like to know :
how you could set the clock numbers to bold ?
How about a weather app on shelf ?
I had not found at that Weather app … and had not updated,
when I tried.
This is what I like in tailoring !
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what would you require more if you can use Haiku - for personal computing ? … effectively now ?
I would definitely like if Haiku actually fully supported my hardware, including 3D acceleration and Bluetooth.
And here’s the difference between different times: Be Inc single-handed made an entirely new OS with new approach to user interface and with excellent support for contemporary hardware. While in Haiku we use 24 years old UI language and pray that some day Haiku will actually support GPUs.
But I do not complain: this is the best option we have got.
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I build Haiku from source with several of my own patches applied. One of them is a quick change to adjust the font style and size for the clock .
It is my old DeskbarWeather project. It is not in HaikuDepot because I have never gotten around to finishing it. There is a bug in it that causes Deskbar to crash once in a while that I would need to fix before releasing it.
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Thanks - I see …
… this way worth to know C++ – or other language – and developing : graving the way of our own likings 
Just as one, who already created
big digital clock for themselves 
and
nice picture photobucket and video thumbnail viewing mode in Tracker 
or
change the spots on Desktop that just does not look or work as they would like it - 
What a pity they had not moved those improvements into fruiting packages - yet ! 
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It‘s not so much blaining them but the observation that when moving to a new OS you are bound to get stuck on something unless you read the documentation.
It is good to conduct some grandmother tests, give people who use a computer merely as a tool a Haiku install and see how they do.
In my case, my grandparent failed because the applications menu was not localized, and neither was the quick tour/userguide (oops!)
I since fixed the userguide/quicktour (they would always open in english before), but the applications menu is still a problem.
The top right one should become the Deskbar logo, in tribute to this entire thread! 
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Well, I think the forum logo fits perfectly.
Deskbar already have logo:
Let’s put it on menu button!..
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