If you look at all the other OS’s, they are all competing on how shiny and cool they are. They all rely on mimicking artificial substances. Metal, glass, and plastic. Competing with them is a losing battle because you’ll just look like a copy of Mac or linux theme.
What I would like to see is something based on natural and organic materials. For example, compare reading something on white paper vs the solid white screen you are looking at right now. Paper is a lot easier on the eye and one of the reasons is that if you look real closely, you’ll see that it is not pure white but it has complex texture.
I would also like to see icons that look like they were painted with real paint instead of over stylized clip art with no real soul.
I think the Haiku look right now flows into my vision. It is happy and appealing. That’s why people even today like to steal the Be ‘look.’ But it is not perfect.
Here’s a nice link comparing warm vs garish
We certainly don’t want to do what Apple does: take real pictures and suck the life and character out of them to use as icons.
I wish I could give mockups. All I can give are ideas. Imagine a GUI carved out of stone. Polished black stone for media apps. Dolomite and limestone for other apps.
Or it can be something painted in Corel Painter. It could be something out of a fractal generator (randomness btw is not the complexity we want…it is confusing to the eye. Simple repetitive patterns are mind dumbing. Chaos is what we want, hidden in everything we see)
I like the idea of the natural look, but I like the shiny look sometimes too. Why can’t the desktop be skinned? I like the apps that I can skin. I’m very visually oriented and I change skins every so often. I’d like to see a skin application that would be easy to create or modify skins for the desktop.
Well, polished stones like hematite are real and shiny. They would be great for the so-called “cool” apps. Other times you just want to get your work done and you don’t want the GUI to be in your face.
One problem with the idea of skins is that they are a tease. The skinnable apps and OS’s are usually pretty ugly by default. You want to skin them but you have to look through 5 zillion amateurish skins and never truly happy.
I would rather have a really well done look for the UI. The mac people aren’t envious of skinning because they have a really well done look and you’re not going to get a better one by outsourcing the job to everyone with gimp.
This natural look can’t be achieved by those lousy LCD or CRT screens we are all using. Take a look at RiscOS screenshots if you like something similar.
IMHO I think it is best to use a nice desktop wallpaper and let intelligent software do statistic analysis of which colours dominate and use those colours in the GUI.
I wonder however how you would deal this with when you might have different colours or wallpapers=desktop backgrounds for each workspace arielb.
hmmm riscos is definitely cheesy…not at all what I was thinking.
so this is also a problem of hardware resolution. That sort of bothers me because while people get faster and better cpu/gpu and eventually every OS will have an opengl desktop…monitors don’t change much.
The last thing I want is some half baked looking UI like windows. Do people really like that or do they switch it back to classic mode like I do after playing for a few minutes?
People do like the simplicity of google. If it’s not going to look absolutely great then the ui should just get out of the way and don’t bog resources with skin abstractions.
I think you meant to say solution looking for the problem. I see 2 problems. Eyeball ergonomics and identity.
The whole point of the natural idea is to make people comfortable while they are using their computer for hours at a time. Sony recognized this problem and came up with this solution: http://www.learningcenter.sony.us/assets/itpd/reader/reader_features.html
It only works with black and white for now. It seems that the ergonomic problem requires a hardware solution. I was also thinking that if Haiku is a really good multitasker then you wouldn’t have the problem from looking at the same thing all the time.
Then there’s the question of identity. They would have photoshop and translucent windows and we would have real textures. Such a UI would be very impressive and still very different.
One problem is that since most computers won’t be able to support the rich textures, you wouldn’t have a standard look. I think a big target market for haiku is emerging markets. They need a free OS with low maintenance and minimal use of hardware resources. Those old computers won’t run the fancy stuff and that would not help the identity problem. Also, if the whole point of the OS is simplicity then the graphical look should also reflect that. So I guess we can forget about those ray traced 3D icons…
A simple UI is also harder for the big boys to copy. Microsoft can try to be like macos x, but if we are using rich textures and paint, they’d probably copy that too because that would also show off their stuff. But if we are simple then microsoft is stuck. Simple and rich contradict each other.
So now I am really thinking to go back to basics. Something like Macos 9 but with tabs and other Haiku features. Not an OS that screams out “look at me! look at me!”
Hi arielb, yes I’d love to have a paper like display, fixed at work as well as portable. But I don’t think there is much to improve in the BeOS R5 basic looks, colours are well done and complement each other nicely. Though there are problems, like you don’t know for sure what is clickable in its GUI and what not which again makes a clean GUI (you might think there is only so much clickable because buttons/items are more or less hidden).
Digg up some posts about GUI like the mockups done lately, and Darkwyrm’s posts and their comments.
ehhh I’m not so crazy about the colors. But that can easily change. The general shape could be sharpened up a bit.
I’ve seen some mockups. For example http://www.k23productions.com/haiku/rc/stubear/OBOS_UI_v2_3_b.gif
is one of the better ones. Some of it does look a little weird though…like there’s some alien growth coming out of the tabs. I also don’t think they should be curved on the right side. I think the symbols on the tab should be in a box and more distinct.
See these edges in the scrollbars and little buttons: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9f/Mac_OS_9_screenshot_2.png
I think that would help.
I can agree that the Mac OS 9 titlebar buttons or widgets are they called? are much more distict, I see it being a button and not just a symbol.
The most trouble graphic artists get us in is functionality vs style. The first is IMHO much more important in practice as the latter, but when the style isn’t right we tend to bash it without thinking for one second.
And of course when I looked at the OBOS screenshot I immediately went “Bleh ugly colours” I agree about the tabs, 1 curve is enough it’s just a style thing but how doesn’t look at a pretty girl eventhough you know she will be useless in real life
hey don’t be beating down the ladies I know quite a few that are smarter than me … and im no dummy but anyway
I like macos 9 gui it kinda grows on ya… except for the aplication switcher which is very outdated
imo the main menu should pop up when you right click on the desktop and have the normal left click pop up options… very handy i must upload a screen shot of my xfce setup which i quite like.
Stuart McCoy also designed the Haiku logo
He wrote “The name was chosen because of its link to BeOS’ unique haiku error messages. I chose a simple, clean typeface which best represents a haiku poem and the three leaves carry this theme even further through the use of the number three and natural elements, both common to haiku poems.”
I will say this much. I am really liking this. It’s smooth, the font is easy on the eyes, sort of like Libreation Sans, and the green colour is a nice touch. I would laugh if I see it for R1, but most likely going to be for R2.
All of the back and forth in this thread just goes to prove that EVERYONE has a personal taste and one look is never going fit all users.
If this OS wants to be new and innovative it will include the ability to change the look of the windows, menus, icons, etc.
And yes there will be lots of crazy, crude, loud, amateur ‘skins’ or ‘looks’ out there. So what? I browse for skins for Firefox and I only find about 1 in 50 that I like, but those ones I like I download and use and enjoy. Presumably someone else likes the 49 others that I don’t (at least the designer?).
I personally hate being put in a box. Like with OS-X and Windows. I hope Haiku won’t follow that mold.
