http://www.mackido.com/Interface/index.html
It’s old but still useful if it gets us to think
Compares the UI of Windows, MacOS 9, Next and BeOS
One thing about the mac idea of 1 menu at the top was that it was really a pain in the next when I was using my sister’s ibook and had to move all the way for a menu with the touchpad when the app was all the way down. On the other hand, it saves a lot of space
and this is what next looked like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:NeXTSTEP_desktop.jpg
Notice the vertical menus on the upper left. You can move them around
here’s another page on those vertical menus
http://gomez-rosado.com/guicookbook/
Not quite sure why there is a menu inside the window if there is a global menu.
It would be interesting if you could collapse the menu so that it would just say “Menu” on the upper left. That would be good for me because 1) I like to save space and 2) most of the time I don’t need the functions of the menu in my face
If haiku adopted vertical menus it would be quite ironic as Apple chose Next instead of BeOS for MacOS X
Definitly nice links to take a look at.
[my 0,02€]
The big question about GUI is drop shadows and rounded corners. Even if you like it or not, we must say that it brings a very nice look to an interface.
The new KDE4 look is very clean and fresh, but windows pretty leaks a buch of things, first of all the triggers on the bottom right to rescale window dimensions. Also no borders is definitly not an issue…
Tabs are not that present and the light grey text on a dark grey background is hard to read. Also, buttons are big enough, but not the text in them. The main top bar is in the same background color of the window background itself, which i think is pretty bad.
Not to talk about scrollbars, also in white, and that must be pretty hard to know if they are active or not, and the pain will come to determine where to clic to get the scroll button instead of the clicking on the track. Last, why only double arrows on the bottom ?
Here it’s a personnal opinion but about the top screen menu, the electric blue color is not only ugly but really hurts. Also, the separation between items is not clear and it may be confusing. Beside that, the typo in this bar is definitly clean and pretty nice, specialy on the clock side.
In the pictures window, the small white border and drop shadow on items is pretty clean and nice.
In a global coloring issue, the choise of white for window background is defintly nice. Same for the top bar. But on the same window, you have an hard blue buttons, blue/grey buttons, (an ubgly) green buttons, and a white one with a blue underline, and a small one in dark grey.
[/my 0,02€]
[quote]http://www.mackido.com/Interface/index.html
It’s old but still useful if it gets us to think
Compares the UI of Windows, MacOS 9, Next and BeOS[/quote]
Where does it compare those UIs? All I see is a MacOS pre 10 versus Win95 UI rant with more or less argueable arguments. Did I get the wrong page? :-s