An Ode To Skulpture 56
jrepin writes with an excerpt from an an article at OSNews musing on the virtues of those "ugly" old interfaces that were common before Apple's Aqua drove everyone to use visual gloss for its own sake: "Thom Holwerda tends to believe that the best interfaces have already been made. Behaviourally, CDE is the best and most consistent interface ever made. It looked like ass, but it always did exactly as you told it to, and it never did anything unexpected. When it comes to looks, however, the gold standard comes from an entirely different corner — Apple's Platinum and QNX's PhotonUI. Between all the transparency, flat-because-it's-hip, and stitched leather violence of the past few years, one specific KDE theme stood alone in bringing the best of '90s UI design into the 21st century, and updating it to give everything else a run for its money. This is an ode to Christoph Feck's Skulpture."
Before Mac OS X... (Score:3, Informative)
I have been an official Apple Developer for ages.
When Mac OS X was still in development, they gave us pre-release builds.
These did not use the Aqua interface. They basically used the original OS 9 interface.
These prerelease builds were REALLY FAST.
Then, we got the official Aqua release at the WWDC.
The OS had slowed right back down to OS 9 speeds.
Since the original Aqua, Apple has been steadily draining out the eye candy, and moving towards a simpler interface.
The irony is that the hardware can now support eye candy.