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."
CDE was consistant. (Score:3, Insightful)
Consistently awful. Being bad every time is still bad.
Nobody pines for "good ol CDE".
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I agree. I had the misfortune of having to work with a Sun computer as my desktop PC. I helped port KDE to Solaris in order to have something useable (I wrote the Solaris ARTS support). A bunch of my coworkers also switched from CDE to KDE on Solaris. Window management on CDE was unusable, especially if a lot of console sessions were opened.
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Damn right. Openwin was way better.
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CDE never did anything unexpected - as long as you were expecting the mouse cursor to randomly become invisible, which keeps happening on one or two of the SPARCs where I work.
To be fair, after it did that a few times, we did expect it, I guess.
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Thanks for your well-put-together analysis.
Do we still give reasons why we hate shit around here?
TL;DR Version (Score:5, Insightful)
Some guy found a KDE theme he really liked.
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Some guy found a KDE theme he really liked.
Not only that, but it's a very washed out, low-contrast design. Great if you're trying to write some rainy day poetry maybe, but hardly good design.
Also, it's easy to diss "visual gloss for it's own sake", but I think it's fair to judge user interfaces as successful when they positively influence how people feel about the product. As always, emotions are super-important, regardless if your aim is to pull more ordinary users into computing (e.g., grandma and Joe sixpack) or just make a boatload of money (
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Well here's a nice thing: you can actually have themes and change a significant amount of the look of KDE. Compare that to Mac or Windows where you take what you are given with only a very tiny amount of customization.
Fonts! (Score:2, Troll)
Nope, still butt-ugly. It's a matter of taste, agreed, but those KDE fonts... man, they suck. ...And what's with the constant battleship-grey?
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(It'll use whatever colour scheme you pick (or create); not a fan of grey myself...)
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The extremely heavy fonts (the text "Allows the manipulation..." in this [osnews.com] screenshot) catches my eye in a really bad way.
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I don't know how to explain. Slashdot fonts: good. Skulpture screenshots fonts: bad. I am looking at this screenshot: http://skulpture.maxiom.de/images/skulpture-sample-2.png [maxiom.de] - observe how the "d" has a small protrusion at top, the "p" has a small protrusion at the bottom, etc. Each letter looks crappy, there's a tiny bit of extra information in each letter. Overall, it annoys me.
Take this screenshot: http://skulpture.maxiom.de/images/skulpture-newcheck.png [maxiom.de] - kerning is messed up. Hint: look at "Text Edit"
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Yeah, I think it's a matter of taste in the end. I remember I used to create such buttons and GUI items for the lulz in Turbo Pascal about 20 years ago, when I was in high school. Oh and they worked, too. Of course, there's a difference between ad-hoc graphical items and such a skin, but from a visual perspective, these are very, very simple to create. To me, "an Ode to Skulpture" means "an Ode to something that a teenage could create in Turbo Pascal 20 years ago". Hardly something to brag about.
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Someone once experimented [wikipedia.org] with something else than battleship grey. For some reason it didn't catch on.
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Someone else [kaleidoscope.net] did too... but it also didn't catch on (maybe because it didn't ship as a standard feature).
Why is this so important? (Score:2)
Are we measuring the nanoseconds that users are wasting? Or worried about our grandparents? They can adapt too.
All these UI discussions seem more about people trying to impose their preferences on other people than anything remotely rational.
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If you could choose between a badly designed system, and a well designed one, would you just say "I'll deal with it" and stick to the bad one? And it's not a simple matter of personal preference, usability can be measured (somewhat) objectively, so certain interfaces ARE a hindrance.
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Right, because Windows 8's new UI is so wonderful and revolutionary that people are trampling themselves trying to buy new devices that use it.
Oh wait...
The UI *is* important. In fact, it's *critically* important, because that is the face of the device you interact with. So much of new technology is different only for the sake of being different, and provide absolutely nothing of value that technology of yesteryear didn't already have.
The iPad practically invented an entire new market segment, despite the
Starting the year with the biggest troll of 2013 (Score:2)
CDE is the best and most consistent interface ever made.
OMFG! For about half a second, I thought you were serious, then I recalled clearly my student years were learning *nix was so much more easy with the CLI than with the plain mess that was CDE...
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It *was* consistent.... Consistently a PITA
Definitely News that Matters (Score:5, Insightful)
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In an attempt to salvage something....
It looks a lot like a number of themes for Amiga OS and other systems, i.e. fairly derivative. That's a good thing. Everyone used to copy everyone else with UI design, and design in general, to the benefit of all. Now we have design patents to put a stop to that advancement.
It's kinda interesting how mobile UIs are like desktop UIs from 30 years ago. At first they were mono-tasking, then you could switch apps with them running in the background, and now you can run two
KDE (Score:1)
Re:KDE (Score:4, Insightful)
and adding K at the front of all their apps seemed more lame and ridiculous than Apple's iWhoring...
Why? It followed the older tradidion of X programs having an x in front of their name, like xterm, xcalc, xbiff, xedit, xlogo, etc.
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Unfortunately, this results in some weird menus. KDE should strip K out of their menus.. stop messing with the alphabet.
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CLI vs GUI (Score:5, Insightful)
"looks like ass, but..."
Usability is something that really gets short shrift from artists, designers, coders and engineers. In fact, it is often met with hostility and direct resistance.
There are so many elements involved in a truly usable interface. "Doing what I expect" is one. "Giving me exactly the correct information" is another, as is "appropriate and timely feedback."
However, aesthetics also play a huge role in a usable interface. It needs to look usable. Maybe not "attractive," but a button needs to look like something that you WANT to click.
I grew up on CLI. Since I've been doing software development since the early 1980s, I have used some of the scariest CLIs ever made (Is a hex keypad a "CLI"?).
These days, I greatly prefer a GUI. I often need to go into the CLI on a system to do stuff, but prefer to stay out of it.
I have designed skeuomorphic UX (I'm actually a fairly decent graphic designer, so I could make stuff look quite "real"), then trashed that for flat, and am basically settling into a "middle ground," where elements of 3D are used, but sparingly. I have found that performance is also a usability coefficient. When you have big-ass 24-bit PNG images, the software spends a great deal more time tossing stuff around in memory and/or disk. That can slow things down.
I'd like to see everyone agree that GUI and UX is every bit as important as the engine that drives it.
I don't think we're there yet. I suspect this comment thread will bear that out.
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Eclipse? Usability? Same Paragraph?
Wow. Now I've seen everything.
Eclipse is an awesome program. A real Swiss army knife.
However, as you seem to infer, it tends to be a little difficult to use. I suspect one reason is that it tries to be All Things to All Men.
UIs are completely context- and audience-dependent.
If you've ever ready any of Tufte's [edwardtufte.com] stuff, you have seen some truly hairy interface elements that require training to understand. However, once you understand, the UX is extremely immersive, intuitive a
Missing the big picture (Score:3)
And... anybody looking for a similar thing to do with their windows when turning off aero isn't ghetto enough, deviantart has some "classic classic" themes you can try.
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A modern AJAX enabled website can spin a 90s computer for a least a little while CPU-wise before loading.
A few years ago, eBay had some flash animation on it's start page showing off a few items with rotation and scaling.
It caused constant 70% CPU load on my 1.8GHz Athlon64!
WOW windows 95 (Score:1)
Who would have thought that windows 95 interface is so great
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.
CDE... looked like ass (Score:1)
This is now the #1 contender for 2013's understatement of the year.
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CDE was pretty dated in 2000.
In 1994, the choices were some MacOS, Windows 3.11 for workgroups, IRIX and CDE. By the standards of the day, Motif with its 3D chiselled look was actually quite nice. IRIX was cooler though.
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Motif with its 3D chiselled look was actually quite nice. IRIX was cooler though.
Maybe my memory's faulty, but didn't IRIX use Motif for the Indigo Magic Desktop?
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OK, this is going back a bit.
Quite a few programs on the SGI were Motif based since they were ports to/from other unices.
For the desktop, they used 4DWM, and there was some file manager. Given the use of the knurled wheel widget for the vector icon scaling, I'd guess they were Open Inventor based.
That was on things like the O2 (much later) and the big green tower SGI whatever that was and if my memory serves me correctly.
The Saddest Part (Score:2)
The saddest part of this whole story to me is the screenshot itself. I'm looking at it on a 10-year-old IBM ThinkPad T42, and there's considerable blank space in my browser window both above and below that screen image, plus my browser's title bar, menu, location bar, bookmark bar, my gadgets at the top of the screen, and my bar thingy at the bottom of my screen... The ancient screen is 1050 pixels high; the screenshot is768 pixels. Modern laptop displays are missing a quarter of their vertical pixels! Why
It's easy really (Score:2)
Things a windowing UI should do:
Conserve screen pixels:
no start/home bar - let me bring up common apps or shell via a right click (hello, TWM and brethren)
thin window borders
small but simple icons for close/minimize/maximize
NEVER FUCKING STEAL FOCUS
Things your windowing UI should NOT do:
be a web browser
manage my printers or wireless network interfaces
act as a filesystem
block when 1 app wedges
We don't need brushed metal, transparencies, cube-shaped 3d representations of your windows, wiggly xterms, just give