Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

“I made an operating system UI within Unity”

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 185 posts

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#51

Post by axegon_ »

0xffff2 wrote: post #19

Am I the only one who hates most animation? If the animation doesn't serve a clear purpose in signalling something to the user, I want it gone. I'm not convinced that we've seen any meaningful advance in OS UI design since Windows 95.

No, you most certainly are not. I cannot express how happy I was when I saw that the software my bank uses is built on top of ncurses. Animations don't make your work any more productive, I'd argue it reduces your productivity in the form of a distraction. All the flashiness and the UI/UX bullcrap is what made the unholy mess that is the web today. As a Gnome user, I've disabled every single animation and effect I've seen and I could't be happier.

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#52

Post by jpindar »

rhacker wrote: post #5
enumjorge wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you missed the point of the post. It’s less about the aesthetics and more about the fact that someone used Unity, a game development tool, to simulate and OS UI.

Thanks for that, I was trying to figure out what "Unity" was in this context, given that Ubuntu had something with the same name as it's main UI for about 7 years...

There are several things called Unity, which I suppose is why the game engine is often referred to as Unity3d.

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#53

Post by vondur »

mikepurvis wrote: post #21
0xffff2 wrote: post #19

Am I the only one who hates most animation? If the animation doesn't serve a clear purpose in signalling something to the user, I want it gone. I'm not convinced that we've seen any meaningful advance in OS UI design since Windows 95.

Type-to-search is significant— Ubuntu has it, MacOS sort of has it (Spotlight), Windows 10 definitely has it. It wasn't until it mysteriously broke last week [1] that I suddenly realised how dependent upon it I had become; I felt like a caveman manually paging through the list of installed software or seeking out the proper icon on my desktop. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2020/02/09/windows-...

You lost me at MacOS "sort of has it". MacOS's spotlight works the best out of all of them you listed. AFAIK, in Gnome, you can't search for text in files with the search function. I believe you could in Unity. Window's search mostly works, but I've had issues with it looking for text in files.

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#54

Post by lloeki »

eberkund wrote: post #25
0xffff2 wrote: post #19

Am I the only one who hates most animation? If the animation doesn't serve a clear purpose in signalling something to the user, I want it gone. I'm not convinced that we've seen any meaningful advance in OS UI design since Windows 95.

My understanding is that animations came about as a way to make slow loading operations on web pages appear faster. Because they looked so elegant and fancy, designers started putting animations on software interfaces that should have otherwise been quick which leads to where we are today. Users also started demanding "smoothness" over speed, smoothness simply being how consistently the UI interactions behaved. On An…

Animations far predate such loading tricks.

They provide a sense of spatialisation and context. e.g minimising a window with an animation (such as the Genie effect, but even earlier, cruder ones) helps in understanding where it went and finding it back instead of having it just vanish. Over time the user builds a model of how it operates by observing such cues. To an advanced user it makes no sense because one already understands that, so the animation becomes an inconvenient delay.

Some animations though, are just there for the heck of it, and don’t help (or even confuse) the user. They’re like the high contrast demo mode on TV, aside for being perceptually satisfying, they carry no meaning, and are actively revolting by their cognitive dissonance to users that already have a understanding of interaction models, but you’d be hard pressed to explain that to users that don’t have that understanding.

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#55

Post by sdegutis »

mrkstu wrote: post #45
wdobbels wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, it only searches through your apps, not files.

Spotlight is the OG OS integrated full text search, originating 2004/5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(software)

Spotlight has not been useful to me in over half a decade. It never finds the files I need, despite the fact that I know they're there, I know I typed them right, and I know its settings hasn't hidden or ignored them. And instead it almost always shows useless files in completely obscure parts of the OS that shouldn't even show up in Spotlight. I turned it off like a year ago and haven't regretted it since.

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#56

Post by NikkiA »

Answerawake wrote: post #3

Looks like a generic Linux distro. Am I the only one getting "visual fatigue" over seeing flat design? I just feel like we need a trend change. Its been way too long. I find myself looking at the old Windows Vista, Windows XP, early Mac OS X, or even Windows 3.1 designs and longing for that simplicity.

Pin striped OSX, now that was a time to be alive.

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#57

Post by that_jojo »

robenkleene wrote: post #50
wdobbels wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, it only searches through your apps, not files.

Spotlight on macOS most definitely searches files, much of the system is in fact built on file system metadata attributes. (It was original designed by Dominic Giampaolo, who also architected BeOS's file system.)

> It was original designed by Dominic Giampaolo

This is the first that I'm hearing of this. That is absolutely sick.

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#58

Post by murermader »

vondur wrote: post #53
mikepurvis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Type-to-search is significant— Ubuntu has it, MacOS sort of has it (Spotlight), Windows 10 definitely has it. It wasn't until it mysteriously broke last week [1] that I suddenly realised how dependent upon it I had become; I felt like a caveman manually paging through the list of installed software or seeking out the proper icon on my desktop. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2020/02/09/windows-...

You lost me at MacOS "sort of has it". MacOS's spotlight works the best out of all of them you listed. AFAIK, in Gnome, you can't search for text in files with the search function. I believe you could in Unity. Window's search mostly works, but I've had issues with it looking for text in files.

Yeah windows default search is kinda bad. Its only really OK for applications and settings. For everything else file related voidtools Everything is a godsent.

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#59

Post by mrkstu »

sdegutis wrote: post #55
mrkstu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotlight is the OG OS integrated full text search, originating 2004/5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(software)

Spotlight has not been useful to me in over half a decade. It never finds the files I need, despite the fact that I know they're there, I know I typed them right, and I know its settings hasn't hidden or ignored them. And instead it almost always shows useless files in completely obscure parts of the OS that shouldn't even show up in Spotlight. I turned it off like a year ago and haven't regretted it since.

Interesting- I find it very useful. It even searches my email that is locally cached. Lots of apps create hooks into it. Major part of the ecosystem that makes MacOS what it is.

Not sure why it's borked for you...

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#60

Post by levesque »

voldacar wrote: post #14
Answerawake wrote: post #3

Looks like a generic Linux distro. Am I the only one getting "visual fatigue" over seeing flat design? I just feel like we need a trend change. Its been way too long. I find myself looking at the old Windows Vista, Windows XP, early Mac OS X, or even Windows 3.1 designs and longing for that simplicity.

agreed "material ui" is cancer

Literally cancer.
Post reply on HN