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“I made an operating system UI within Unity”

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61–70 of 185 posts

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

#61
post #56

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.

That and brushed metal. Such thrill.

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

#62
post #16

reddit's modern userbase is really interesting. There are some incredibly interesting people who use it, but you also find a bunch of accounts that are under a year old with lines like this: Please don't. I would like to see you get rewarded for your hard work. Screw the parasites. Their new UI seems to be doing its job, but I wonder if the decline in thread quality was worth it.

As if the quality of HN threads is better by leaps and bounds.

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

#63

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.)

Recently I discovered that Xcode uses Spotlight in an interesting way — when you want to convert crash logs from your apps into readable stack traces, you only need to place the relevant symbol files anywhere on the disk where Spotlight can find them. No need to import them directly into the IDE.

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

#64
post #17
post #2

Looks really cool! Unfortunately it looks like there is only a Windows version available to play around with. If this could run on Linux and have support for running arbitrary x11 apps then it would be very interesting! I don't have a lot of personal knowledge about Unity3d, but I do hope the creator puts this up on github or something. I'd love to take a closer look.

It's probably not hard to get it running on Linux but it's not a shell. It's just a toy with built in 'apps.'. Running arbitrary apps rendered to a texture in this app and forwarding user input back to apps is probably out of scope.

> but it's not a shell. It's just a toy with built in 'apps.'

Yes that's what I figured. For sure not what it's designed to do as of yet, but if that gap could be bridged in a practical way then this seems like a good head start.

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

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of animations do serve a clear purpose. Humans are not used to things popping up into existence immediately out of nowhere. Yes, you may argue that you and me are tech savvy and trained our brains to not care as much. But that leaves everyone else. I think a bunch of animations shown in this piece are over the top. But quick animations can help immensely with usability. The best ones are so subtle that most peop…

I'm not so sure, if todays animation really have a clear purpose. Remember, when the animations on the Iphone calculater was so long, you often got the wrong result, because it did not get each pressed button (because the animation was so long). Also it can be very frustrating, if you are in a hurry. And in Win 95 you still could choose all colors by yourself. Now you can say bright or dark an almost no app listen to…

> because it did not get each pressed button (because the animation was so long).

No, it was because the animation was blocking.

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

#67
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.

Lots of animations do serve a clear purpose. Humans are not used to things popping up into existence immediately out of nowhere. Yes, you may argue that you and me are tech savvy and trained our brains to not care as much. But that leaves everyone else. I think a bunch of animations shown in this piece are over the top. But quick animations can help immensely with usability. The best ones are so subtle that most peop…

>If that's the bar, then we haven't seen any meaningful advancements ever since the Xerox PARC.

Yeah, probably so. It just so happens that I built my first PC sometime around 1994 or 95 so Windows 95 is the first graphical OS that I can personally remember.

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

#68
post #32
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.

Am I the only one who hates graphics on t-shirts? If the design doesn't serve a clear purpose in signalling something about the user, I want it gone. I'm not convinced that we've seen any meaningful advance in t-shirt design since Windows 95. Ok, ok, I'm being dumb. And yeah, I tend to agree, but as a counterpoint: sometimes it's also just cool to have cool stuff. There is certainly a modernist fetish for superminima…

>Am I the only one who hates graphics on t-shirts? If the design doesn't serve a clear purpose in signalling something about the user, I want it gone. I'm not convinced that we've seen any meaningful advance in t-shirt design since Windows 95.

I don't know if this helps or hurts your point, but I do in fact also hate graphical T's. All of my T-shirts are solid colors and most of them are black.

>What is the "clear purpose" of MacOS UI to have rounded corners, or the status bar to be translucent, or for the "genie" effect of minimizing an app.

Thankfully I don't have to use macOS very often, but I don't think any of those serve a purpose and they constantly (but mildly) annoy me when I do have to boot up my mac. The minimization effect is important, but it should still be fast.

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

#69
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.

I think it's just important that every animation be justifiable as providing some sort of information. Like "where did this come from" or "something is happening here" or "if you click here, this will happen".

Any time someone's design blog starts talking about how an animation makes people feel, it's time to run screaming.

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

#70
It's a nice looking display, and it's running at a nice 60FPS. However, operating systems don't generally run in full GPU mode all the time -- it's a huge amount of power to be re-drawing the screen that often, and that scales to poor battery life on mobile and expensive power costs in servers.

So that's one of many reasons practical OSes don't do their UIs with GPU shaders when they can otherwise get away with less.

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