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

71–80 of 185 posts

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

#71

Post by peatmoss »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #69
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.

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.

In the case of animations that provide visual clues, I wonder if animations could be adaptive to slowly get out of people’s way as they get more familiar.

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

#72

Post by lloeki »

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.

Maybe your md index is borked. Look into the mdutil (maintenance) and mdfind (search) commands.

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

#73

Post by mikepurvis »

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.

I'm back on Windows 10 now after a decade of MacOS.

But my recollection is that it's fine as a search feature, and not that great as a launcher— if you just blindly type a prefix and press enter (as you can on Windows or Ubuntu), you end up launching a window of extended search results. Maybe I was doing it wrong somehow, but whenever I used Spotlight to search for an app, I needed to type it in, wait for the search to completely resolve, and then use the mouse to select and launch the application out of the results.

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

#74

Post by lloeki »

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.)

Not just FS metadata, it can index ID3 tags, EXIF, and whatnot, and it’s fairly extensible, although underused.

Kind of like the underpinning concept of AppleScript and app dictionaries, awesome tech and concepts, but it’s sad to see the promise of the extensible, composable desktop slowly dying.

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

#75

Post by dnadler »

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.

As far as the filesystem goes, navigating in Windows with the keyboard is WAY easier.

I can't seem to figure out how to effectively navigate the file system on MacOS without resorting to the terminal. I routinely have trouble locating mounted file systems, can't figure out how to type in a specific path I want to go to, etc. These things are trivial on Windows, but seem not to be possible on MacOS. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and assume that I'm just too used to Windows to discover this functionality, but it's a real PITA.

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

#76

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

hokkos wrote: post #30
sixothree wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is Project Glass in this context? Forgive my ignorance, but search is confusing here.

Maybe a reference to Sun's Locking Glass project ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXv8VlpoK_g

Looking Glass was a real window manager though.

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

#77

Post by stareatgoats »

kick wrote: 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.

Could many AI chat bot developers be live testing their bots on Reddit?

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

#78

Post by fxtentacle »

0xffff2 wrote: post #68
hbosch wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pu…

Me too. I dislike both t-shirts with useless text on them and apps with useless animations in them.

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

#80

Post by kick »

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.

Flat design is more simple than skeuomorphism, almost by definition.

What you seem to want is complexity.

Post reply on HN