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“I made an operating system UI within Unity”

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

#111

Post by etaioinshrdlu »

arexxbifs wrote: post #93
kick wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flat design is more simple than skeuomorphism, almost by definition. What you seem to want is complexity.

There's plenty of middle ground between the current extreme flatness and, say, MacOS X Tiger. An interface with a simple 3D bevel look (such as in Motif or the toolkit in NeXTStep) is no more skeuomorphic than than a flat interface, especially not considering how prevalent touchscreen controls are today. Flatness to the current point of minimalism is, to me, very taxing and complex. Things blend together so much it's…

I miss the look of MacOS X Tiger so much. It was a thing of beauty.

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

#112

Post by designcode »

mbf1 wrote: post #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.

OSX and iOS would probably disagree

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

#113

Post by Narishma »

musicale wrote: post #108

In the 1970s and 1980s, GUIs devoted a large portion of the machine's power (and other resources such as memory and disk space) to improving usability. This reduced raw application performance and power efficiency but it was considered a worthwhile tradeoff. For years we've been optimizing battery life, but now that mobile devices can run for 8-10 hours or more on a single charge, perhaps we should reconsider spendin…

Maybe it's because it uses (at least at launch, dunno if they every changed it for something else) Web tech for it's interface?

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

#114

Post by pwthornton »

This is like Windows Vista Aero UI on crack.

There is a reason that UIs don't look like this. The transparency alone is a major issue for usability, accessibility, and productivity.

It's an interesting project. I wish this person would have pushed themselves to think of new paradigms, rather than trying to use more effects to very staid looking interaction design concepts.

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

#115

Post by thiht »

mirimir wrote: post #105
rhacker wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yeah, same here. Like, what's the point of an "operating system UI" in a Linux desktop environment? But then, I also don't get the point of doing that in some game engine called Unity. I mean, is that a viable way to do a desktop?

You're literally on Hacker news. Not everything needs to be viable. Fun is enough.

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

#116

Post by kick »

threatofrain wrote: post #97
kick wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flat design is more simple than skeuomorphism, almost by definition. What you seem to want is complexity.

Easy isn’t always so simple.

Correct, but flat design is objectively simpler than skeuomorphism.

I don't even mind skeuomorphism, I quite like it, but it's just bullheaded-error that has people claiming that it's simpler than flat design.

Complexity isn't a sin or something.

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

#117

Post by [deleted] »

presidentender wrote: post #92
MrLeap wrote: post #40

Years ago, when I was adapting field manuals into Unity Games -- I got asked to create some training for a piece of field kit that relied heavily on a windows mobile device (very early windows mobile, that had a registry -- could run some win32 apps, had a noticeable delay of like 350ms between every input and it reacting...) I had that new-job-gotta-impress energy, so went _hard_ at this project. I added so many tin…

I worked for the same field-manual-into-Unity employer for a few years, first doing DoDAF architectures on a contract on Ft Huachuca, switching to the serious games division for a small number of weeks before I politely quit in frustration. We spent years building what amounted to UML diagrams of existing Army units. Great effort went into them. Coordination with active-duty officers, with GS civilian stakeholders, t…

[deleted]

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

#118

Post by kllrnohj »

mbf1 wrote: post #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.

Your phrasing of this is a bit unclear. I think you mean that no "real" UI redraws when nothing has changed.

But otherwise most operating systems do run in full GPU mode all the time. The true-mobile ones, so iOS & Android, are almost always using dedicated hardware to handle composition without spinning up the GPU (although both use the GPU to render, so whenever something does change it's immediately back on the GPU), but "desktop" ones are generally always doing GPU composition as long as the display is on. With some hand-wavy exceptions to that primarily for video layers in select circumstances with proper hardware support.

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

#119

Post by PointersAreFun »

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.

NextStep 4 actually, Objective-C and OpenStep were like manna from heaven and are still with us

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

#120

Post by dsfyu404ed »

presidentender wrote: post #92
MrLeap wrote: post #40

Years ago, when I was adapting field manuals into Unity Games -- I got asked to create some training for a piece of field kit that relied heavily on a windows mobile device (very early windows mobile, that had a registry -- could run some win32 apps, had a noticeable delay of like 350ms between every input and it reacting...) I had that new-job-gotta-impress energy, so went _hard_ at this project. I added so many tin…

I worked for the same field-manual-into-Unity employer for a few years, first doing DoDAF architectures on a contract on Ft Huachuca, switching to the serious games division for a small number of weeks before I politely quit in frustration. We spent years building what amounted to UML diagrams of existing Army units. Great effort went into them. Coordination with active-duty officers, with GS civilian stakeholders, t…

I had an intern that whipped up a new set of training walk through slides and used MS paint to draw color coded boxes and arrows on screenshots to teach you how to use it. It was like a day of work for him. People with C in their job title saw that PowerPoint. It was a really damn good training presentation.

I call it Schrodinger's work. Maybe it matters to someone, maybe it doesn't. You don't know until you do it. The stuff you spend a month on winds up being worthless and the stuff that you spend an hour on winds up being used everywhere. There's no telling which is which. Such is life creating support documentation for systems that live and die by things outside your team's control.

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