11–20 of 92 posts
Cool insights in Desktop! I really hope that someone comes up with a desktop metaphor for the hundreds of open browser tabs (which I think are the new bookmarks) that hang open in an endless horizontal list. Imagine tabs which are like documents, can be moved around, minimized, and spatially organized in folders and subfolders. Actually, why does this not exist somehow?
TLDR: How to hack MATE to get window shading and spatial file management à la MacOS 9. Decently cool and interesting, but not worth the hour-long read IMHO.
Try some 3D creation tools, such as Autodesk Fusion or Blender. Those face a really hard problem. It took too many years to get 3D CAD and drawing up to a tolerable level. Selection in a cluttered 3D environment took a long time to solve. Most user-level GUIs are addressing a far simpler problem.
I'd just like to have borders back. They don't have to be big, or shadowed. Just present. I'm tired of overlapping borderless consoles in Ubuntu. Of web sites where there's a scrollable area with no border. Multiple scrollable areas with no border, as with Discord. Buttons with no indication of the live area. This stuff is borrowed from phones, but does not scale well to larger screens and more controls.
Furthermore, I use the tiling functionality heavily. There are about 10 apps I use regularly, and they launch and get bound to a particular workspace on startup. My screen remains uncluttered, with one app filling the viewport, and a single keystroke to switch to the other apps I use. It's pretty close to perfect for my use cases.
Lastly, these WMs are all configured through text files, so your exact configuration can be stored in dot files in git. In my case I use Nix, so I can redeploy my exact setup on any machine without any manual configuration.
Cool insights in Desktop! I really hope that someone comes up with a desktop metaphor for the hundreds of open browser tabs (which I think are the new bookmarks) that hang open in an endless horizontal list. Imagine tabs which are like documents, can be moved around, minimized, and spatially organized in folders and subfolders. Actually, why does this not exist somehow?
The wording has some ambiguity, but it does sound like TFA hasn't heard of Xerox or Perq - perhaps attributing some misplaced invention, rather than popularisation, to Apple.
Subsequently reinforced my suspicion:
> The spirit of the Macintosh spread throughout all of computing; the GUI was inexorably the future.
I think with desktop minimalism there's two broad interpretations - a desktop metaphor that is simple (has (frustratingly) few features), versus one that is complex but can be configured to be simple to operate.
I like the fact I can very precisely adjust the width and colour of my window borders, but it's not a configuration item I visit more than once every few years, so I wouldn't say the option adds to the complexity of the interface. (Disclaimer - I've never used MATE.)
> Oddly enough, only GNOME has had any kind of distinct vision
The author did use KDE early on (version 3, but says they've only been using a computer for a decade and change).
They're aware of other desktops, then, including the one that's arguably put the most effort into having a consistent user experience.
The discussion on navigating through minimised windows I think boils down to a consideration of how to represent complexity - similarly their discussion of the launcher - almost inevitably a hierarchy is required if we are aiming to 'avoid the keyboard at all costs'. People have different GUI preferences there - mine is generally narrow and deep, over wide and shallow.
The screenshot is 1920x1080. Screens are sold using buzzwords like 'HD', 'UHD', and 'retina' that evoke a sense of image clarity. I spent years telling my dad that I liked higher resolutions because it meant more /space/ and he couldn't grasp what I meant. He was stuck on associating higher resolution with clarity until I bought him a 43" 4k monitor, and he used it for a while. Even at 1.5x scaling, suddenly, he was able to view multiple pages of a document clearly at the same time without even scrolling. This isn't at all a normal desktop setup or the kind of setup that desktop environments are optimizing for or advocating. But it works better and better matches the inspiration.
MacOS 9 and the spatial desktop metaphor is neat. I went that route for a while. What this misses, however, is that the biggest problem with the desktop interface is that we've substantially increased application complexity and laptops (and even smaller devices) won. As a result, we're trying to answer the question "how we fit our skeuomorphic paradigm in a diminutive form factor". The inspiration involved much large…
MacOS 9 and the spatial desktop metaphor is neat. I went that route for a while. What this misses, however, is that the biggest problem with the desktop interface is that we've substantially increased application complexity and laptops (and even smaller devices) won. As a result, we're trying to answer the question "how we fit our skeuomorphic paradigm in a diminutive form factor". The inspiration involved much large…
Refreshingly so at times. Comparatively it’s very distraction free.
Whenever I fire it up to journal or fiddle with some classic MacOS development I always think, “Where did we manage to go so wrong in the last 30 years?”
MacOS 9 and the spatial desktop metaphor is neat. I went that route for a while. What this misses, however, is that the biggest problem with the desktop interface is that we've substantially increased application complexity and laptops (and even smaller devices) won. As a result, we're trying to answer the question "how we fit our skeuomorphic paradigm in a diminutive form factor". The inspiration involved much large…
For many people, the limiting factor of this is visual acuity though. I personally can't see it useful to have more than 2560x1440 equivalent pixels of space on a 27 inch monitor. For a larger monitor, you have to sit further back, so it is effectively the same. If you want to see more clearly, you'd need to get closer, but that causes issues since you are still limited by your available field of view.