351–360 of 407 posts
No mention of GeOS! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Softworks
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I'm fairly certain (an earlier iteration of) that came out in Windows Vista which is nearly 20 years ago. It was called Aero Snap.
I didn't know that. I actually used Windows until 2019 and only learned about this feature last week. Well, that does it: UI has only gotten worse.
And Windows-shift-up to make a window fill the vertical space of the screen without changing its width.
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RE: GEM, the Atari SM124 monochrome monitor was actually a super high quality monitor that was known at the time for producing a crisp comfortable image, and it was higher resolution (640x400) than the Mac (512x342). GEM on it actually looked really good. The problem was two fold: with the Atari you had the choice of one or the other (colour or mono), the colour was very low resolution, GEM looked squished and crappy…
I don't know what happened to GEM. As someone who used them all GEM was superior to both Windows 1 and Windows 2. Macintosh had them all beat although it was a slower machine. But GEM didn't seem to advance and when Windows 3 came out they were toast. For me Windows 3 (and especially 3.1) was the first time where you could work all day without having to drop to the DOS prompt to get work done. I was running Windows 3…
Its original advocate and designer, Lee Lorenzen, left DR to go create his own startup and make Ventura Publisher (which shipped with its own copy of GEM). Which was then bought up by Xerox. Which is also where Lorenzen came from in the first place before DR. (GEM came out of his desire to build out a Xerox Star-like system for commodity PCs, which he tried to pitch at Xerox but failed, so did at DR instead.)
On the ST side it went off in other directions, the two codebases forked significantly.
You might be looking at these old Unix GUIs thinking they're shit compared to now, but actually, at the time, they were shit too.
Yep even the later ones. I used to sit in front of a Solaris CDE desktop locked in a basement. Made me want to slit my wrists. The colour scheme, how it worked, the peformance. All horrible. I used RISC OS at home. Was wonderful to come back to that.
Still love the old Acorn machines. I mostly use Arculator[0] nowadays for that nostalgia though.
I can't help thinking about how much we have lost. Just finding the scrollbar nowadays can be a challenge. Not to mention if you want to resize a pane - in some applications they seem to have taken extra steps to make it difficult to find the line to grab.
We also lost clearly identifiable buttons, loading bars (replaced with throbbers), status bars that tell you what you're hovering over and what the program is doing, stable UIs to develop muscle memory, etc. But we did gain some nice things! - Tabs. - Titlebar buttons and other space-saving measures. - Document editors remembering unsaved changes. - Forms that validate on focus lost, instead of submission. - Ctrl+P m…
Just give me the option to view a log of what is happening under the hood. Tell me which step of the process you are at, what files are you copying etc.
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With a better API we could have a progress bar that goes through the TCP/IP stack: advance when the domain is resolved, when a handshake is finished, when the request is sent, when the response starts streaming back, when the response finishes. It'd be a very jumpy bar, but it helps develop intuitions. "The first part is always slower on this machine", "when it gets stuck on this spot I need to reset my router", "thi…
Perhaps an aside, but the things we do to compensate for the warts of TCP are staggering.
Even if fetch ran over UDP, or a direct serial connection, or IP over Avian carrier, it'd still be a poor API that doesn't allow progress indication.
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> loading bars (replaced with throbbers) There is a very practical reason for this; most GUI apps are webapps (whether local or not is irrelevant), and the fetch API was so poorly thought out that it was not possible to get an indicate of progress - all if gives you is inprogress or done (nothing in between). As a result the loading indicator can only indicate in-progress or done. There might have been worse ways to…
As a result the loading indicator can only indicate in-progress or done. This is a failure of whatever framework the web dev is leaning on instead of actually programming the computer. It is perfectly possible to get real progress information other than yes/no. Web sites had it for years before lazy spinners took over.
>> As a result the loading indicator can only indicate in-progress or done.
> This is a failure of whatever framework the web dev is leaning on instead of actually programming the computer.
No, it's a failure of fetch.
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> This sort of worked when the opinionated manager was Steve Jobs. Steve indirectly had a hand in this, by emphasizing the humanities. That, unfortunately, backfired as a sort of positive feedback loop. Someone hired a few underemployed artists onto the team, and the artists invited all their friends and soon took over the department. People that in an alternate timeline would be smoking weed whilst sculpting wood in…
idk, i think your underestimating the ubiquity and resources behind stuff like A/B and usability testing nowadays. Certainly a much more sophisticated way of determining whether people are able to find what they need.
Probably also worth dropping this here in the off chance someone here will be part of today's lucky 10,000. http://toastytech.com/guis/ At first glance it looks like this is much more breadth over depth. Quite an array of systems here.
ToastyTech is wonderful but don't forget GUIdebook, which also is. https://guidebookgallery.org/
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> I dislike how it is 'developers first' and not 'users first', There are user-centric and dev-centric Linux distros. Windows is "Microsoft cloud onboarding" centric, and the experience has been dramatically degrading for years. If that were not the case, why would senior executives at Microsoft say things like "we've heard you" and "we intend to reverse the suck in the coming year"? Even their management knows users…
> These things are objectively better on a modern KDE linux They are not. I use a KDE distribution at work. I regularly see GPU texture copy bugs like random lines across the middle of the display, or along the bottom edge. I use a 4K 144 Hz 16:9 display, and the Linux platform absolutely struggles with getting the scaling, resolution, and colour depth on all the dozens of GUI toolkits correct. Subpixel antialiasing…
Right now my laptop is connected to 4K Dell display and it works perfectly in clamshell mode. I never saw any random lines across the middle of display, GPU acceleration seems to work fine, WebGPU in my Chromium browser works fine, video decode accelerated so 4K video eats a tiny bit of CPU. I can't say anything regarding color depth, everything seems to work fine for me. My display reports "3840x2160, 60Hz 30bit" info. I'm using 2x scaling and fonts are rendered properly (not blurry) in all applications I'm using.
My WiFi is configured using NetworkManager, I don't have iwd installed and systemd-networkd is not enabled. It somewhat helps that I'm using Arch and I decide what to install and what to enable.
I agree that Android provides much more polished system and I'd be happy to switch to desktop Android if that ever will be a thing. I don't like Linux desktop. It's just the only desktop operating system that does not suck for me.