Some thoughts for the future

[Ben Steeves]

On 6/29/05, Richard Kelsch <rich at csst.net> wrote:

>  Hold on there Nellie!  Oh please don't get me wrong about Gnome, Apple, and
> MS.  In fact, I happen to love Gnome and I like how it works...so far.  I
> also happen to like the OS X window manager of Apple.  Yes, the Apple gui
> has flaws, as does Gnome, and MS.  I dislike the MS gui, but at least they
> are making improvements.  The Gnome in some ways is very fast, but still has
> some responsiveness issue too.  This is, perhaps, more X related, but an
> issue nevertheless.
>  

You're confusing performance with interface -- if you take away the
tons of optimizations and the excellent compositor that Aqua has,
you're left with a very sloppy, ragtag interface.  The "window
manager" is more anemic than even Metacity, which people accuse
(wrongfully, IMHO) of being underpowered.  The OS X finder is broken
in several different ways, the Dock and the Menu Bar are poor
substitutions for GNOME panels, there are several *different* window
toolkits which produce different looking apps depending on which one
you use.  Are they pretty?  Sure.  Are they consistent?  Not at all.
GNOME, if you stick to using GNOME apps, is at least visually
consistent, and a lot of thought and testing has gone into making it
usable.  There's definitely room for improvement: X support for
clipboards and drag and drop still needs to be rationalized, for
example, but really, it's not much worse than Aqua's.

I agree with you that GNOME and X in general need optimization and
modernization -- and they're getting it from several different fronts
right now (see the xgl project, the luminocity branch of metacity,
etc... to get really excited about the future, read this:
http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/xrendering).  But it's important to
realize that that there are two completely orthogonal aspects of a
desktop user interface: the usability interface itself (of which GNOME
is the best I've ever used) and the performance  (in which, as you
say, Aqua is the winner so far).  You might argue they're not 100%
orthogonal, and they're probably not, but without going to extremes in
either, I think it's valid.

>  This may annoy the command line or simplicity die-hards out there, but eye
> candy is desirable in a GUI.  Anyone saying to the contrary never enjoyed
> the movie "Hackers."  On MS the company Stardock has the right idea.

Eye candy has its place (and isn't directly related to either
usability or performance, except in how it enhances or detracts from
either)... some of it can be functional, some of it is just pretty,
but a lot of it just gets in the way.  Not that I think it shouldn't
be available -- but it's not the sole reason to pick a user interface.
 Use OS X for more than a few weeks and I guarantee you'll get annoyed
with some of the eye candy.  And there's no way to turn most of it
off!!!

I originally decided to magnify on your post because you seemed to be
holding OS X up as the gold standard by which all other UIs should be
judged.  I just wanted to give you the perspective of someone who uses
OS X daily :-)
-- 
Ben Steeves                     _                    bcs at metacon.ca
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