maemo.org - Talk - can the '08 GUI be ANY crappier?

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- - can the '08 GUI be ANY crappier? (https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=23147)

Re: can the '08 GUI be ANY crappier?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bundyo (Post 218264)

Yup, but that's your modern these days. If you're not throwing around some pictures with any number of fingers - you're so old news. :)

But this one beats them all...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0ODskdEPnQ

With a very large and spiky mace. :D

Man, what a pile of... pdfs.

Re: can the '08 GUI be ANY crappier?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bundyo (Post 218264)

i cant make up my mind if thats the smartest, or silliest way of interacting with files that i have ever seen.

i cant help but wonder what would happen if one where to remove the initial empty window of programs that need a file to be "useful". so that rather then going to the editor to make a new text file, one create a new, empty text file, and then open it, bringing one into the editor.

but i guess apple has a patent on that (its the file creation system they used in lisa)...

Re: can the '08 GUI be ANY crappier?

Quote:

Originally Posted by tso (Post 218319)

If so, then IBM must have paid them, because that's how we did things in OS/2 Warp.

Re: can the '08 GUI be ANY crappier?

Quote:

Originally Posted by fiferboy (Post 218163)

Qole, I think part of the problem auto-hildonizing would be restricting all GTK programs to a small set of features. For example, Hildon applications can only have one menu, while GTK applications can have as many menus as they want. Hildon applications, while able to have more than one toolbar, would look pretty silly with 8 toolbars stacked along the bottom - not to mention there would be very little usable real estate.

That is not to say that some things could not be auto-hildonized, like hildon input method. I have no idea why all editable text areas do not have this automatically, other than the fact that code would have to be moved into GTK.

I am by no means an expert on this, but I can see why Hildon is a layer on top of GTK. Having small-screen support built into GTK would be another option, but would certainly be much more complicated and I think many applications (Xournal, Abiword, Gnumeric, etc) would not be quite as nice as their Hildonized counterparts.

The Hildonisation of GTK apps is somewhat similar to the 'embeddization' of QT I believe. But in QT apps built for the QT Embedded version (Zaurus apps as an example), all you had to do to change QT apps to have the interfaces like QT embedded apps was invoke one call to the QTPE library instead of the QT library in your converted program. The rest was automatically taken care of.
There were a few features /calls absent from QTPE as against QT so make it more suitable for a handheld platform and to make it a smaller footprint platform.
This made conversion very easy.

I am not aware how much of a change it is for hidonization of GTK apps though. But I understand the underlying philosophy of having a UI suitable for handheld devices against a full fledged desktop system. But maybe the difference is that while Hildon is a layer sitting on GTK, QT Embedded (known as Qtopia) was a seperate port of QT for embedded devices, so in that way, it may not be directly comparable.

Re: can the '08 GUI be ANY crappier?

Quote:

Originally Posted by danramos (Post 218297)

I still consider myself a moderate and would prefer to be able to use either and have the tablet detect it. So there.

lol. You'll get no argument from me. :)

Re: can the '08 GUI be ANY crappier?

Quote:

Originally Posted by tso (Post 218319)

but i guess apple has a patent on that (its the file creation system they used in lisa)...

Apple got all that stuff free from Xerox (who really invented the GUI, mouse, etc). That's why many of us laughed at their silly lawsuit against Microsoft years ago... just like the judges did. ; )

Re: can the '08 GUI be ANY crappier?

Quote:

Originally Posted by sjgadsby (Post 218243)

Oh yes, you think it's annoying when you bump your home applets out of position now? Wait until they rocket across the screen and deform other applets upon collision.

Even moreso than the Moblin example (or BumpTop, etc.), this would actually be really cool... What if the Maemo "desktop" was actually a huge virtual (extended) area that could be flicked and scrolled to any position... Iconsets could be created in different areas, applets (photos, videos, whatever) could be positioned in random places... Flicking and scrolling to different locations could be defined by finger gestures... Ooh! :)

-T.

Re: can the '08 GUI be ANY crappier?

Quote:

Originally Posted by tso (Post 218319)

i cant make up my mind if thats the smartest, or silliest way of interacting with files that i have ever seen.

3D desktop metaphors like that one in the video only work for a limited number of files. Try that with the thousands of files on a _real_ system - (wait whiie I count..) - eh, 239685 files, that's in my home directory tree, i.e. my user account (a bit more than I expected, really..).

It's just like with the 3D file manager in Jurassic Park ("This is Unix. I know Unix", anyone?). You could actually download that filemanager from SGI, which I did, and promptly found to be 100% impossible to use in practice. Such things only works in demo setups with a few files and directories - unfortunately, because they can _look_ nice! :D

Re: can the '08 GUI be ANY crappier?

ta-t3, i wrote the graffiti view whilst at Linuxtag this year for exactly the same reason.
The "physics" view in liqbase works as a paradigm until you get to a certain limit.

After that it looks **** and cluttered and breaks and becomes unusable.
Graffiti now displays ~ 1000 sketches :)

I'm keeping the live physics view for smaller groupings however (read: tag clouds)

Re: can the '08 GUI be ANY crappier?

Quote:

Originally Posted by TA-t3 (Post 218473)

3D desktop metaphors like that one in the video only work for a limited number of files. Try that with the thousands of files on a _real_ system - (wait whiie I count..) - eh, 239685 files...

As an artist, I really like metaphors like that. And, if I think of the metaphor not a a complete fuilesystem, but what I usually keep on my desktop (usually less than a hundred items), I think it could really work... Where I really see it working, though, is on the web -- think Opera's "Speed Dial" (which is made somewhat practical in the Mozilla Aurora project).

I'll stress again, though, that Nokia's plans for the Internet Tablet is not to make a hacker's tool (or even a programmer's tool), but to create an easy-to-use multimedia device for average everyday-user's. So, in most of these regards, I assume that eye-candy will always beat a programmer's ideal for functionality. So, in large regard, we really must all just get over it...mustn't we? Or, look for a device that's made for programmers (<ahem>Windows desktop<ahem>). :p

-T.