I disagree, and these 2 posts describe my point well. 3D is not about eye candy. It is about user experience. That is why it is listed under Usability. The 3D effects have to be a useful addition to the experience. For example like Expose (and its clones) do, or the example I gave of minimizing a window. Besides that some effects give the user a slick feeling but these are only secondary; not the priority.

its user experience, just like a sugar high is...

lets get the basics working first, before we sugar coat everything...

Funny, gqil made the same joke a few months ago.

Many apologies to lcuk for incorrectly attributing this to qgil.

http://mg.pov.lt/maemo-irclog/%23mae...04-09T23:23:54

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20080314

@allnames..: Tell me what an informative 3D hint will tell you more than an informative 2D one?

Nevermind the fact that some applications will be better off with hardware rendering (like playing a movie) one has to realize the following propositions:

1) Nokia wants to bring the NIT to a bigger market;
2) Nokia is aiming to improve the usability of the device;
3) Diablo has several usability related changes e.g. not requiring reflashing anymore, and the software update tray icon;
4) The hardware is there, right now, in at least the n8x0 series; unused;
5) Competitors are actively using this very hardware (e.g. smartphones), or going to use a revision of this hardware (Pandora);
6) Besides direct competitors, the main 3 OSes (latest NT series, Vista; latest OSX series, Leopard; latest Linux & X.Org 7.x based OSes) use this functionality.

Back to your question, a valid, related question would be:

What is more user-friendy
1) An error, with sound, with its own theme colour (e.g. gray), popping up on screen, with no hardware rendering;
2) An error, with sound, with its own theme colour (.e.g gray) popping up on screen, with hardware rendering;
3) An error, with sound, fading from the original background of the current application to its own theme colour (e.g. gray), popping up on screen, without hardware rendering;
4) An error, with sound, fading from the original background of the current application to its own theme colour (e.g. gray), popping up on screen, with hardware rendering?

Similar question can be asked related to the minimizing of an application.

What, do you think, feels the best to the user? Although, sure, it does depend on some technical factors there is a general concensus on the correct answer, and it is related to the way the human mind works, and we're talking about a visual interface; not CLI.

What is the first thing you do when someone physically attacks you on the street? You evade the attack.

Although, in the case of an error or information popup, you do want to get the attention of the user, you don't want to harm the peace of mind a user has when she minimizes an application. Therefore, the above minimizing example counts more than the information popup (cleverly picked to support your argument I give you that...), but it doesn't mean the example is irrelevant, and there is room for further development. For example, I would like to see an information popup showing where the heck it is related to. IOW, visually showing its parent application.

Up front: I'm an advocate of 3D for usability. Much of it is glitz, which *can* enhance the user experience, but it also opens the door for new types of visualization that can provide novel ways of usefully viewing/using information not possible with static perspective 2D (a coined term representing classic Win95-esque desktops).

Take a look at this (specifically the first half). It's a good example of what is possible with acceleration mixed with cleverness.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/b...hotosynth.html

Sure this can be done in 2D, but I'm guessing that it would more easily and efficiently be accomplished with 3D hardware; not to mention kinder on the battery of certain tablets.

Even glitzy compositing windowing systems like compiz fusion receive usability benefits from acceleration.
1) Zoom out to see all windows
2) Zoom in to magnify
3) True transparency of varying opacity
4) Quick tiling of windows for application selection.
5) Increased UI responsiveness

}:^)~
YARR!

Caaaaap

I think you misunderstand me. I'm not against 3D and I'm not talking about hardware acceleration.

@allnamesareout and Capt'n Corrupt: The things you describe are just 2D done with hardware acceleration. I'm talking about things like 3D cubes and animating windows (axis rotation or melting to statusbar like in OSX and Compiz). They sure are pretty, but if you are trying to do something fast - they tend to just get in the way. iPhone out of this (didn't see one), but HTC TouchFLO is horrible and the various touch interfaces based on gestures i've seen are pointless and slow (not the effects, but the usage). I'm still using them though, since WM is even worse.

funny thing is that before we hade the 3D/gpu all upper tier grpahics cards did something called 2D acceleration. mind you, this is from as far back as windows 3.x or the isa bus...

these days the same feature have been folded into the 3D chip...

this is for online sharing in Internet (web-cam)
but
COWON iAudio A2 (A3) is not a recorder too;
it has almost same ARM processor with DSP on the board;
and it records 640x480, 30 fps, AVI with MPEG-4 compression as well...