Future AmigaOS GUI

[porneL]

Screen/window chooser as cycle gadget - LOVELY.

jumping mouse pointer sux.
animated elements could become annoying after few hours.

[SnowBord]

Just about the only thing that tells you that there is a button in Windows is that you know the general location for it. With a quick glance, it is impossible to differ between buttons and ordinary text/imagery.

ok but tell me this.. what imagery in windows does not afford some sort of function after you left or right click it??  Why should it be labelled a 'button' anyhow??  It is (in most cases, something amiga can't pray for any time soon) a pictoral representation of a function.

Sometimes you can't get away from traditional buttons, and this is not a bad thing..  But where the UI can be made more pleasant and decrease the time ncecessary to locate items, the end result is a positive one.

is it people like you who are tree-hugging old concepts and an outdated OS that have the functionality they deserve from their OS?
or is it OS's developed by companies who have done, and continue to invest millions in their User Interfaces?

The Amiga OS is the outcast don't forget.  Lots of borders and frames STRESS the eyes and can work AGAINST the goal of finding what you want quickly...

Why should a button look like an old button??  You like it purely because you have been conditioned to accept it, and now find an alternative approach far too shocking.

As for the keyboard reference - it is not a feasible one.  Removing the borders of the buttons would make everything highly confusing, as there are TOO MANY letters, and.. THEY ARE LETTERS!  Humans remember and locate image references far faster than textual ones (in the right application ofcourse).
I mean, spreadsheets don't remove their cell borders just because the UI is upgraded..  in their case it is not applicable, just as in the keyboard example.
And here's one that IS an improvement - If you have a hotplate for cooking food which is an old electric design and a new one.
What do sane rational people prefer??  The flat glass surface hotplates over the traditional 'you can see the heating element and a hole beneath it' approach, complete with borders and separation of hotplates'.
Flat elegant glass or lots of ridges and exposed bits?
you decide.

Either way, I'm done arguing.
Why do some Amiga users feel so threatened by UI advances??  AmigaOS doesn't have it yet but big deal.. learn from the research of others.

[SimoAmi]

porneL wrote:
jumping mouse pointer sux.

Let's say I like to explore possibilities. changing the mouse pointer's color after click is a nice visual interaction that I haven't seen in other any other OS.

animated elements could become annoying after few hours.

What are you referring to?

[mdwh2]

SnowBord wrote:
2. The theory being you can get access to your most frequently used commands... hence do stuff quicker.
The goal is to increase the learnability of the package by new users by hiding a zillion potentially confusing options.  Again, increasing learnability is a HCI plus.

Except that when you've used an interface for a while, many people I would say (at least, I do) find their way quickly to the menu option (or button come to that) based on the position. If the position is likely to change randomly, then I either have to carefully read each item everytime I choose an option, or risk clicking on the wrong items.

Thankfully this option can be switched off, but I found it one of the more annoying Windows "features".

Other things I dislike about the Windows GUI:

- Menu items on windows - it's quicker to access menu options when you can just shoot the mouse up to the top of the screen.

- Scrollbar arrows being the complete opposite end of the scrollbar. It means that if I want to 'fine-tune' the position, I have to move the mouse a long distance when I overshoot.

- Also on scrollbars, the fact that the window/scrollbar reverts to its original position if you move the mouse too far away from the scrollbar. I never understood why they did this. Countless times I've scrolled through a large amount of data, and then had to redo it because I had moved the mouse a bit too far just as I release the button.

[SnowBord]

the pointer colour change is a neat idea that indeed should be explored..

[SnowBord]

mdwh2:
- Scrollbar arrows being the complete opposite end of the scrollbar. It means that if I want to 'fine-tune' the position, I have to move the mouse a long distance when I overshoot.

- Also on scrollbars, the fact that the window/scrollbar reverts to its original position if you move the mouse too far away from the scrollbar. I never understood why they did this. Countless times I've scrolled through a large amount of data, and then had to redo it because I had moved the mouse a bit too far just as I release the button.

couldnt agree more with these points.  This has long pissed me off too...

Except that when you've used an interface for a while, many people I would say (at least, I do) find their way quickly to the menu option (or button come to that) based on the position. If the position is likely to change randomly, then I either have to carefully read each item everytime I choose an option, or risk clicking on the wrong items.

very true... i just brought up the theory behind it... personally im not 100% sure it's for me (well definately not the reordering of menus).
either way, they're trying to find new ways of doing things.. no doubt their ideas will not be to everyone's taste..  they're on a whole different level from AmigaOS - AmigaOS is struggling to get a coherent modern look for it's UI (and has finally begain to achieve it), while M$ and Apple are pushing the boundaries forwards.

As for menus, valid point... perhaps they are keen to make it obvious that the menus are associated with a window, and like for them to be visible..  I personally prefer Amiga's approach (with MagicMenu ofcourse..)
Hell, even JAVA with it's latest SWING GUI engine looks sweet (1.3 and less didn't look too hot)..

as a whole though, there's far more positives in their GUI than negatives.

[mdwh2]

teotwin wrote:
Yes ive seen thode examples before, and there are many many more examples of bad application gui designs. But that is it, they are looking at *applications*, we are trying to focus on the underlying toolkit used to display those applications. Nothing will stop coders making bad ui decisions, and thank god some of the MS teams that do the gui's for the apps are not resonsible for the gui for the OS. At least coders should be given the proper tools for creating good interfaces. As much as amiga lovers hate to admit it, windows IS far ahead in term of gui layout. You can pick at the irrelevant crap specific apps they have screwed up but the fact still remains that the underlying gui toolkit has firmly kicked aos's but over the years and we are still tryingt o catch up. Hence our suggestions.

I still prefer MUI over Windows in various areas, so I wouldn't say it's a clear cut case that Windows kicks AOS' butt. One area where I think the Windows toolkit lets down programmers is the area of making resizable windows. Of course, it is possible to have resizable windows in Windows, and this is the case where they are obviously needed. But countless times I've seen various options windows which aren't resizable - sometimes they don't need it, but sometimes they do have some small textbox or list which I'd love to make larger, but I can't (random examples off the top of my head: the Advanced tab under Internet Explorer options, or the View Logs window on mirc). On the other hand, every MUI window is resizable (and it looks like this is true of Reaction, though I've never programmed it so I'm not sure how it works). On a similar note is the problem that unresizable windows are less likely to cope well with things like different font sizes and so on. This just isn't a problem under MUI. There seem to be various reasons for this:

- "Visual" tools such as "Visual" C++ encourage designing windows with fixed coordinates (ie, point and click create gadgets at the specified position). Visual tools are less common on the Amiga, and no sane programmer wants to hand code interfaces with specified X,Y values;)
- Imo, I prefer the MUI mechanism for creating resizable interfaces (you're saying things like "place these gadgets in a row", and then leaving MUI to work out the resizing, where as in Borland Builder, it's slightly more fiddly given different Anchor and Align properties to the gadgets - and I never worked out how to do it in Visual C++, though I presume it is possible somehow..).
- Lastly, windows *have* to be resizable in MUI (unless MUI determines that this isn't necessary - maybe it's possible to force non-resizable windows, but it doesn't come by default). Under Windows, programmers are often more likely to opt for the easier non-resizable windows.

ps, I welcomed the idea of borderless buttons, they say (in your quote) it just common sense to have borders, do they give any reasoning? I find the borders irritating, add clutter and are completely uneeded. And its not just microsoft doing it, look at adobe's latest offerings, etc etc. If its such a bad idea why has osx and linux adopted it? Dont put to much faith in things just because they bash MS.

One problem with borderless buttons/menus is that it's less obvious what is part of the interface, and what is just text. Okay, in practice I know what a menu under Windows looks like, so it doesn't seem to matter, but this something that could make things harder for newbies. Occasionally I've found websites which redefine the links so that they don't appear underlined, and I often find those very hard to navigate, having to randomly click on text, not knowing what's a link, and what isn't.

I don't know why Apple, Microsoft, etc copy even the bad ideas off of each other.. I wish they didn't.

[chris]

I'm going to jump in here, I'm a bit late maybe but I have a few points I'd like to make...

1. Microsoft GUI techniques.
Windows is possibly the most inconsistent GUI I have used, it's even worse than AmigaOS - as at least you can configure all the different GUI toolkits to look and operate the same way on the Amiga.  There are a few different designs of the window menus - some highlight when you move the mouse over them, some hide items you haven't used recently, some you can even move elsewhere.  File requesters are even worse, with several different designs depending mainly on when the program was written, as far as I can tell.  In AmigaOS, when asl.library is updated, all the programs using asl.library for requesters automatically get the new look.  With Windows, all these old designs still seem to be hanging around.  Either everything is staticly linked at compile time, or there are thousands of old routines in DLLs which, rather than being replaced, have been kept - there is some bad design there if they can't just update the DLLs and automatically get the new designs to all programs.  Even the XP themes don't extend to the Command Prompt titlebar.  It really is a mess.

2. Bringing windows to front with Intuition
I believe OS4 has a feature where you can hold a key down and click on any part of a window to bring it to the front.  I think you can do this with old versions too, with the aid of a commodity such as ClickToFront.

3. I like the official OS4 design, I like Simoami's design too but there are more things I don't like about it (why different coloured window gadgets? The screen titlebar looks a bit cluttered).  One thing the icons could do with on OS4 is a few more colours.  Next to the gradients etc, the GlowIcons look a bit low-coloured.  The other thing with the GlowIcons is that the shadow effect should ideally be alpha-channeled so it properly casts a shadow, the design tends to look a bit strange on certain backgrounds otherwise - same with the glow effect.  Having said that, I do like GlowIcons and they are much nicer than the sort of rubbish you get on Windows.

Erm, that'll do for now.

Chris

[SimoAmi]

The screen titlebar looks a bit cluttered).

It probably is, but the purpose here is to show how useful it can be.

Also, you'll notice small dots separating those different applets.

Actually you can drag out applets to hide them and free some space on the titlebar or click the boingball on the extreme left to select Preferences and add any other applet(s) !

[chris]

I do really like the design of the mouse pointer... the rest looks like some sort of freaky AmigaOS/MacOSX/Windows hybrid.  I'm not saying I don't like it, I just don't think I could use it regulary.  Soz.

Chris

[SimoAmi]

spotUP wrote:
OK... seems like most guys dislikes the screenshots sent out by Hyperion so far. Why not make a poll on which default theme we would like to see shipped with OS4, right here on amiga.org and forward the results to Hyperion? That way we could show them what we, the users, would like the default GUI to look like.

The poll could look something like this;

Which default GUI would you want to see in OS4?

1. "Official" Hyperion GUI.
2. SimoAmi GUI.
3. XXXX.
4. XXXX.

Maybe we could include links to the mockups too.

It would sound like I'm challenging Hyperion's efforts, but my intention is only to contribute.

I did contact Ben for the GUI concepts a couple of months ago. He, in turn posted links at OS4 internal mailing list so that people involved can take a look at it and see if I can contribute in building the GUI for OS4. I haven't received any feedback on the subject since then.

[Hammer]

1. Microsoft GUI techniques.
Windows is possibly the most inconsistent GUI I have used, it's even worse than AmigaOS -
 

Did you forget' Windows Server 2003' (out of the box)?
 
".exe.manifest" script may force XP GUI for non-XP era programs. Compatibility is not guaranteed.

 

as at least you can configure all the different GUI toolkits to look and operate the same way on the Amiga.
 

At the current AmigaOS 3.9; third party tools maybe needed for extended visual enhancements e.g. Birdie/Visual Pref.  

With Windows, all these old designs still seem to be hanging around. Either everything is staticly linked at compile time, or there are thousands of old routines in DLLs which, rather than being replaced, have been kept
 

One of the main strength of Windows is its legacy compatibility (i.e. investment protection). This is one of the main boat anchors on why the mainstream market sticks with Windows.  

Microsoft’s “design for XP” logo regimes enable the customer to look for XP GUI consistency (or close to ~90 percent consistency).

It’s a balance between breaking compatibility VS visual appeasement.  

Having said that, I do like GlowIcons and they are much nicer than the sort of rubbish you get on Windows.

They are about the same in my POV i.e. there’s nothing about them to make them stand out from the crowd.

I do use and operate AmigaOS 3.9 (Boing bags 1) enhanced with Birdie2000/VisualPref/Magicmenu/(plus others) AND WindowsXP-Pro-SP1 enhanced with StyleXP.  

One of the next possible Windows GUI can be seen here. http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2003/0509/k1_6.htm

[KingTutt]

SimoAmi. check you PMs man!

Anyway Hammer, Longhorn doesn't impress me in the slightest. Moving the API to OpenGL and the like is just a natural progression. I think that by AOS5, our beloved OS will be established enough to make the transition to 3D rendered icons and UI.

And whent that happens, oh... when that happens, it will be pretty.. so very pretty.

Thank God Amiga is getting back into the race. It couldn't of picked a better time!

[redfox]

@SimoAmi

Very nice!   :-D

I have been very impressed with your screenshots in the past and now.

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redfox

[redfox]

@teotwin

Good suggestions!  :-D

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redfox

[CodeSmith]

One of the next possible Windows GUI can be seen here. http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2003/0509/k1_6.htm

Oh, *that* is the reason behind the 128MB 3D accelerator requirement.

At this rate, the MS UI group is going to put demo crews out of a job  :-P