RE: Questions

["Jared White" <jwhite gaeldesign com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: gnome-gui-list-admin gnome org
> [mailto:gnome-gui-list-admin gnome org]On Behalf Of Guillermo S. Romero
> / Familia Romero

> > ways it's less elegant and refined than Mac OS 8/9 IMO.  Also
> the pointless
> > eye candy annoys a lot of people, it looks cool at first but
> soon it just
> > slows the user down.
>
> Yep, eye candy can be really distracting, cos user does not know where
> things are, of if an area does something. But everyone wants eyecandy,
> no? /me runs.

OK, I know this is off-topic at this point, but I just want to say that I
strongly disagree with any "pointless eye candy" accusations concerning Mac
OS X. What's pointless about having ultra-readable text, widgets that you
can actually pick out from a window, and icons that magnify so you can see
what the heck they are? Sure, Mac OS X may not bring much new to the
interface table, but it's hands down one of the best WIMP-based GUIs around
at the moment. The only "eye candy" thing I might agree is a bit
over-the-top is the Genie effet, but the whole animation only takes less
than one second on a 500Mhz G4 PowerBook. Big deal.

I've been using Mac OS X quite a lot for almost a month now, and I find the
eye candy refreshing, not distracting. It's about time computer interfaces
looked like they were designed by artists in Photoshop, instead of looking
like they were slapped together in ten minutes by someone with MS Paint. No
offense, but the gray boxes with little 1 pixel lines mode of interface
design is *woefully* outdated. The only reason I can think of that anyone's
still doing that is because no one has managed to come up with a
sophisticated graphics layer that could handle professional graphics
functions in real-time until now with Quartz in OS X.

I don't want to get into any big arguments here, so I won't go on any
further, but I do want to say this: GNOME and KDE have a lot to live up to
now. A *lot* to live up to. Let's hope they can rise to the occasion.

Jared