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Re: XAML is good, but the threat is Avalon
by David Johnson on Friday 26/Mar/2004, @10:32
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"You can do great effects, rotation, shadows, transparency, scaling..."
That's just eye candy. While you want an interface to look good, you don't want it to look like a Hollywood special effects bonanza. That stuff does nothing to improve the usability of the interface. Hint: the usability improvements of Aqua over OS9 had nothing to do with its transparencies and animations. Those were just to get the media types to pay attention.
<em>If the Avalon threat goes unanswered we'll be back to the bad old days when you know you're running a unix app because of how crappy it looks.</em>
Unix looks crappy? Then you aren't running KDE. Plastik looks better than anything Microsoft offers, and you get to use real color schemes as well. Baghira simply rocks. You can't to anything like this in Windows. |
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Re: XAML is good, but the threat is Avalon
by Benjamin. on Friday 26/Mar/2004, @16:36
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Bahh. Eye candy??
I need scaling and rotation on every-day widgets for my real-world safety-related and well-established work-related problem area. If you can't scale interactive diagrams that describe the state of your power station you don't get out of the starting blocks. Don't try and tell me that it's just eye-candy.
Then go and look at Max OSX. A few minutes of using that and you'll be saying "I wish my user interface was as engaging as this for average users". While low-eyecandy GUIs are good and important in many areas, you can't say that having a toolkit that simply can't do it is a competitive advantage.
Unix used to look crappy? Yes. Five years ago you always knew whether you were running a UNIX app. If we're still where we are now in five years (assuming the longhorn ship date slips a few...) you'll again know you're running a UNIX app. There are places where the toolkits just have to be able to keep up.
Take a look at this video: http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv/episode.aspx?xml=episodes/en/20031028LHORNDB/manifest.xml
When QT/Kde can do that in about as many lines of code we'll be back on track.
For those without broadband, the video shows Avalon with a video playing in the background with transparent buttons and text boxes sitting on-top, rotated, and scaled to a size appropriate for the monitor. This is done by embedding the widgets (and some in-line text) in a text-flow layout, which in turn sits within a transform layout, which sits alongside the video playing in the same position within a canvas.
QT needs to adapt to be able to put everything in a canvas. There can't be any concept of a canvas item that is different from a regular widget. That, at least, needs to be done before Longhorn's release. If we ignore what is possible on other platforms we limit ourselves in where we can go with what we have.
Benjamin.
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Re: XAML is good, but the threat is Avalon
by Paul Eggleton on Friday 26/Mar/2004, @21:30
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Eh? Being able to scale an interactive diagram has nothing to do with the widget set used for standard applications. I would be very surprised if you could build such an interface with real widgets and have it practically usable - you'd be much better off writing a custom widget, just like you would now. These kind of special purpose diagramming applications have been built for years, without any of the things that Microsoft is proposing.
I'm not suggesting that some of these things aren't nice, but if you think they are absolutely necessary right now (and for mission-critical applications no less!) then I think you've been letting Microsoft whisper into your ear too long.
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Re: XAML is good, but the threat is Avalon
by anonymous anonymous on Saturday 27/Mar/2004, @23:22
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> When QT/Kde can do that in about as many lines of code we'll be back on track.
Hmm.. He is obviously trying to turn some peoples' anger up.
Its Qt/KDE not QT/Kde.
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Re: XAML is good, but the threat is Avalon
by noname on Saturday 27/Mar/2004, @03:29
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"Unix looks crappy?"
No.
"Plastik looks better than anything Microsoft offers,"
That's nonsense. Windows default style looks as good as Plastik, wether it is Luna, Win2000 Style oder 2003-Style. The Windows gimmicks (eye candy) work usually better because of higher graphics performance.
Btw, plastik looks good. But KDE (kdeartwork) is shipped with ~ 20 styles with 17 of them are made for trash can or aren't fully implemented. They should be dropped.
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Re: XAML is good, but the threat is Avalon
by Erik Engheim on Wednesday 31/Mar/2004, @18:27
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"Hint: the usability improvements of Aqua over OS9 had nothing to do with its transparencies and animations. Those were just to get the media types to pay attention."
I beg to differ. All the eye candy in Aqua is not as useless as people make it.
1.Icons: Large icons are easier to hit and click than small ones. The big icons in Aqua makes this possible (that they look good is a nice side effect). The realistic look of the icons makes them easier and faster to identify. In the old days the icons looked so bad often that you couldn't really make out what they represented or tell them apart.
That cartoon look is better than realistic ones is just bullshit. OS 9 use cartoon look on icons and I am much slower at identifying icons in OS 9 than OS X.
2.Valuable visual cues: When you minimize windows you clearly see where the window goes. This should help newbies figuring out where their windows went. It even helps power users sometimes. For instance when you close a palette window in Word for OS X its window is sucked into the button that toggles it. Makes it very easy to refind the button to redisplay it.
3.The vector graphics allows powerfull switching between windows alla Expose. Expose is really awsome. It is one of the great user interface inventions in many years.
4.The scaling effect in the dock allows you to more easily identify the minimized windows.
There are lots of other examples (like toolbars). The point is however that most of this eye candy serves a purpose. Often it gives valuable visual cues to the user about the effects of the operation he performed.
In fact I would argue that XP has useless eye candy and OS X does not. In XP the webish user interfaces often have bitmaps and such to pretty up dialogs. However the bitmaps can't be clicked, display no information or serve any other function than decor. In Aqua the eyecandy at least serve a purpose if not for all users.
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