What are your thoughts on GUI?

[Trapitalism]

Everything should look like winamp circa 2004.
We have the technology to do this with vector graphics so it scales to any resolution but all the big open source vector rendering libraries are still in their infancy and design has gone down the toilet so everything is fugly as hell.

Also, nothing beats the command line for compiling and other programming related tasks.

How the fuck did we get devolve with design as time advanced? Lazy graphic designers.

 

[Pee Cola]

All the GUI one needs. Runs like a champ on a 7MHz CPU with 1MB RAM.

 

[BlueSpark]

Ross should stick to making funny gaming videos, his UI ideas are awful.

-Who would rather wave their arms around to control their PC instead of simply moving their wrists and fingers slightly: imagine working on a project for hours and having to gesture at the screen over and over.

-Hitting the buttons in the corners of the window by accident isn't going to happen very often to anyone with basic motor control skills. No wonder it takes him so long to put out videos if he's this inept.

-Things that work don't need to be changed for the sake of change: that's how you end up with garbage like Windows 8.

-His argument that Microsoft's monopoly being why GUI designs have stayed the same for decades doesn't make sense given that there are other popular alternatives to Windows, like MacOS, Android, many different Linux GUIs, etc, that follow the same basic design principals.

-Microsoft has tried many new things - they're all terrible. Windows Phone, Zune's GUI, Paint 3D, their shitty new video editor, their clusterfuck of a billion different designs that is Windows 10.

-The GUI that he made looks like cancer. If it works for him then good for him but there's no way that the average person wants that.

 

[TheShedCollector]

On PC's at least the way we interact primarily with a computer hasn't changed since, ever. We had the keyboard at first, then the mouse and since then nothing has really changed. The GUI hasn't really been revolutionized in 20 years because there really isn't much to do.

Where there has been revolution is with touchscreen devices, just because the way we interact with those devices is so fundamentally different.

 

[Terror Rism]

if a GUI isn't 100% customizable to the user in some way or another it has failed imo, windows being the primary culprit. i don't care how difficult it is or if the average user wouldn't know what to do, i just don't want you to fucking actively prevent me from doing shit i know i want to do and what it does, without some indian "windows expert" forum mod telling me i don't know what i'm doing or why i'm doing it.

let's start relatively simple, want to edit the super ugly layout and buttons on the windows 7 login screen? shouldn't be too bad considering that the OS lets you change the avatar and background images, just manually edit Authui.dll cunt; the entire thing is tied to moving individual pixel variables that only update upon full system reboot, enjoy figuring out how to manually format your own animated .BMP loading icon like it's still windows 98. if you like your work when you're done, put it anywhere we might find you for distributing our proprietary code. some online games with anticheat will consider this an improper change to a system file and refuse to let you play

too annoying, you don't even see the login screen for that long anyway, i just want to make a nice little custom theme using the tools that are already in windows that allowed the developers to make the theme in the first place, shouldn't be too hard! just install a third party program that runs a kernel level driver to disable the constant system level check for unsigned themes that are not microsoft-made! then you obviously don't want to have to manually hex-edit system .dll files to edit graphics that have 0 documentation, so you're gonna need to buy more third party software (that also has little to no documentation) and try your fucking best to guess what element is what. fuck around randomly for 3 months and you'll have half a system theme that technically breaks copyright laws just by existing!

you're only 100+ hours of registry changes and bug fixing 12+ year old bugs that have existed since Vista away from an almost customized interface. and i won't even get into shell modification and how almost every program seems to be forced to be intricately weaved around explorer.exe's coding and existence. none of this is compatible with windows 10.
also if you ask any questions about any of this on any average windows forum your thread will be locked by some powerjanny that thinks everyone's stupid, vm's don't exist, and needs them to protect these poor retards from modifying their own computer.

i understand that i'm the idiot for expecting any better of them, but fuck almighty do they go out of their way to be as annoying about it as possible to make something actually unique out of their product.

 

[Meriasek]

I like the idea of tiling managers like i3, they need lots of screen space, but work well enough with command line interfaces.
Other than that, bring back TUIs like Dosshell, or get on with LCARS.

 

[The Real SVP]

One thing he forgot is that everything should be easy to script and automate. I miss the days of ARexx.

 

[Pissmaster]

On PC's at least the way we interact primarily with a computer hasn't changed since, ever. We had the keyboard at first, then the mouse and since then nothing has really changed. The GUI hasn't really been revolutionized in 20 years because there really isn't much to do.

Where there has been revolution is with touchscreen devices, just because the way we interact with those devices is so fundamentally different.

The best change in the last 12 years has been being able to just tap the Windows key and immediately type in your search.

Trackpads have also come a very long way, though the gestures and how well they work tend to change from computer to computer. Some people just can't seem to ever get used to multi-finger gestures, and Apple in their infinite wisdom decided one day that two-finger scrolling should be reversed by default out of the blue, to make it more like touch screens, which is cancerous.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

The best change in the last 12 years has been being able to just tap the Windows key and immediately type in your search.

That and being able to pin anything to the start menu. It can be programs, scripts, that linkin park song or a button to launch pornhub, it's a very useful miniature desktop that will always be at the forefront when needed and I don't think Microsoft has realized what they have (almost) created.

 

[Drain Todger]

Messing around with WindowBlinds, Rainmeter, and OS theming almost invariably leads to me going "fuck everything about this" and reformatting. It seems like a great idea on paper, until you run into a program where your fancy theme just doesn't fucking work and it overrides UI elements in a way that looks like dog shit. And then you try uninstalling it and it leaves remnants that are impossible to get rid of, leaving your GUI a hideous mess.

Everything should look like winamp circa 2004.
We have the technology to do this with vector graphics so it scales to any resolution but all the big open source vector rendering libraries are still in their infancy and design has gone down the toilet so everything is fugly as hell.

Also, nothing beats the command line for compiling and other programming related tasks.

I still use Winamp with the ClassicPro skins. I miss the old media player skinning heyday. Nobody does that shit anymore. Everyone just uses the default skin for everything.

 

[AmpleApricots]

All the GUI one needs. Runs like a champ on a 7MHz CPU with 1MB RAM.

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I loved the concept of screens and thought it worked very well for back then and the resolutions. You could do a high res 2-color screen for text for example and then have fancier screens with more colors open which was easy on the RAM. Switching was also basically instant and generally Workbench was very snappy, which I cannot say about many modern GUIs. Was really disappointed coming to Windows later and found it to be lacking in these aspects, especially when you had to switch around color palettes for some programs. I also liked the application menu in the Top bar. Old Apple System 7 did the same. Also a nice GUI IMHO. What made ARexx so great is that almost *everything* supported it in some way and the ports, you could have for example your text editor draw graphics in Deluxe Paint or insert statistics about a file in FinalCalc. (Spreadsheet Program) Recently, for fun I wrote ARexx stuff for FinalCalc that shoved off some Work to an ARM SoC connected via serial. That we still don't really have anything compareable with that degree of usability and adoption is a disgrace. It'd probably be a huge honking security problem tho. Disconnect your private computing from the Internet is what I say. If your software can't do it, find better software.

I prefer TUI, but sometimes it's just not that practical. I still use a very old fvwm config that makes it look a little like CDE with matching toolkit skins. You know you have reached your comfortable spot when you're not sure how to change the configuration because you haven't done it in such a long time.

 

[Coffee Shits]

I'm gonna walk back my tard rage for a second and praise a tiny tweak that improves all GUIs immeasurably: the concept of "mile-high" menus and controls, where the control in question extends all the way into the edge of the screen. It grants the ability to slam the cursor against a side of the screen or into a corner and still be on a "hot" zone - an area where you get feedback when you click.

In new-ish variants of Windows, I believe W2000 and newer, this is exemplified by the Start button: even if the visual area of the button itself doesn't extend all the way into the corner, the button will respond to a click if the cursor is there. This is extremely helpful because it eliminates the need to aim at important window controls and makes the overall experience less frustrating.

 

[GethN7]

I liked Windows 95 before the IE integration. Quick, clean, simple, did the job.

Now we have what looks like an art designer's nightmare on later versions of Windows where they did a ton of acid and thought multi-tiered ribbon bars and poorly defined buttons were a great idea.

As for Linux, only modern GUI that's any good to me is Cinnamon. GNOME can piss off, XFCE is okay if I have nothing better, and KDE 4.x can neck itself in Minecraft.

 

[teriyakiburns]

All the GUI one needs. Runs like a champ on a 7MHz CPU with 1MB RAM.

View attachment 1370392

Workbench was years ahead of its time, like the rest of the Amiga platform. If they'd only had a little more forethought, they would have been the biggest OS and computer hardware maker on the planet. Instead we're stuck with power-hungry, x86-drived bullshit and the black-box mystery wrapped in an enigma that is Windows, or the increasingly schizophrenic BSD shell that is OSX.

 

[{o}P II]

i don't use Linux at the moment but KDE is fantastic. i wish it could be used on top of windows

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

I loved the XMB the first moment I saw it on the PSP. I'm glad it was on the PS3, too.

View attachment 1370151

Now that's a launcher.

Killing XMB was a crime against all that is good.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Killing XMB was a crime against all that is good.

You will absolutely love RetroArch.