DragonFly BSD
DragonFly users List (threaded) for 2004-12
[Date Prev][Date Next]  [Thread Prev][Thread Next]  [Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: user interfaces (was Re: GoBSD.com)


From: "Martin P. Hellwig" <mhellwig@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2004 21:55:30 +0100

Jonas Sundström wrote:
<cut>

Gnome/KDE it seems are trying to mimic Windows for the most part, with a little transparency thrown in. It's sad really. Not that CDE or NeXT was any better. The only really good GUI I've used was that of MacOS 8/
9. Windows is OK but boring. (designed to run each app in fullscreen)


I think it's time for some other kind of GUI paradigm, but I'm not sure what. (Some kind of tiling?) I just hope the "web thing" Microsoft has going doesn't catch on.

<cut>
Would you like to:
1) Read E-mail & browse the Internet
2) Use productivity programs
3) Use that special just written for this sector program
4) Go to lunch, brake, toilet, home (logoff) or insane (quit)

I just as or even more userfriendly then
placing a bunch off icons on the desktop.


There once was a big-button GUI shell for the MacOS, with exactly this purpose.. I hated it. :)) But then again, kiosk computers are there to annoy us.

Seriously though, your task-oriented supershell idea is a good one. Start coding!

I already have it for my non-unix cow-orker administrator, when she logs on to a box (ssh) she gets a menu like the above which asks her to , add a user, delete a user, change a password, modify a group , go into bash or log off.


The idea is not mine, this is something often done in novell and dos by administrators, writing scripts for the users to prevent them being lost in the shell and by this disallowing them to start other "unauthorized" programs.

The future of the desktop? I don't know, but one thing I do know that the shell is something I feel comfortable in (I started as a desktop-drooler).

Perhaps I would like to have a clean desktop whats more built like the "unix" idea ,small programs that a very good in one thing but can work together easily to "create" a bigger more complicated function, with the interaction between programs in a UML diagram like way.
I describe it poorly because I still haven't figured out why this would be any better then the already present choices for a gui.
But let me think a couple of years about it maybe something useful will come out of it :-)


--
mph



[Date Prev][Date Next]  [Thread Prev][Thread Next]  [Date Index][Thread Index]