Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Mon 9th Dec 2002 04:57 UTC
The compiler suite coming for all SGI MIPS-based machines is one of the best optimized development tools for any platform. SGI has put many years of experience on the newest version of the series, MIPSpro 7.4, which we recently gave it a spin.
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> All I'm saying is that the GUI works quite well in practice with the colors it has.
> Windows XP looks like a candy store to me. Way too distracting. The GUI
> should not hamper you in your work.
The text is readable, the buttons are very easy to see, and the windows/widgets overall have high contrast without making my eyes hurt. If you think that it looks like a candy store, you are welcome to your opinion, but you have not given any reason why it would hamper your work.
> Oh, go ahead and insult people.
You would have to be legally blind to think that the text in that screenshot is good compared to other graphical environments. My dad is legally blind, although that is mostly due to his refusal to wear his glasses while computing, and he cannot tell the difference between smoothed and non-smoothed fonts. And where did you get the idea that being legally blind is an insult?
> If you're talking about the yellow background, that's not the default. The default
> is a nice green color. Otherwise I don't see the big fuss about the GUI.
(The only thing more irritating than a review showing screenshots of non-default themes is being told later that they do not reflect the company's UI design decisions.)
It is ugly. Italic fonts without some kind of smoothing are hard on the eyes, and the hinting on the normal fonts does not look good at all. I want to be able to read the text without having to sit there and study it. Granted, it is not nearly as bad as poor font smoothing, but it is still nowhere close to RedHat 8.0 or Windows XP with ClearType enabled.
> The pink in some of the text boxes is actually quite nice and not nearly as intrusive
> as you might think
But...pink? o_0
> the yellow background is not default
Okay, I will give you that one.
> and is easily changed
I have not seen the default, and it is important.
> the blue buttons are only for a few buttons in this application
Then they are inconsistent with the rest of the system?
> and they don't look bad on the grey background
No, but they do not look particularly good either. They look like something I drew in VC++ 1.0's icon editor so many years ago. No gradients, no 3D look, jagged lines, etc. Compare the look of the SGI debugger shown in the screen shot to the Netscape 7.0 "Modern" theme.
> and the non-smoothed italic fonts look way better than the fonts in many of the window
> managers that are available on unix
Perhaps, but that is not saying much. ;-)
> Yeah, dissing the whole GUI based on one screenshot is so much more fun.
I was "dissing" one aspect of the GUI - its appearance - and for that only one screenshot was needed. My criticisms were, to the best of my knowledge, fair and accurate. Had I said that the UI was unresponsive, or illogically laid out, or some other such thing that cannot be easily determined from a screenshot, I might have agreed with you.
Anyway, my take on the matter is that SGI could care less about having an aesthetically appealing development environment because the customers are buying the machine for its hardware.