It's a bit of a slow newsday at the moment, so I figured we'd pass the time with something special. Let's take a look at some obscure and/or older user interfaces listed in ToastyTech's GUI gallery, and see if there are any interesting ideas that can be found in those old user interfaces that we would like to see in our modern user interfaces.
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Member since:2005-12-21
No you're right. CDE was goddamn awful. I worked on that platform for about 7/8 years.
It used the Motif toolkit and was modelled on Windows 3.11 in many ways (The OSF foundation who were responsible for Motif even included MS back then). Unfortunately the Windows Desktop matured and CDE/Motif didn't. It barely changed other than stability wise in the time I used it. For example, the absence of any kind of tree widget started to really show how dated Motif had become.
One thing it had a going for it was that Motif had a pretty easy to learn API. Unfortunately though, you had to drop back to the Xt and X level to do a lot of stuff (drawing, event handling, etc.).
Member since:2005-06-29
Miximise, close, show on desktop x, show on all desktops, move to desktop x, and, of course, you can group them.
Member since:2005-07-06
On the Amiga, when you iconified a program/window/screen the resulting icon was a shrunk version of the original display.
This meant you could monitor the operation of a number of programs at the same time without using a lot of your screen space.
As for the number of icons, even in 1985 the Amiga supported virtual screens/desktops.
Note: these features did not orginally come with the OS, but the free Fred Fish Disks made it easy to get these programs for those who did not have them.
Member since:
2006-12-24
How useful is it to manipulate icons of minimized windows on the desktop, though? What do you do with them other than click on them to restore them to view?
The main issue I have with this system is that the user must move aside non-minized windows until the minimized window icon is visible in order to restore the minimized window. That seems rather annoying compared to the taskbar, where you locate the right task visually and restore the window with a single click without any windows in the way. (If you have too many windows and the taskbar stacks, then you must click on the application button and then the right window, though.)
Also, if you have a lot of windows minimized, aren't you left with a rather cluttered desktop? It seems that as time goes on I have more and windows open on my desktop at any given time.
It is this too-many-windows open problem with which the desktops are grappling by means of taskbars, docks, and other means. The old desktops didn't really have this problem because of CPU limitations or RAM limitations or multi-tasking issues.
Maybe I'm just misunderstanding how CDE works, though. Please feel free to correct me. :-)