Ode to Skulpture
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 1st Jan 2013 18:19 UTC
KDE I tend to believe that the best interfaces have already been made. Behaviourally, CDE is the best and most consistent interface ever made. It looked like ass, but it always did exactly as you told it to, and it never did anything unexpected. When it comes to looks, however, the gold standard comes from an entirely different corner - Apple's Platinum and QNX' PhotonUI. Between all the transparency, flat-because-it's-hip, and stitched leather violence of the past few years, one specific KDE theme stood alone in bringing the best of '90s UI design into the 21st century, and updating it to give everything else a run for its money. This is an ode to Christoph Feck's Skulpture.
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RE: Re:
by drcouzelis on Thu 3rd Jan 2013 18:00 UTC in reply to "Re:"
drcouzelis
Member since:
2010-01-11

Best? Probably not, if you take intuitiveness into account. We had a couple of Blade 1500's and Ultra 25's in the lab (before switching to Debian PCs) and I could never find out how to restore an iconified window when a maximized window was on the foreground. I did several silly things, like drag the maximized window a bit to the right, or iconify everything. I guess there must be some keyboard combination that shows a list of all windows, but it's not something you can guess (intuitive = easy to guess). In an intuitive GUI, you can guess where things go when you minimize them, and how to restore them.


The window is fullscreen because you, the user, told the window to be fullscreen. If you want to access part of the desktop to see other windows you have two options: either resize / move the fullscreen window or use the standard (and I mean REALLY OLD standard) key combination Alt + Tab.

When you press the "iconify to the desktop" button you know exactly where the window is going: it's being iconified and placed on the desktop.

You restore iconified icons by activating them with a double click, like you do any other icon.

Other unintuitive things in CDE include having to double click on the dash to close the window (how can you guess that?)


A single click on the dash will load a menu with a very intuitive button in it that says "Close". Alternatively, as you mentioned, you can double click the upper left corner of the window to close it, just like you can in every version of Microsoft Windows from version 3.1 to 7.

the fact you can have some "pre-iconified" windows that are there from the beginning of the session, thus resembling icons, but dissapear if you open and close them (thus not acting like icons)


I assume you mean iconified windows that you, the user, placed on your desktop. They don't just "disappear". You restored them to full sized windows and then closed them.

and a lack of obvious way to customize the dock.


I agree. Every so often I re-learn how to configure the dock and my response is always the same: "That was neat and kind of harder than it should have been". ;)

Best window manager: Windows 7


I hate any window manager that uses a task bar. I find task bars to be one of the worst inventions for user interfaces. They waste space with a tiny representation of every window I have open. I don't need a tiny version of every window since I already have the full version of every window right in front of me.

Strangely, I love the (somewhat unique) task bar in the Haiku user interface, maybe because it's so incredibly compact.

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