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.
As some of the folks that have been hanging around here for slightly longer might remember, I have an affinity for the Common Desktop Environment. While CDE sure wasn’t pretty, it was a very consistent environment to work in, and it never surprised you; everything in CDE is where you expect it to be, and every action is followed by an expected reaction.
Anyway, the feature that I want to see brought back to life is minimising windows to the desktop as icons. In CDE, when you minimise a window, it becomes an icon on the desktop, which you can manipulate like an icon. There is no taskbar or dock entry for a window. What this means is that a window is an object, and you can manipulate it from just one place: the window itself, or the icon if it’s minimised. Instead of windows being abstract containers for information, they become tangible objects in and of themselves. Especially with today’s large screens, iconification (as it’s officially called) makes a lot of sense, and we could finally do away with taskbars or docks nonsense.
Another interesting feature can be found in RISC OS. Instead of having a menubar in each window, or a menubar atop the screen, RISC OS put its menubar underneath the middle-click menu. Middle-click inside a window, and the vertical menubar would pop up. While this is a discoverability disaster, I still like it personally because it would allow for a cleaner desktop – I don’t use menubars anyway (keyboard shortcuts!).
Moving on, let’s talk Mac OS 9, for me the ultimate pinnacle of Apple user interface design. The Mac OS 9 ‘platinum’ interface has a very pleasing feel to it, with lots of feedback upon interaction, as well as a highly consistent look. That kind of consistency is hard to come by these days. It’s sad that Mac OS X can’t even stand in Mac OS 9’s shadow when it comes to clean, unobtrusive, and consistent design. It’s a bit late, I know, but please Apple, bring back platinum! I’ll just go back to my rocking chair and knitting needles now.
I want to give an honourable mention to Visi On, one of those early graphical user interfaces that should’ve gotten more airtime than they did. It had a very interesting way of ensuring portability: all Visi On applications were written for a non machine-specific virtual machine (Visi Machine), with only a very small core being machine-specific (Visi Core), using Visi C, a restricted subset of C designed for portability.
Visi On’s files were dated December 1983, meaning it was designed at around the same time as Apple’s Macintosh user interface. Even though it is mouse-driven and graphical, it has no icons and is mostly text-oriented. You can still play around with Visi On today, thanks to the floppy images preserved by ToastyTech and a copy of MESS.
What kind of features would you like to see brought back from the dead? What old or obscure GUIs do you find intriguing?
ToastyTech’s gallery doesn’t hold a candle to http://guidebookgallery.org/ collection. Check it out.
I remember the first time I saw BeOS’s interface, It was the first time I ever saw anti-aliased fonts in a GUI. It was so……beautiful; I could never look at another GUI the same again.
RISC OS actually made application/context menus available via the middle mouse button (which it says on the RISC OS 3 page, in fact). The three buttons on an Acorn mouse were select, menu and adjust.
And this hardly counts as the discoverability disaster Thom claims it to be. It’s one of the fundamental things you learn when starting to use RISC OS. If this is a discoverability disaster, then so is the difference between single click and double click…
Looking back at the screen shots of Redhat 9, I have to say the Bluecurve theme was and still is one of the nicest themes ever.
I still think that the QNX Photon interface (http://toastytech.com/guis/qnx621.html – or here, http://www.osnews.com/img/8908/snap6.jpg for a full desktop shot) was one of the best looking, most consistent GUIs of it’s day.
It was a real shame that QNX never took off on the desktop, despite a small but loyal following at the beginning. I remember running it as my main desktop for many months back around 2000 or so. The 3D support was excellent, there were some really good native packages (apart from the awful email client in 6.2.x) and an X server to run a select few *Nix apps. There was even a GTK port, I seem to recall. I see Thom really liked it as well : http://www.osnews.com/story/8911/QNX_The_Unexpected_Surprise/page1/
It was the only OS (apart from BeOS) that has ever made me feel a real attachment to it.
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. 🙂
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.).
Miximise, close, show on desktop x, show on all desktops, move to desktop x, and, of course, you can group them.
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.
It’s been a while since I’ve used XFCE, but, as I recall, its Desktop has several modes of operation; file icons are just one of them. Another option was to have windows minimize to the Desktop as icons. It was cool – and it was interesting enough that you wondered why no-one else had an option to do it – but it wasn’t particularly useful, at least for me.
Programs in NEXTSTEP minimize to an icon at the bottom of the screen and from there you can arrange them however you want. It is quite nice.
In NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP, rhapsody, and early OSX releases, you can “tear off” a sub menu from its parent menu so it stays on the screen at all times. It is a really handy feature. I wish they’d put it back in OSX.
… oddly enough, I can’t seem to find a good screenshot demonstrating this.
Ooops..screwed that one up…mistook this for OpenLook.
I thought openlook was one of the best looking/most useable guis of its day… it also had tear off menus. I learned to love virtual desktops from using olvwm.
Unfortunately it was hell to program for without using a lot of helper code.
Funny enough I run windowmaker as my primary window manager. At home I run xfce4 for my wife’s sake.
Edited 2009-03-17 00:50 UTC
here’s a pic of my desktop. if you are interested
http://io.debian.net/~tar/gnustep/next/slides/screengrab-02-15-2008…
yeah, its soooo nice.
GTK+ has this feature. In Gnome, you can turn it on with the GConf key /desktop/gnome/interface/menus_have_tearoff
WorldWideWeb, the very first browser, was also a HTML editor and had a rather big menu. One of the shots on wikipedia shows several teared off:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/WorldWideWeb_FSF…
TextEdit.app running under GNUstep:
http://www.nongnu.org/backbone/images/screenshots/textedit-1.png
Stone Design’s Create.app on Rhapsody:
http://www.shawcomputing.net/racerx/screenshots/duel_cr-te.jpg
personally i only use virtual desktops and manage anywhere between 9 and 24 windows without problems (i’m using e17). it goes more or less like this:
2 physical screens each has 12 virtual desks.
on the left screen:
desk0: kadu, jabber, other IMs
desk1: irc
desk2: 2 or 3 terminals for kernel compilation
desk3: 4 terminals for application compilation
desk4: konqueror for project files management and online documentation
desk5+: other documentation (usually pdfs) and anything else
desk9-10: amule, rtorrent
desk11: root console for whatever
sticky: kadu chat window (when not used it’s shaded and doesn’t interfere)
right screen:
desk0: firefox with news/email/and any commonly visited sites
desk1: amarok
desk2: kernel source code
desk3: application source code
desk4: less often used konqueror
desk5+: anything
desk9-10: amule, rtorrent, anything
desk11: usually porthole/synaptic
sticky: gcalctool or other calc (also shaded when not used)
this way i always know where anything is, i never close any windows because they do not interfere with whatever i’m doing on another desk, also it let’s you easily group windows together (like the consoles) it let’s me switch between “docs on one screen code on the other” to “irc on one code on the other” with 1 simple click or scroll. moving windows between desks/screens is a matter of drag and drop on the pager.
on the other hand if you don’t have a few common apps that you always want running, and you tend to open/close windows a lot, a standard taskbar might be better.
Edited 2009-03-17 00:11 UTC
Site’s owner comments little bit too “Apple fan” to my taste.
We already know rants about Apple GUI, and good things about it. But as a point of view still interesting.
Whats funny about that comment is there are people who think he has an anti-mac agenda, and is part of some global conspiracy to tarnish the good name of apple
What’s even funnier is that I’m typying this very comment on a brand new 20″ iMac my dad just purchased with my help. I advised him to buy it, and took him to the Apple store and I handled everything – I just got back.
Yup, totally anti-Apple
.
The funny thing is that when Apple bought NeXT, they first reworked the look and feel of OPENSTEP to be as close to Platinum as possible because they wanted their users to feel at home. You know, to support the marketing effort of presenting this thing as Mac OS 10 rather than NeXTStep 5.
http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/desktop/full/rhapsodydr2.p…
Only later, after they had that gorgeous system known as Rhapsody working, they decided to come up with an all-new interface – the biggest leap in bling-bling and eye candy the world of desktops has ever seen.
Dunno…enlightenment itself was really full of bling bling when it came out. It substantially pre dated apple’s move from macos.
Don’t take that last sentence too seriously – these things are subjective. What I meant was that I was disappointed when Platinum was replaced with Aqua. Probably because I was brought up on System 7, and the Rhapsody screenshots I saw in 1997 looked like the ultimate desktop system to me.