MorphZone posted a screenshot of the upcoming MorphOS 1.4, revealing an updated MUI look and feel. OSNews featured a review of the Pegasos platform just a few days ago. Update: In other Amiga-related news, Fleecy’s 11th week of Q&As is online.
Updated Looks for Upcoming MorphOS 1.4
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
42 Comments
2003-05-25 2:43 am
2003-05-25 7:12 am
2003-05-25 9:49 am
2003-05-25 10:16 am
2003-05-25 11:24 am
2003-05-25 11:31 am
That looks incredible. Much, much better than the ugly stuff they had before. Also, the icons look SVG, just beautiful.
Hopefully they fix the stuff the review pointed out.
looking better, still looks very flat and blocky, very old school unix looking. Also looks like color insperation from Windows Longhorn screenshots. But hey keap the work up.
Still waiting for some alt OS to have a look that knocks me out of my seat. Some of the gnome screenshots are about as close as it gets
Wow, the Verdana looks just like it did with X and FreeType on RH9. Cool.
Love the subtle gradients. The whole thing is just gorgeous.
Beautiful background too. Anyone know where I can get it?
> looking better, still looks very flat and blocky,
Well, yeah, I suppose the scrollbars (er, and radio buttons and popup-menu buttons) could use some work. Hmm… why are the popup-menu buttons in the “Control” and “Fonts” areas different? I like the ones in the “Control” area.
“Beautiful background too. Anyone know where I can get it? ”
Eh, I would say if you have a digital camera go out side and create the same. Thats what I have been doing, just find nice shots like that, Simple is better. And you got a background your freinds want.
But yeah, that background caught my eye to, much better then what they had in previous ones.
7! window controls! 7!!
Can’t be good…
Actually the titlebars look more like Whistler (watercolor) than they do longhorn. I think the button on the left looks a bit out of place and the buttons on the right look too tiny. I think they should blend the button into the left if they insist on keeping it and either make the titlebar smaller or the titlebar buttons bigger.
The scrollbars could use some work too. But they are the typical enhanced amiga workbench scrollbars.
Also those icons could just as easily be png or other 32-bit bitmap icon file. I’m glad however to see 32-bit bitmaps as the icons.
However I like how many options it has for the UI though from my experience with AmigAOS I know it kinda makes things hard to configure a bit especially if you have more than one appearence manager installed like I used to have because one could ovveride the other.
Great to see good progress is being made.
Egad, all you critics should try designing your own GUI if you think it’s so easy!
The fonts are different in the Control & Fonts sections because Gadgets in the Intuition part of the AmigaOS
allow you to do so! You want flexibility or Microsoft telling you what you should get?
Flat & blocky huh? Did you ever see how menus were rendered in BattleChess? They had little cherubs
with fluttering wings unrolling a scroll containing the menu items. Many incredible things are possible to create with the AmigaOS as far as a GUI is concerned – however I’ve seen some bad GUIs on the Amiga as well.
These were usually attempts to emulate Windows or some other OS & not sticking to the published
User Interface Style Guide published by Commodore (& Addison-Wesley). Where is the Style guidelines for Windows, the Mac, or Linux? I’ll bet they don’t exist. One only has to go to the Interface
Hall of Shame & see that there are virtually NO examples of bad GUI design in the AmigaOS. If anyone were
to use the AmigaOS for a week, they would understand why the GUI rendering library was called Intuition!
Jim Steichen, author of AmigaTalk (a port of Little Smalltalk)
You seem awfully authoritarian and self-righteous for someone who professes a liking for choice. Classic zealot.
Many incredible things have been done with Windows, and Linux, and MacOS. BeOS–look at that ZSnake.
>Where is the Style guidelines for Windows, the Mac, or Linux? I’ll bet they don’t exist.
Umm, developers for Windows and Mac are required to follow certain Human Interface Guidelines. AmigaOS did not invent them. I believe they’ve been around since Xerox PARC. Linux is moving in that direction too, thanks to Havoc Pennington.
>One only has to go to the Interface
Hall of Shame & see that there are virtually NO examples of bad GUI design in the AmigaOS.
From what I’ve seen of the AmigaOS, it looks like total crap. NeXTStep was far superior. I know it was advanced for its time, but it’s not the Holy Grail of interfaces. Sheesh. “bad” is subjective by definition.
I have been reading Moss’s weekly interviews since they started and I am getting a very definite feeling that I do not trust the guy
So many vague promises ” yes it’ll be better but we can’t say when it’ll be released ” – claims to be sure of commercial support re software but can’t name names – says yes the Mac is a logical PPC platform to code for but can’t say when we will……
He never answers a question straight – all his answers seem tailored to be rebuffable later in a vaguely Orwellian sense
I’m not commenting on his character or his company: I know nothing of either. Just that his style is not conducive to winning my trust.
Sure, I would almost definately change the colours, the icons and try as bad as I can to remove as much window controls as I can if I ever use it, but frankly, this is the best looking Amiga (original, rewritten or clone) I have seen. The icons don’t look all that bad, except that it lacks contrast with the rest of the desktop.
The old icons looked great, and while photorealistic they retained a sense of visual clarity waaaay better than these.
Do NOT under any circumstances create a default icon set where all icons have the same color.
There are several things that contribute to clarity, some of which are:
1. Symbolism
2. Shape
3. Colors
Now, I do think this is just some sort of theme. The new icons are clearly ripped from somewhere.
“Still waiting for some alt OS to have a look that knocks me out of my seat. Some of the gnome screenshots are about as close as it gets
”
While it is quite nice to have a pleasant looking Desktop/Finder/Workbench display, and might help sales in a shop, I wonder why people rate it so highly?
I doubt if I spend more than 1% of my computer time looking at the Workbench screen. Almost all the time I am using one program or other, on its own screen, and fortunately each program looks different, according to its functions.
In answer to other comments, the extra window buttons in MUI are optional and at least in the current version of MUI are off by default. One very useful one is the “snapshot” button. If you click on that, the window will come up with the same size and position nect time you open it.
MUI is a good system.
Cor blimey, they’ve done just what they promised. That’s not common in the computing world, AFAIK. This is what MUI should have been from the get-go.
I say nice work to the team that did the work on this.
A major improvement.
It doesn’t scream out ‘Dump your heavily tweaked and honed Linux/WindowMaker desktop right now’ at me, but for Amiga users, this muct be very, very welcome.
“is being developed in a country”
should have been is also being developed in a country..
Sorry.
My point is if you are so rejected by Communisme, or at least an icon of it, why use Windows, Linux BSD etc..?
I just wonder, if you actually ever used AmigaOS. Or are you just Linux dieahard or so? Because if so, you should remember that even before Linux started, Amiga was in the age of its glory. The point is, I have seen bad designs, and very nice ones – in my experience, AOS could become nearly everything. The screenshot shown is not so special imo, and there is no problem to replace look of scroll-bars or any other gadgets.
As someone mentioned already – Amiga was multimedia, period. It is not only about OS, but also set-up-box like end user apps. If you like PS2 or modern PC games navigations/menus etc., just go get yourself nearly 20 years old A500 and look at some titles, before you say something about Amiga’s inability to provide attractive interfaces. Because, if you haven’t seen e.g. Scala Multimedia, you haven’t seen smooth media done easily.
So the question is, if Amiga lacks UI guidelines, or it simply provides user with freedom of expression, which may be way too much for some persons to grasp …
-pekr-
Indeed i was wrong..i thought the main developers of MorphOS
would come out of the USA.
I was trying to point out that f.i
Windows, Linux BSD, Solaris ,MorphOS etc. are also
being developed in the USA, so if he is really that
“tight” i think he can better live in a cave and eat
leaves all day..i understand and support his point but its just not possible to live like that in this f*cked up world.
No, I actually haven’t used it;I believe I admitted that in another article. I have seen screenshots, though, even off the AmigaOS4 site, and they don’t look too good. The person I was replying to was obnoxiously claiming Amiga was the only OS with interface guidelines, and that it’s perfect in every way. Yeah right.
I’m not a Linux diehard. I like BeOS a whole lot, and I said in my post that Mac and Windows also innovated, not just the Amiga.
Sorry if I offend.
Both Amiga and Mac have style guidelines books. The Mac one is much fatter, and can be downloaded from the web site.
Amazon are offering the Amiga one “used and new” from $10. To be honest, it is of OS 2 vintage, but much of it still applies.
There is much to be learned from the book “About Face” too.
You can’t judge an OS from screen shots. You need to use it for a few months to see how it works.
IMO OS/2 Warp 4 is prettier than this. And OS/2 is butt ugly out of the box. I wish they’d let go the the 14 inch monitor widgets. It makes the UI look old and outdated. Increase the font size too.
Also note, I see they got the Microsoft symbol as their temp folder!
“Increase the font size too.”
This is purely a user setting. One would set it according to monitor size and quality (some users will have to work with small low res monitors) and user’s eyesight.
It is impossible to find one default that suits all. Likewise, some people like anti-aliasing, while others find that it just looks blurry.
In any case, you can set different font sizes (and fonts) for each program. A program with a lot of long menus may be best with a smaller font than another which has just a few short menus.
Are we looking at the same screenshot? In the one I’ve been looking at, the font size is an enormous 12 points, and the gadgets are just as huge. They’ve really blown up the GUI this time, as opposed to older versions.
I’d actually have to agree with the people who don’t like the icon for the temp directory. Pretty bad choice, at least if one’s gonna take a screenshot for the public. Anyway, may not be a huge thing to argue about but what if that was a swastika instead?
Apart for that I really like what I see. Great work!
“I’d actually have to agree with the people who don’t like the icon for the temp directory. Pretty bad choice, at least if one’s gonna take a screenshot for the public. Anyway, may not be a huge thing to argue about but what if that was a swastika instead?
”
It is a visual joke. Temp=Soviet Union
Do you really not get it? It made me smile the moment I saw it.
Wit is an essential component of graphic design – in fact, the biggest component.
@Don Cox
This is purely a user setting. One would set it according to monitor size and quality (some users will have to work with small low res monitors) and user’s eyesight.
It is impossible to find one default that suits all. Likewise, some people like anti-aliasing, while others find that it just looks blurry.
In any case, you can set different font sizes (and fonts) for each program. A program with a lot of long menus may be best with a smaller font than another which has just a few short menus.
I agree that it should be set it according to monitor size and quality. But the default targeted resolution should be minimum 800×600 and should be readabled to the user. Also a program with a lot of long menus is a badly designed program.
@Iggy Drougge
Are we looking at the same screenshot? In the one I’ve been looking at, the font size is an enormous 12 points, and the gadgets are just as huge. They’ve really blown up the GUI this time, as opposed to older versions.
Yes we are looking at the same screenshot. The widgets are too small and is apparent that they were designed for a 14 inch monitor. Look at this screenshot of Gnome and you’ll know what I mean by too small:
http://vhost.dulug.duke.edu/~louie/screenshots/2.2/12.jpg
I think the first mistake lots of UI designers make today is to reach prematurely for the gradient tool. I heard from someone that one of the first things they teach you in computer graphics classes is to think very hard before using a gradient! Maybe that’s just the color scheme, I don’t know. Anyway, if you like the look and happen to be a Linux user, the icon set looks a lot like Aqua Fusion, and the window decoration is a lot like Quartz. I’m pretty sure the Aqua Fusion icon set is available for Windows as well.
“From what I’ve seen of the AmigaOS, it looks like total crap. NeXTStep was far superior.”
I think very few have mentioned “AmigaOS” and “good looking” in the same sentence. But then, good GUI design is a lot more than just good looks.
From the webpage with the screen dump – “This is an un-official preview of MorphOS 1.4 and MUI PPC.”.
Which imho makes the hammer and sickle icon a non issue.
I think the first mistake lots of UI designers make today is to reach prematurely for the gradient tool.
True.
I guess it’s typical for GUI programmers to do this when they implement gradients for the first time. Remember Crux by Eazel and this “High Color Gradients” style by mosfet.
Now that the novelty weard off, gradients are rarely used anymore. My absolutely favorite so far for “generic” styles (not relying on pretty images) is BlueCurve which only uses a few gradients on the titlebar, selected menu items and progressbars in a very tasteful way.
This screenshot is NOT an official MorphOS1.4 screenshot. It is my private desktop and those icons are not part of MorphOS. I took them from some KDE icon archive.
Actually the Temp: disk contains my developer environment, so I marked the thing as something “toxic”
OK, I can agree I have rather weird sense of humour, but what does this have to do with MorphOS? You have no idea what I meant by using this symbol and your create theories out of space.
Will this OS run on my ibook2? Where can I read more?
Yes we are looking at the same screenshot. The widgets are too small and is apparent that they were designed for a 14 inch monitor. Look at this screenshot of Gnome and you’ll know what I mean by too small: