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agent2693 Jan 20th 2008
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MikeWilson
Jan 20th 2008
It involves a lot of psychology, if something shrinks into the taskbar, you know where you can access it again if you needed to. Eye candy is nice, but it also has to be quickly readable and understandable, so you can just pick it up and go. -
Fredrik
Jan 21st 2008
Some of the "eye candy" is great, much of it is pure crap.
Vista's blurry transparent windows are, in my opinion, ugly as shit. That's more of a "we can do this, let's put it in" not "this will help people navigate" or such. Same goes for the alt+tab showing of the windows.
If you would have asked me a few month ago I would have said that Apple's OS X was a lot better, but since 10.5 they added quite a few meaningless GUI stuff. Such as the menu bar showing the background blurred (just like Vista's windows) and the dock has a 3D reflecting effect. The dock looks great when you put it on the side though, which I always do myself, so that's not a problem for me but the menu bar should just not be transparent. Apple did a great work on unifying the GUI on all their windows though, before some of the apps had stripes, some with brushed metal and some with a gray gradient — now they all have the same sleek gradient. So there's a lot of good and a lot of bad GUI in this upgrade and I haven't used Vista long enough to really give a solid opinion on many of their GUI features. (Nor any Linux system lately, and way back when they weren't so heavy on the eye candy.)
And as Mike said, some of it is for psychology and usability, some just for kicks. -
SaintJimmy
Jan 22nd 2008
Im still using XP because I have a crappy computer...but when I get the money, my next computer is going to be a Mac. I use them at school and everything runs smoothly and looks good. I was using custom windows themes for a while, but lately i've taken to using plain old windows classic to save memory (still running on 512mb =\)
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A big trend, it would seem, lately among various operating systems, is to improve the graphical user interfaces to be more fluid, have more visually appealing features, and be all around pretty eye-candy.
Now, some features seem to be designed to make the navigation of various windows make more sense (like the idea of a window "shrinking" into the taskbar, instead of just disappearing). Others seem to just be for show or for fun (most notably, the feature in Ubuntu's Compiz plugin that allows you to paint fire on the screen...completely pointless, but fun as heck!).
So, my question is, do you use a system that has a window manager like this, and do any of the features actually help to make things make more sense visually for you?