My Best Haiku Design So Far

I like it. But do we even stand a chance of this being implemented? I know that the visual aspect of haiku is not a priority right now. But would love to see some things done. I like the way this looks and would love to see it in Haiku. I do know there have been some small things done here and there. but, I don't have much hope of see haiku look like this anytime soon.

The trick would be to have a design that does not require major work to the app sever in order to be implemented. Seeing as how you are interested, you might want to try talking to the devs about your design and see what about it can be done and what can't. Then make changes based on what they say can be done. At least you can ask, it doesn't hurt.

jimmy calm down. You should know that not all people have your opinion.

Also in my opinion haiku needs a much much better gui. But for that we need first hw acceleration.

Why are people making concept cars, when my old trabant does his job on bringing me to my job an back home.

Relate to the "design":
It's nearly worthless. Taking something and making small changes is really not a good job. Instead people should try to think about something completely new, a new way of interacting/organizing with the computer/GUI.

If you make just simple changes, most developers will not be interested, because it's "similar", and it's not worth the effort.

But if you come up with some more or less revolutionary ideas/concepts... then you might find developers being interested. (S&T was a little example)

I like it. It reminds me of MacOS 9, which is the pinnacle of classic desktop computer user interfaces IMO. It's not a big change, but not a subtle change either. (I'd probably try to find a better balance between the blue and the yellow.)

The problem with visual design is that everyone has an opinion. User interface has a lot of "bikeshed" potential. (The cost of change is sometimes higher than the benefits of a subtle change, since our community is so small and cross-functional. Upsetting changes involve everyone.)

Another problem, from a non-dev point of view, is that users have little say in the development of Haiku, including its visual design. (Visual design isn't separated from functionality. It's the same code. Any user interface changes have to be implemented in code, eventually.)

There is no process for visual design changes within Haiku separate from the regular development process. The subtle changes to Haikus user interface have generally come about, I think, through the work of Stephan Aßmus, and lots of community discussion, or sometimes none, and the icon contest a few years back.

So, don't be discouraged by negative feedback, or too excited by positive feedback, but please do keep making designs! Haiku will need to evolve, and even though accelerated 3D graphics is a key technical milestone that we still have to reach to be able to pull Haikus interface up to the forefront, a gentle, tasteful makeover in the meantime is a good thing, IMO, to lessen the impression that Haiku is all static. It's bad enough that people think we're in perpetual alpha.

Anyway. Just my 2 cents.

/slumbering dev Jonas Sundström

The question I ask how does this IMPROVE using the GUI?

Not how to make the GUI cool looking.

To me the drop shadows on the menus are a waste, they do nothing to help use the system.\

The progress window also does nothing for me, I can't even tell what the diffirence is.

The calculator however while functional the same has far better contrast of the keys. I LIKE IT!

Why does the GUI need to be updated in looks?

The purpose of Haiku is not to be cool as the mass market defines cool, it is to be cool as the developers and the people who like their style define cool.

The Tracker is how many years old now? Yet I still see people struggle to do in so-called modern GUIs what I do every day in Tracker.

Again if you want people to want your changes, they must be more than mass-market cool, they must IMPROVE the use of the GUI. Like I said in the last message I posted, the changes to calculator really made it easier to use because of the increase in contrast. The drop-shadows on the other hand did nothing to improve the interface. They just look cool.

Find changes that the people who are writing the code want, and you will get your changes in. Push for changes that that no-one wants who does work on this OS and you get nothing.

Few Haiku developers/users care for what the mass-market today thinks are cool, after-all by the time Release 1.0 comes out the definition of cool will change by then and all the old work would be a waste anyway.

I like the colors in the mockup and I also like the colored scrollbar with the dots to show that it is grab-able.

However, I think the change is too drastic to make before R1. Remember that R1 is suppose to look more or less like BeOS R5, although there have been some fairly major visual alterations already so it is not out of the question.

That being said I have been steadily working on fixing/adding theme support back to Haiku including the ability to color some never before themable items such as scrollbars, slider thumbs, list boxes, etc.

Once it is possible to change the color of more interface elements the next task will be to update the Appearance Preferences panel in order to more easily facilitate applying different color schemes.

Perhaps your ideas can be incorporated into a theme that the user can select. I wouldn't hold my breath for this to happen anytime in the near future but it's good that you are trying out these looks so that they can be expanded upon in the future.

like the blue. However, I'm don't care about the appearance to much but like the decorator stuff there should be a add-on interface for ui control customization. So people can experiment and provide their add-ons. And thanks to Stephan its easily possible to implement such a add-on:

Just derive a class from BControlLook:
http://haiku.it.su.se:8180/source/xref/headers/os/interface/ControlLook.h

Replace your implementation with the default BControlLook in:
http://haiku.it.su.se:8180/source/xref/src/kits/interface/InterfaceDefs.cpp
line 1148

To make it even better lookup your add-on dynamically in a add-on dir at this point...

You will NEVER, EVER, NEVER get some people to see this. There are even people who can't see why the Aros GUI that is based on something almost 30 years old should be updated. They give the same arguments. Personally I think they just don't want too many other people to come play in what they consider to be their sandbox.

Yes i remember when stippi wrote about rewriting the deskbar, and taking the advantages of os x and win7 and create something better.
Soon he was attacked, and people saying how great the current deskbar ist and he should change nothing.

Too bad, that stippi, ingo and axeld, seem now to be occupied with something else.
It's a little pitty that the packagemanager is still not in a useable state.

I agree, I am looking forward to the package manager.

Ok, maybe some desing ideas:
1. Ditch the "3D look" of window borders, scrollbars etc. Simplify them.
Haiku website is a good example of modern, colorful but sleek design. Yet functional
2. Does Haiku need a deskbar? I think no. Press Windows key or use mouse gesture, that activates some sort of panel (something like Dashboard on OSX), that displays grid of live thumbnails of each open application.
3. Desktop redesign - More interactivness, replicants along with icons.

And what's wrong with that? The '90s saw the best desktop GUIs ever. (OS9 and Windows 95 - the latter of which was so successful that it was replicated directly in every succeeding version of Windows until 7.) After the '90s desktop OSes have just been loaded down with glitz and endless fiddling with what was already perfectly fine.

If you try to create a hybrid UI that works equally well on two wildly disparate sets of input and output methods, you're going to wind up with a bad compromise that doesn't work well on either. The reason your Android tablet and its applications are responsive and pleasant on a tablet is because they were designed for a tablet. Haiku is designed for desktop. Neither desktop nor tablet OSes should try to be something they're not, it's only going to make everybody unhappy.

1. 3D UI elements help to distinguish areas and items from one another in a way that mimics natural depth distinction to the human eye without requiring special aids like glasses. It's perfect for making items more clear and distinct without having to resort to color-coding or overly large boundary spacing. If you want to drag UI styling back to the days of Windows 2.0 and Macintosh System 6, there's always Windows 8.

The Haiku website is an excellent example of minimalist but pleasant web design, I agree - but applications are not websites and websites are not applications, and even the Haiku website uses subtle 3D effects, anyway.

2. If you make the Deskbar a hidden pop-over, all you're doing is creating a "no-man's land" on the screen where you don't want to have anything important because it might get hidden when you need to switch applications, see which ones you have open, open the menu, or check the notification icons. What Haiku actually needs is the exact opposite: a way to make the Deskbar inhabit a reserved portion of the screen that applications can't overlap (at the user's discretion, of course) so that I can maximize a window without having to drag it out of the way of the Deskbar by hand.

And what good are application thumbnails, anyway? They're not big enough to convey anything meaningful about the application that the icon and window title don't. If you need to see details about a window you have open, why would you not just switch to that window?

I foresee some real conflict arising over this once it's time to start work on release 2.

Zing! But then the noophiles will complain if the documentation uses screenshots with the old decorator, and the rest of us will complain if it does the opposite...

In all seriousness, I think the Haiku team is going to have to come up with an official policy on look & feel eventually...I just hope they stick with the simplicity of the current look...

I like everything but the dimples on the scrollbars - they just look weird when there's a bunch of them on a really long handle, like the one on the bottom.

I like it, but if there are too much of them, I get distracted; my eyes follow the first all the way to the last. I think it might be better if there were only three or four of them for the whole scrollbar.

Also, lightness of the scrollbar catches my eye off guard,as if its trying to blend with the textbox. Maybe could the scrollbar boxe's line be made darker or wider?

I guess that is 3 strikes against dimples along the scrollbar like in this proposed design. How about instead of having little dots all the way along the scrollbar we copy BeOS and have either 3 (larger) dots or 3 lines in the middle of the scrollbar?

Screenshot of the BeOS Scrollbar preferences for reference:

http://www.tunetrackersystems.com/bedocs/documentation/User%27s%20Guide/...