Creative Design

Over the past day or two I've been looking at some of the mockups posted in this section. While I think that some of them were nice, none of them really felt quite right to me, so I decided to see what I could cook up in Photoshop. After some amount of time and effort, here is the result:

It's not quite perfect (a few things are a couple pixels off, for example), but it's a fair representation of how I think the Haiku UI should look. Instead of reinventing the wheel or "stealing" UI elements and appearances from the "big guys", I've tried to focus on simply improving what was already present in R5 and bringing it up to current standards (alpha blending, shadows, HQ text antialiasing, etc).

I have another mockup that contains more UI elements in the works, but I figured I might try to get some opinions on what I already have done. What do you guys think?

My understanding is that R1 isn't going to be a huge visual departure from BeOS, which is fine as BeOS/Haiku as it is today, IMHO still looks pretty great (especially with the new icons!) The idea of thread then, is to suggest small changes which could improve the overall look and/or consistency of Haiku visually (ie. make it look better without going as far or as wrong as Zeta did). I have five:

- Maintain wallpaper from start up right through to shut down. Right now when loading the desktop and shutting down/restarting, the user selected wallpaper starts with/switches to the default solid blue background. I don't know how technically feasible this is, seeing as almost every OS/desktop environment does it the way Haiku currently does, but it would be nice and consistent if the user selected wallpaper was maintained at all times.

- Change the highlighted menu options from grey to blue. It's pretty hard to read black text against the dark grey background and the shade of grey itself is pretty mid-1990s. Blue with perhaps a slight gradient like GNOME's Clearlooks has could help make the desktop be more legible and look more modern.

- Soften the harsh lines, smooth some of those rough edges. Tabs for example could do with being a little more rounded, the bolded text ditched and with selected tabs a different shade of grey to unselected ones. Buttons could change shade or attain a glow on mouse over. The beveled window borders could be made less obvious and the key emblems in menus given a more modern (vectorised?) look.

- Include some desktop wallpapers. Perhaps closer to the final release, another competition similar to the icons one could be held?

- Desktop icons placement fixed. It's pretty messy at the moment. "Clean up" is pretty hopeless as far as both aesthetics and organisation are concerned.

Also, I know plenty of people will argue with me on this, but I hope Haiku never includes native theming support, leaving theming to third parties. As Mac OS X demonstrates, the best argument against theming is having a fantastic default theme.

Hi,
I have heard about Haiku Project, on Freenews TV on Freebox
So I want to make an test:

What do you think about?

If you look at all the other OS's, they are all competing on how shiny and cool they are. They all rely on mimicking artificial substances. Metal, glass, and plastic. Competing with them is a losing battle because you'll just look like a copy of Mac or linux theme.

What I would like to see is something based on natural and organic materials. For example, compare reading something on white paper vs the solid white screen you are looking at right now. Paper is a lot easier on the eye and one of the reasons is that if you look real closely, you'll see that it is not pure white but it has complex texture.

I would also like to see icons that look like they were painted with real paint instead of over stylized clip art with no real soul.