<BeforeYouFlameMe>Yes, I understand that one person does not represent the full Slashdot groupthink</BeforeYouFlameMe>
A common battlecry of Slashdotters is ‘you’re wasting my CPU cycles/GPU cycles/RAM/whatever; turn off the eye candy and give me a product that actually works.’ I think this is a bit silly; I’m a far happier user when I use an attractive-looking piece of software, but to each their own. Vive la difference and all that. However, I get insanely frustrated when I read things like the following:
Don’t conflate Beryl with the silly effects like wobbly windows and raindrops making your desktop splash and windows catching fire when you minimise them and so forth. Those are neat for a few minutes and then quickly turned off. But Beryl can bring things to the table that are of real value, and it’s unwise to dismiss the whole think just because the parts that get exposure on YouTube are silly.
For example, when I hover my mouse over an entry in my panel’s window list, a live preview of that window pops up, so I can instantly tell (for example) whether a long compile process has finished without actually having to switch away from whatever I’m doing. Similarly, when I alt-tab to switch windows, what appears isn’t just the icon for each application, it also includes an actual scaled-down representation of each window, so I can tell which picture each graphics editor window is editing far more easily than just going by filenames. The ability to zoom in smoothly on a window is very handy when trying to debug graphics output, and conversely if I want the big picture I can zoom out and see all my desktops at once. (Forget the cube, I’m talking straightforward tiling - but it’s just as dependent on Beryl.)
What rubs me the wrong way, here, is that you can substitute Windows Vista in for every instance of the word Beryl above, and little will have changed. Live previews? Check. Alt-Tab? Check. The features present in this piece of software (which currently stands at version 0.2, let me point out) are shameless copies of Vista. This, of course, flies in the face of the countless posts I’ve seen mercilessly flaming Vista over the past couple years about its ’scads and scads of useless, GPU-sucking eye candy.’ Sigh. I just don’t understand the hypocrisy of this crowd at times. I’ll admit that Vista lacks the desktop-switching features built in to Beryl (which sounds neat, by the way).
Also, take a minute and look at the most popular themes available for Beryl today. I was shocked and amazed by what I found:
3 responses so far ↓
1 Aaron Ballman // Apr 23, 2007 at 4:13 pm
I’ve learned to simply ignore slashdot because the drones on there are so ignorant, it’s laughable (but sad).
2 Will Pearson // Apr 26, 2007 at 12:25 am
Over the years I’ve learnt to ignore the Slash Dotters. From what I’ve seen most Slash Dotters think they have superior knowledge but when it comes to it they actually don’t; often Slash Dotters have little knowledge, and this often leads to their comments and judgement being ill informed. Added to that most Slash Dotters, or at least the one’s I’ve seen, have big egos, and they are therefore unable to accept that they have shortfalls in their knowledge, something that we all have.
The Slash Dotters usual view that all this “eye candy” is useless junk just proves the point. If you think about a computer in terms of computing theory then all a computer is is a machine that transitions between states in response to input; FSM’s, PDA’s, and Turing Machines show us this much. This is a particularly useless device unless people can harness the state transitions for their own purpose. To do this people need to communicate with the computer and the computer with them; the mechanism for this communication is the user interface. Thus, the user interface is really governed by information theory, psychology, and semiotics.
Considering one concept that information theory gives us, that of channel capacity, we see that the whole UI can actually be used to communicate information. So, if the “eye candy” has semantic concepts mapped on to it then it’s actually serving a valid purpose as a communications mechanism. Console programs, on the other hand, are actually very poor in terms of communicating information efficiently. Text only takes up a fraction of the UI leaving the rest of the UI communicating nothing.
Finally, even “eye candy” communicates something. “Eye candy”, which is a term I really hate as it seems to have been developed by complete morons who don’t understand communication, communicates something about how much effort has been put into creating something. We associate good presentation with a lot of effort. We can then use some algebra to work out how much effort has gone into the internal mechanics of something. The equation is:
total effort = effort put into UI + effort put into mechanics
We also relate the total effort to the price tag of something. This is why people don’t trust things that only have a moderate price tag but that look really flashy. If you buy a top of the range sports car then you expect it to have more effort put into it, and thus a bigger price tag, than your average family saloon; therefore, you expect it to have better aesthetics and mechanics.
Will
3 Diego // May 1, 2007 at 7:51 pm
I don’t understand your point.
You are frustrated because you found a silly conversation in slashdot?
Or because they are talking about something that is very similar to Vista?
Forget about who is copying who. In software everyone borrows ideas from others (Microsoft is the first one).
That happens because those “original” ideas are already discussed in the developer community (research papers, conferences, newgroups, prototypes…) a long time before a product comes out to the market.
A lot of effects in Beryl or XGl comes from other projects and experiments, that predates Vista (so it’s very probable that Vista designers/developers borrowed ideas from there).
And about the themes that are similar to Windows… that always happens (there is also a lot of themes similar to OSX too).
A lot of these themes are created by individuals, just for fun. It’s like saying: “hey look, I made a thing that looks like a expensive commercial soft X, in my spare time”
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