4 ms·
When 3D acceleration became mainstream and people started developing 3D-accelerated desktop it was very trendy to have a bunch of pointless 3D stuff going on. I
by simias 8y ago
When 3D acceleration became mainstream and people started developing 3D-accelerated desktop it was very trendy to have a bunch of pointless 3D stuff going on. I think it was around that time that compiz and its 3D burning cubes and other mostly (but not entirely) useless eye candy were released: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QokOwvPxrE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QokOwvPxrE
I think there were two reasons for this:
- It looked cool, even if sometimes very impractical. Now it's a bit mundane but at the time it was like breaking the 3rd wall, we were so used to the flatness of the desktop that it was really weird to view it as a 3D object.
- Apple and Microsoft were in no rush to bring these features to their commercial OSs (and proably for good reasons, MS tried to have the 3D carousel in Vista but even that wasn't very useful). That meant that people in the Linux world in particular could show off "hey, can your Windows XP do that?"
But of course eventually we realized that 90% of these features were counter-productive so we only kept the bits that made sense (ability to scale down windows in real time easily to make thumbnails or previews, faster rendering, a bit of transparency etc...).
- ascagnel_ 8y agoThe only good implementation of a 3D desktop effect (outside of straight-up window rendering) is Expose, which Apple demoed in 2002/2003 for 10.3. I remember, circa 2005, there being compiz extensions that enabled something similar.
- palebluedot 8y agoTranslucent windows when moving and resizing is really nice (KDE).
- michaelmrose 8y agoIt could expose all the windows in the current monitor, on all monitors of the current workspace, or all windows period. Virtual desktops which I believe linux supported long before spaces acquired a nice visual metaphor with compiz which allowed you to zoom out to see them all and drag windows between one and the other. Windows could be set to have a small amount of resistance when passing other windows to make it easy to stick them side be size. The effects for windows creation and destruction were quite cool and super configurable.
- ChrisClark 8y agoHaving had to move to Windows for work, I actually miss wobbly windows. All the fancy over the top effects and 3D stuff? No. But for some reason for me, the fluid windows felt so much better than the perfect stiff boxes I have to use now.
- apk-d 8y agoI have the exact opposite response. The wobbly windows look wacky and distracting. To my eye, windows are simply not meant to do that. I suppose it's a matter of what you're used to (as is often the case when it comes to UI opinions).
- ChrisClark 8y agoYeah, I most likely got seduced by all the fancy stuff in the early Compiz days and then used the wobbly windows long enough that they are what feel normal.
- skykooler 8y agoCompiz (and the wobbly windows in particular) were what got me to try Linux in the first place. Previously I'd always thought of it as a server/workstation OS that was very stuffy and minimal. A friend showed me the desktop effects, which completely changed my view; I'd never before realized that linux could look cool.
- dkarl 8y agoThis reminds me how old I am now and how young I was back then. At the time, stuff like this filled me with excitement. Now I look at it and think it's obvious that the annoyance factor and lost performance will vastly outweigh the legitimately cool applications. It also reminds me that I used to tweak a bunch of settings in OS X to speed up and disable animations, but I gave up years ago because Apple kept breaking them. Now I just use OS X with its default settings and stay away from things like Spaces that insist on cramming animations into my attention. That makes me sad, so I am going to go back to not thinking about it.
- jazzyjackson 8y agoHi I'm a recent convert to OSX and found the animations of 3-finger-swiping between desktops annoying. Recently found the "reduce motion" checkbox in System Preferences > Accessibility and instead of sliding it just does fade-in-place which is way less annoying and I think feels faster because you start to see the other window right away, even if there's a window fading away on top of it. The slide from desktop to desktop feels like I need a split second to orient myself after being spun in a chair.
- draw_down 8y agoWindows made the framing of the windows translucent with a blurring effect, which I still think looks pretty bad. Still pretty pointless imo.
- yarrel 8y agoRotating cubes and wobbly windows were in macOS.
- babypuncher 8y agoI don't think they were...
- redial 8y agoThe cube animation was introduced in 2002-2003 if I remember correctly, and it is still present in macOS when changing users using fast-user-switching.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]