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NeXTSTEP was beautiful, clean, and elegant. How is it that the Gnustep pseudo-copies, such as Etoile, can be so ugly and inconsistent? Everything from nasty f

NeXTSTEP was beautiful, clean, and elegant. How is it that the Gnustep pseudo-copies, such as Etoile, can be so ugly and inconsistent? Everything from nasty font choices to the inconsistent and weird spacing between widgets to the weird mishmash of UI styles. You'd think that the entire selling point (so to speak) of software like this is that it retains the elegance of NeXTSTEP, but no. For maybe two decades I'd argued that the fundamental problem with open source UIs is that there is no hegemon, no dictator who forces everyone to be consistent and to have good taste. Witness the incredible proliferation of awful X11 interface designs, window managers, toolkits, and platforms, and the still astonishing primitiveness and lack of proper interaction and interconnectivity between X applications. Instead you have a thousand flowers blooming, all nurtured by homebrew software developers who have no idea what they're doing designwise. NeXTSTEP, and of course MacOS, have had dictators and designers, and it shows. And when there is some powerful force in effect to keep everyone in line, open source UI software can more or less have this quality: witness Android under Google's, um, guidance. But Etoile is a great example, I think, of the no-hegemon effect. Even though they had a TEMPLATE of design elegance (NeXTSTEP), they still managed to make a failure of a UI product.

schmorptron 5y ago
wanted to disagree, but then noticed that the open source Desktops I think look good all sort of operate under that umbrella, like Gnome and elementary all have very strict design guidelines.
- quadrifoliate 5y ago
  I think another problem is that there's no way, as far as I know, to disallow an app that doesn't stick to those guidelines. I mean, maybe the Gnome default applications can strictly stick to those, but what how do you ensure that third-party apps stick to the guidelines? Apple seems to have solved this with a combination of big community of enthusiasts and an App Store for macOS, and just the App Store for iOS. A major fear of Apple developers seems to be the prospect of their App being removed from the App Store for unclear reasons. It's hard to imagine a model where apps can remain FOSS but have the same sort of strict design guidelines.
  - SeanLuke 5y ago
    NeXT took a different tack. Rather than enforce a set of requirements and guidelines, NeXT produced a library and set of tools so compelling that only an idiot wouldn't use them -- and these tools (such as Interface Builder) strongly encouraged implementation of NeXTSTEP style. Whereas MacOS has historically been all stick, NeXTSTEP was all carrot.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      This is also roughly the Qt/KDE approach. Except that there are alternatives such as GTK and wxWidgets that have to be supported too.
      - SeanLuke 5y ago
        IMHO QT, GTK and wxWidgets are, put simply, awful. They are good examples of limited toolkits designed in part with cross-platform development in mind, rather than libraries designed with novel or even good interface design. They proliferate and compete on X despite there being poor interoperability among them. They seem to be focused on copying Windows (hardly a paragon of good interfaces) design elements and in enabling skins rather than deep UI functionality. I come from a background of early MacOS, NeXTSTEP, and the Newton, three environments which prided themselves on developing novel and useful interfaces tailored to the specific needs of their platforms. The X11-inspired cross-platform toolkits are head-shakingly bad compared to these efforts. For example, GTK on Maemo was so embarassingly inferior in design to NewtonScript (a GUI 10 years before it note) that I wrote an entire article about it. I think the only decently crafted open source UI on Linux/BSD right now is Android. Because Google has the resources and heft to make people do it right.
        sudosysgen 5y ago
        Qt is strongly associated to the KDE project, which takes it's heritage from CDE et Al., which predates Windows a fair amount. They didn't really copy Windows, and actually did a lot before Windows and still do many things Windows can't. Also Qt is fairly independent of X11. It can operate fully independently from X and nowadays is basically agnostic to X. I suspect GTK is similar.
shrubble 5y ago
NeXT started with Display PostScript as the underlying rendering engine. The X Windows fonts require a great deal more work to be visually consistent; and are not integrated with the coordinate system of the rest of the display. Whereas under DPS it is all one integrated method/system, making it easy to adjust the spacing between all graphical elements. I think at least, that is the reason for any visually jarring things under Etoile and this is seen in multiple Linux GUIs...

schmorptron 5y ago

wanted to disagree, but then noticed that the open source Desktops I think look good all sort of operate under that umbrella, like Gnome and elementary all have very strict design guidelines.

quadrifoliate 5y ago
I think another problem is that there's no way, as far as I know, to disallow an app that doesn't stick to those guidelines. I mean, maybe the Gnome default applications can strictly stick to those, but what how do you ensure that third-party apps stick to the guidelines? Apple seems to have solved this with a combination of big community of enthusiasts and an App Store for macOS, and just the App Store for iOS. A major fear of Apple developers seems to be the prospect of their App being removed from the App Store for unclear reasons. It's hard to imagine a model where apps can remain FOSS but have the same sort of strict design guidelines.
- SeanLuke 5y ago
  NeXT took a different tack. Rather than enforce a set of requirements and guidelines, NeXT produced a library and set of tools so compelling that only an idiot wouldn't use them -- and these tools (such as Interface Builder) strongly encouraged implementation of NeXTSTEP style. Whereas MacOS has historically been all stick, NeXTSTEP was all carrot.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    This is also roughly the Qt/KDE approach. Except that there are alternatives such as GTK and wxWidgets that have to be supported too.
    - SeanLuke 5y ago
      IMHO QT, GTK and wxWidgets are, put simply, awful. They are good examples of limited toolkits designed in part with cross-platform development in mind, rather than libraries designed with novel or even good interface design. They proliferate and compete on X despite there being poor interoperability among them. They seem to be focused on copying Windows (hardly a paragon of good interfaces) design elements and in enabling skins rather than deep UI functionality. I come from a background of early MacOS, NeXTSTEP, and the Newton, three environments which prided themselves on developing novel and useful interfaces tailored to the specific needs of their platforms. The X11-inspired cross-platform toolkits are head-shakingly bad compared to these efforts. For example, GTK on Maemo was so embarassingly inferior in design to NewtonScript (a GUI 10 years before it note) that I wrote an entire article about it. I think the only decently crafted open source UI on Linux/BSD right now is Android. Because Google has the resources and heft to make people do it right.
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        Qt is strongly associated to the KDE project, which takes it's heritage from CDE et Al., which predates Windows a fair amount. They didn't really copy Windows, and actually did a lot before Windows and still do many things Windows can't. Also Qt is fairly independent of X11. It can operate fully independently from X and nowadays is basically agnostic to X. I suspect GTK is similar.

shrubble 5y ago

NeXT started with Display PostScript as the underlying rendering engine. The X Windows fonts require a great deal more work to be visually consistent; and are not integrated with the coordinate system of the rest of the display. Whereas under DPS it is all one integrated method/system, making it easy to adjust the spacing between all graphical elements. I think at least, that is the reason for any visually jarring things under Etoile and this is seen in multiple Linux GUIs...