4 ms·

You appear to have a lot of experience with this equipment and interfaces like this, I have to say what has been lost, in terms of usability between this and th

You appear to have a lot of experience with this equipment and interfaces like this, I have to say what has been lost, in terms of usability between this and the more usable versions of Mac OS? (The modern versions of Mac OS and the unix desktops of Gnome and KDE leave much to be desired)

kragen 4y ago
I appreciate the flattery, but I'm not really an HCI expert. To my taste, GNOME, KDE, and modern versions of MacOS are all significantly easier to use than X-Windows in the 01990s, most of the time, as well as capable of doing a wider range of things. But, because their implementation is much more complex, they are often more difficult to debug when things go wrong, even though the available debugging tools are also better.
jfb 4y ago
I'm not the OP, but I was around for this stuff at the time (my first exposure to ~Unix was Andrew at CMU in like '88) and while I definitely look back at some of it nostalgically, most of my nostalgia is for the contemporaneous Mac OS. Open Look and the various X11 systems were pretty primitive, in comparison. And slow, for the most part, at least with the class of workstation I got to use. A lot of the idiom of what we see today was actually developed by Microsoft, for Windows 95. That's fine, but it's also pretty monocultural. The classic Mac OS had a different set of assumptions than Windows did, but the industry has chased that Cairo dream.
porcoda 4y ago
Not the person you’re responding to, but I spent a ton of time using SunView and peers too. I don’t see much lost in terms of usability: I’m pretty happy with modern interfaces compared to the old ones. My biggest complaint about new systems is that I can’t quickly throw together a GUI based program with the ease I could on those systems. It wasn’t a big deal to just write a simple C program to make a program with a GUI, even if it was a bit ugly and crude. These days the few times I’ve tried I just give up: too many abstraction layers, too much complexity, too high of a learning curve wading through poor documentation. The closest I’ve found that feels as easy as those old UI systems are libraries like FLTK, but that adds a dependency versus just writing something that targets the UI that the system provides and has zero third party dependencies.
- lelanthran 4y ago
  > It wasn’t a big deal to just write a simple C program to make a program with a GUI, even if it was a bit ugly and crude. These days the few times I’ve tried I just give up: too many abstraction layers, too much complexity, too high of a learning curve wading through poor documentation. That is correct, if you want to write your program using C (or similar), but if you want to do simple GUI programs, there's enough support in existing c/line programs. Use zenity, wmctrl, etc. Here's a basic pomodoro clock written in bash: https://gist.github.com/lelanthran/bbbcf5c8b6b26c9bc0263384a22b4f61 https://gist.github.com/lelanthran/bbbcf5c8b6b26c9bc0263384a...
  - kragen 4y ago
    How would you do something like https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/-/blob/master/yeso/%CE%BCpaint.c https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/-/blob/master/yeso/%CE%BC... (a simple paint program), https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/-/blob/master/yeso/mand.py https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/-/blob/master/yeso/mand.p... (a Mandelbrot renderer), or https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/-/blob/master/yeso/glyphed.c https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/-/blob/master/yeso/glyphe... (a fatbits pixel font editor) with zenity, wmctrl, etc.? All three of these are less than 40 lines of code. The best things I've found for simple GUI programs these days are Tk and HTML+JS.
    - lelanthran 4y ago
      All those examples require a canvas. For simple GUI applications that mostly just take input from the user and produce output in a non-canvas form, zenity usually works.
      - kragen 4y ago
        I would argue that if your "graphical user interface" doesn't involve any actual graphics, you shouldn't call it a "graphical user interface" ("GUI"). Zenity can't do any actual graphics, just text you can point at with a mouse.

kragen 4y ago

I appreciate the flattery, but I'm not really an HCI expert. To my taste, GNOME, KDE, and modern versions of MacOS are all significantly easier to use than X-Windows in the 01990s, most of the time, as well as capable of doing a wider range of things. But, because their implementation is much more complex, they are often more difficult to debug when things go wrong, even though the available debugging tools are also better.

jfb 4y ago

I'm not the OP, but I was around for this stuff at the time (my first exposure to ~Unix was Andrew at CMU in like '88) and while I definitely look back at some of it nostalgically, most of my nostalgia is for the contemporaneous Mac OS. Open Look and the various X11 systems were pretty primitive, in comparison. And slow, for the most part, at least with the class of workstation I got to use. A lot of the idiom of what we see today was actually developed by Microsoft, for Windows 95. That's fine, but it's also pretty monocultural. The classic Mac OS had a different set of assumptions than Windows did, but the industry has chased that Cairo dream.

porcoda 4y ago

Not the person you’re responding to, but I spent a ton of time using SunView and peers too. I don’t see much lost in terms of usability: I’m pretty happy with modern interfaces compared to the old ones. My biggest complaint about new systems is that I can’t quickly throw together a GUI based program with the ease I could on those systems. It wasn’t a big deal to just write a simple C program to make a program with a GUI, even if it was a bit ugly and crude. These days the few times I’ve tried I just give up: too many abstraction layers, too much complexity, too high of a learning curve wading through poor documentation. The closest I’ve found that feels as easy as those old UI systems are libraries like FLTK, but that adds a dependency versus just writing something that targets the UI that the system provides and has zero third party dependencies.

lelanthran 4y ago
> It wasn’t a big deal to just write a simple C program to make a program with a GUI, even if it was a bit ugly and crude. These days the few times I’ve tried I just give up: too many abstraction layers, too much complexity, too high of a learning curve wading through poor documentation. That is correct, if you want to write your program using C (or similar), but if you want to do simple GUI programs, there's enough support in existing c/line programs. Use zenity, wmctrl, etc. Here's a basic pomodoro clock written in bash: https://gist.github.com/lelanthran/bbbcf5c8b6b26c9bc0263384a22b4f61 https://gist.github.com/lelanthran/bbbcf5c8b6b26c9bc0263384a...
- kragen 4y ago
  How would you do something like https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/-/blob/master/yeso/%CE%BCpaint.c https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/-/blob/master/yeso/%CE%BC... (a simple paint program), https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/-/blob/master/yeso/mand.py https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/-/blob/master/yeso/mand.p... (a Mandelbrot renderer), or https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/-/blob/master/yeso/glyphed.c https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/-/blob/master/yeso/glyphe... (a fatbits pixel font editor) with zenity, wmctrl, etc.? All three of these are less than 40 lines of code. The best things I've found for simple GUI programs these days are Tk and HTML+JS.
  - lelanthran 4y ago
    All those examples require a canvas. For simple GUI applications that mostly just take input from the user and produce output in a non-canvas form, zenity usually works.
    - kragen 4y ago
      I would argue that if your "graphical user interface" doesn't involve any actual graphics, you shouldn't call it a "graphical user interface" ("GUI"). Zenity can't do any actual graphics, just text you can point at with a mouse.