On 6/27/07, Bakul Shah <bakul+plan9@bitblocks.com> wrote:
>
> > By 3D design, do you mean 3D widgets? You might note that most
> > Plan 9 apps don't use widget toolkits (although libframe is sort
> > of like one), but libpanel (by Tom Duff, used by mothra) uses 3D
> > widgets, as does Inferno's Tk (although both are ugly by most
> > standards; I'm no fan).
>
> I don't mean 3D widgets in particular.  I don't even like the
> word widget.  If they'd called it a gizmo it might have
> evolved differently....
>
> I am not sure what I mean :-)  Guess some sort of 3D UI.  A
> way to deal with 3d objects.  Things like Cocoa's (x)(-)(+)
> 3d buttons are pretty silly and you don't lose anything by
> flattening them.  Eyecandy is not what I mean.  To me design
> is more about function, not just making things non-ugly.
>

What's more usable about 3d than 2d for a GUI desktop?
Apple spent a long time implementing overlapping windows for their first
GUIs they were copying from Xerox... except that Xerox didn't have
overlapping windows.  They made their work much harder for themselves.

Now consider Acme... Windows aren't overlapped, they're tiled, you can hide
windows but then you can also find them again.  Kind of nice and efficient.

If I didn't have overlapping windows, Expose on Mac OS X would be much less
interesting now wouldn't it?

It's a shame when a new feature requires a new feature to use that new
feature.

What's the point?  Job security?

I use Acme on Mac OS X as my main editor for most things these days
actually.  The only things I really miss are when I'm editing scheme or lisp
and need to match up all those damned parenthesis.  In those cases I use
Emacs... it's just better at it (and no stopping to click to highlight
open/close parens doesn't do it for me as much as automatic code indentation
based on syntax gets me)

I've honestly also not really tried to figure out if Acme's minimal
auto-indenting can help me with this.

Dave

Dave