On Mon, 2004-03-22 at 09:37, Rohit Vishal Kumar wrote: > (Emphasis Mine). This is something that i had discussed with Indra and > SM sometime back. I am not against KDE or GNOME or something else - but > a comment by one of my students who had taken the knoppix cd from me > says it all - "Windows i to - ektu bhalo dekhte" >
I've read a number of posts around the Web regarding this point. I do agree that effectivly the difference (at least visually) between Windows and the various Linux desktops are not always very significant. However at the same time I wonder *how different* should or could they be? Current GUIs comprise windows (in the generic sense) and actions on windows. As far as I can see the only thing differentiating one windowing GUI from another is (mainly) the fluff. Granted, from the point of HIG, certain features may be present in one UI and not in another. But in the end, if we do follow well established HIG guidlines does'nt that imply that all GUI's must effectivly be the same - the differenecs essentially being in the artwork? > Perhaps it is time to take stock of FLOSS and develop a new > paradigm... A new paradigm is also an interesting idea. Though I have'nt read the HIG and UI literature extensively, it seems that paradigms other than the WIMP based one we all use require novel interaction/IO methods (say for example the input methods shown in Minority Report - though that would probably make my arms ache in a short time!) More importantly, I dont think novel (and also efficient) UI paradigms would be built in someones spare time - I'm pretty sure you'd want to do some research and testing on human subjects etc. Furthermore a novel paradigm means a major shift in how a person uses a computer. If a paradigm shift would make it much easier (eg full voice recognition) such a shift woud occur. Until such paradigms become available I have a feeling we're all going to be using WIMP's which are inherently all the same. Just out of curiosity what type of UI paradigm's can people think off? Off the top of my head: voice recognition for input, media aggregators (that would effectvly link and relate various types of documents - sort of the semantic web on your hard drive). Maybe in the far far future - fully immersive UI's? ------------------------------------------------------------------- Rajarshi Guha <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://jijo.cjb.net> GPG Fingerprint: 0CCA 8EE2 2EEB 25E2 AB04 06F7 1BB9 E634 9B87 56EE ------------------------------------------------------------------- Do radioactive cats have 18 half-lives? -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body "unsubscribe ilug-cal" and an empty subject line. FAQ: http://www.ilug-cal.org/node.php?id=3
