[Martinus]

[color=66ff00]Windows interface is not only poorer than OSX, MS's leading edge design is poorer than OSX.

link

Now accounting for the fact that Vista is in beta you still can't say that the win interface is better because apple is currently improving it's already superior GUI with each release.

Now I consider Linux's GUI as a double edged sword of sorts, it's both as flexible as you want and as inconsistent as all hell. It needs serious improvement and as the video I linked to suggests it may well be coming in the near future.

Why the unnecessary windows fanboi stance? As I said before I value windows as a good OS but it's nowhere near as polished as OSX or as flexible as linux. There are certain things you need windows for though and that's why it's valued.
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[Ghost]

Is Vista the blue/green interface that came with XP? I wasn't referring to that; I was referring to "Windows Classic," as in how Windows 98 looked. Also, I wasn't even really referring to looks at all. I was referring to how it's set up.

[Mongoose]

Getting back on topic a bit here...

Some parts of that demonstration were pretty cool to look at, at least.  I don't understand why he made such a big deal about the transparency; programs like Winamp or Trillian already do that without any need for anything complex.  I'll have to say that the rotating windows were amazing, and when he started writing a note on the back of a webpage...that was awesome. Overall, though, there doesn't seem to be much purpose for the whole thing.  As Descenterace said, the monitor is a 2D environment, and cluttering it up with all kinds of 3D interfaces can get overwhelming really fast.  I also don't see the point of directing so many graphical resources just toward the desktop display; it's all well and good if you have the latest graphics card, but for someone like me, it'd make my machine run slower than an Amiga.  I got the same reaction after using OSX Tiger for the first time yesterday; all of the graphical flashiness just seems extraneous to what you're actually using the machine for.  Windows 95 still looks fine to me.  I'll take back everything I just said, though, if someone develops interactive holographic desktops or Ghost-in-the-Shell-style mental interfaces; if we get to that point, bring on the 3D!

[mikhael]

3d accelleration to make your 2d desktop run faster and smoother? BLOODY BEAUTIFUL.

3d Desktops? BLOODY AWFUL.

Look, as long as your interface to the computer consists of a mouse (which is, essentially a 2d device) and a keyboard and your display is a screen (a 2d device), 3d desktops are going to suck donkey bollocks. Every single way you can describe a 3d desktop maps directly to a 2d display with virtual desktops--which have been about and working at decent speeds since the days of the 386. Making it 3d only makes it less efficient, harder to find things, and more confusing for anyone who isn't a geek.

Before anyone even contemplates switching to 3d "desktops" (even the word "Desktop" is mired in 2d thinking!), a full on 3d input and display system is required. Even then, applications that need 3d displays and input need to be created. Everyone and their brother isn't hacking on something in Lightwave, but you'd be hard pressed to find someone who didn't use IE, Word, Excel, and the like.

[WMCoolmon]

Originally posted by vyper
Real Alt is a codec for WMC anyway ya bell-end.

Originally posted by ChronoReverse
Nice dig on Microsoft.  But the upcoming graphics system in Vista (and will be backported to XP) utilizes the 3D card to a greater degree than even OSX does.

To me, that speaks of 'bloat'. I don't care if my menus have pixel shading and crap, I care if it doesn't get in the way.

Not to mention, if bump-mapped Windows require people to upgrade their video card, that seems a little absurd.

I do think the days of nearly-all 2D interfaces are numbered. But, ironically, I don't think I can watch the video because I only have xine - no "real" anything. It's a piece of **** anyways.

I think 3D GUIs will only really come into style once we have readily-available 3D displays and/or interfaces. Whipping out a pair of goggles and doing operations on a virtual desk sounds like it could be handy, but hardly anyone has the money to afford such a thing. There's also the social stigma (and God/diety of your choice/Darwinism help us when people start using them while driving, ala cell phones)

[mikhael]

Originally posted by WMCoolmon
Whipping out a pair of goggles and doing operations on a virtual desk sounds like it could be handy, but hardly anyone has the money to afford such a thing.

Its worse than that. Let's try a little exercise:
[list=1]

• push yourself back from  your computer and sit up straight.
• lift your arms up and make lots of motions like you were using a computer in thin air
• keep doing this for the three hour stretch (on average) that most people spend using a computer every day
• suddenly realize why fully 3d interfaces are a dumb idea

[mikhael]

Originally posted by vyper
Real Alt is a codec for WMC anyway ya bell-end.

Real Alternative is a codec for Windows. Windows Media Classic CAN use it, but neither is needed for the other to work. I use RA in Windows Media Player.

WMCoolman, WMC is Windows Media Classic, not a reference to you.

[IceFire]

Making 3D GUI's is generally not going to work.  People understand 2d flat planes.  While the human mind is pretty good at dealing with 3D environments (we live in one) we're still pretty rooted in 2D thinking...the ground is down, the sky is up, and everything exists along that plane.  The rest are just details.

So a GUI that operates in pure 3D is probably not going work.  Not with conventional methods.  Never say never I guess.

But 3D acceleration to make the 2D interface smoother, cleaner, and faster is a good idea and one that I applaud.

[WMCoolmon]

Re, WMC: I realized that, hence the

As for three hours of waving arms around, it's not so much that, as you could sit down anywhere and use a virtual mouse + keyboard + move windows around with intuitive movements. For modelling you could actually grab things and move them around in 3 dimensions at a time rather than just 2.

There would be the lack of tactile feedback and physical exhaustion, yeah, but it'd still be more convenient than bringing out an entire laptop, especially if it were possible to be discreet about it.

[Kamikaze]

While the "3D floating windows" idea sounds fairly useless (e.g. virtual desktops are much better than stacking windows sideways), using 3d hardware to improve the desktop is pretty cool. It's more useful than you might imagine.

Here's a blurb about it from Jon Smirl (He used to do a lot of work on Xgl, an Xserver built on OpenGL). From: http://dri.freedesktop.org/~jonsmirl/graphics.html

Using 3D for the desktop is not just about making more eye candy. A lot of the 3D generated eye candy may just be glitz but there are also valid reasons for using 3D. 3D is simply faster than 2D, no one is making their 2D functions faster, all of silicon engineering is going into 3D. You can do fast, arbitrary image processing for things like color space conversion, stretching/warping, etc. I’ve seen some extremely complex filtering done in real time with shader hardware that would take the main CPU several seconds a frame to do. Support for heterogeneous window depths (simultaneous 8, 16, 24-bit windows) with arbitrary colormaps. On-the-fly screen flipping/rotation for projectors, and whole-screen scaling for the visual impaired, etc. Resolution independence allows objects to be rendered at arbitrary resolution/size and down/up-sampled when shown on-screen. More interesting applications are described later in the windowing section.

[CP5670]

This 3D interface seems to be useless. It would be cool for about five minutes, after which it would just get obtrusive. I hope Vista retains the option of using the classic 98/2000 scheme with no animations, which is simple enough that it isn't going to benefit much from 3D acceleration anyway.

[mikhael]

Originally posted by WMCoolmon
Re, WMC: I realized that, hence the

As for three hours of waving arms around, it's not so much that, as you could sit down anywhere and use a virtual mouse + keyboard + move windows around with intuitive movements. For modelling you could actually grab things and move them around in 3 dimensions at a time rather than just 2.

Modelling is completely, utterly NICHE.
As for the rest, describe to me a more intuitive movement for moving a window around than using the mouse. Almost anything you can think of that IS intuitive maps 1:1 directly to "move mouse pointer to window, grab the window, drag the window, release the window".

Originally posted by WMCoolmon
There would be the lack of tactile feedback and physical exhaustion, yeah, but it'd still be more convenient than bringing out an entire laptop, especially if it were possible to be discreet about it.

Stand in the library and start typing in midair one of these days. Keep it up for about half an hour. Let's see how unubtrusive you are.

3d interfaces can't be made practical without changing the entire "desktop" metaphor. As long as we think in terms of "windows" and "files" and "folders" and "desktops" and the like, you're not going to find anything that will beat a mouse and a keyboard for manipulating those concepts.

I'm seriously not trying to come across as an ass, its just that the man/computer interface is one of those things I take great interest in. I get a little worked up about it.

[Martinus]

[color=66ff00]I can honestly say that I'm mostly excited about this because of the effort to try and implement something outside of the box. I also think it's a bit preemptive to draw any conclusions without any hands-on experience.

A good example to me is the ability to use keyboard shortcuts or the mouse, a lot of people are mouse only, I'm sure the majority of people use both and a few use keyboard pretty much exclusively. People tend to find a method of working with a computer that they like because there's some flexibility there.

I guess linux allows you the freedom to use whatever features of whatever GUI's you want. I use xfce4 with some KDE components like konsole, konqueror and kbluetooth. As I said before it's not flawless but it's nice to have options.
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[mikhael]

Originally posted by Maeglamor
[color=66ff00]I can honestly say that I'm mostly excited about this because of the effort to try and implement something outside of the box. I also think it's a bit preemptive to draw any conclusions without any hands-on experience.
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But we've had hands on experience. There's dozens of 3d desktop ideas out there. All of them suffer from a lack of supporting hardware or a prevailing reason for using them.

And its not out-of-the-box thinking, either: Since the advent of 3d graphics accellerators, people have been compositing 2d graphics onto a texture buffer and then projecting that in 3d space as a texture on a polygon. We've seen entire games based around using 3d graphics to simulate 2d (MarioRPG for the Gamecube comes to mind). Vista's just the first case of Microsoft doing it in the GUI of their OS.

[Kazan]

Originally posted by Kalfireth
It never ceases to amaze me that people will wall themselves off from media, purely because they've grown bull headed about the application used to display it

no it's nothing to do with bullheadedness

Real Media pushes snoopware and bloatware - RealPlayer is a piece of  bloated spyware, the format is lossy as hell and anyone who knows their ass from a hole in the ground would be using something under ffdshow

[mikhael]

yeah, but RealMedia is great for Internet streaming pr0n. I know all my favorite sites use Real Media.

[WMCoolmon]

IF someone wants to convert it into a usable format, be my guest...I'd be very appreciative of a DivX or something so I can see what it actually *is*

Although it's probably on google somewhere.

[ChronoReverse]

RV9 is considered by most on the Doom9 forums to be at least as good as XviD and for some media (particularly animation) to be even superior.


Of course, it's weighed down with licensing and such as well as being a propietory format.  But the Helix DNA it's not based on is pretty much what you'd call open-source.



In any case, unless you were on Linux, it's not a screaming problem to play it back even if you don't want to use Real's players and codecs.  And RealAlternative isn't even the only method.

[Kamikaze]

It's not a particularly big deal with Linux either. Mplayer supports Real formats.

[WMCoolmon]

Originally posted by ChronoReverse
unless you were on Linux

Bingo.

I'm using Ubuntu64, and AFAIK there is no 64-bit realplayer.