Start Button ?

[Warrior]

Yes and the start menu can get cluttered if you have too many files. I think either my way or just a desktop with icons on it would be good for a Desktop. I like how WindowMaker on Linux works, has a menu with some of the most important programs (editable)

[aladdin]

IMHO, fluxbox concept one of the most interesting :
- no icons on the desktop
- no start button (or similar thing)

there is only a customizable right-click menu, and you can use desklets if you want shortcuts to your applications ... there is also some programs that allow you to have icons on the desktop but they are almost never used :p
another interesting feature in fluxbox is that it enable you put applications' windows together (in a same tabbed window), then you can acces them from title bar.
plus some little features like multilayerd desktop ...etc

[Warrior]

Heres a concept GUI I drew in Photoshop at home

http://www.javaop.com/uploads/guest/FutureGUI.gif

[distantvoices]

I prefer a mixture of the two of them - icons which represent the state of the application and collect instances of it in a sub menue - and a menue which offers access to less used features like System Settings, Network settings, adding Devices, loading/unloading drivers - either accessible via some button or via right click popup on any spot of the desktop where pixel(x,y).owner==desktop.

Also I can imagine to have some kinda taskbar which offers all open windows - either in full state or iconified - to choose from in form of buttons.

A sophisticated desktop manager of today would also include some possibility to iconify all the open windows at once in order to clean up the screen.

Hm. I should go on and implement icons & a file system browser finally. Might be fun.

[Solar]

I'd love to see a desktop os where it was based around a "DESKTOP".

I'd love to see an OS that doesn't fence itself in with some cool "metaphor" but simply does things in the most simple, effective, and intuitive way possible.

Lumping everything together into a single "killer menu" is just about as far away from it as presenting the user with an empty space with no hint whatsoever what's expected of him (fluxbox).

Amiga Workbench, right after loading, presented you with an icon / label for every connected storage device, and a menu bar. Clicking on the icons brought up a file browser window for that device. One of the icons was labeled "System". That was a blatantly obvious, intuitive interface. Virtually everything that came after that - sadly enough including post-Commodore versions of AmigaOS itself - went down eye-candy lane.

[distantvoices]

isn't it obvious?

In times of Amiga 500 (where I#ve seen a workbench for the first time - but used to that kinda things from C64 - GEOS), with all the limited memory and cpu capacity, the engineers were forced to do a damn good job of engineering in order to have the damned thing work well and in the mean time look extremely good - by adapting the saying: Less is More. The amiga os of these time has looked lean and quick, and according to what I recall from my rare encounters with an amiga it's been quick as lightning too.

Today, with all this increasing availability of power & memory & storage, the engineers needn't care anymore about how efficient their algorithms are. Just code the fcuknig thing and be it gone, we care stih. That's where all this bloat stems from mostly - and easy to lulled users who see "whoa look at This Eye Candy" - and look over the significant failures in background.

I wish an GUI environment which gives me the possibility to tell it: I don't want fading menues. I want outline rectangles for window moving. I want full window dragging. I want animated iconifying. ... and so forth. Give the average user reasonable settings and let him choose what eyecandy he wants to enable.

One example of slightly crappy UI environment is the Ubuntu GNOME desktop, where mount-icons popup everyone on top o the other. Where you can't simply launch a file system browser by clicking on some button. Oh, yes, you could open a terminal and say ls cd ls cd ... what so ever. It's getting there quickly too. But what good for 's the UI environment then, eh?

[Pype.Clicker]

Noone will be surprised if i say that "one-icon-per-device" appears in MacOSX (and iirc in previous versions of MACOS) aswell.

The question is, is it still appliable nowadays ? I mean, i have over 10 partitions at home, that cover 2 hdds. plus 3 or 4 partitions on asmodan@work. Add to this files i'm responsible of on the department's server, accounts on remote machines and the like (sf.net, contributions to wiki)...

That's what i'd like any of my systems to manage / synchronize, etc.
Would a single screen be enough to show them all ?

I like the "naked screen" approach for everyday work (using well-known tools to perform usual tasks such as coding, websurfing, document typing, annotation, etc.) but when i have to do something new for which i don't know tools already ... hmm ... let me tell you that i'd love to summon the WizardOfOS (tm) and look among those daemons if i have some freshmeat installed to get the job done...

[srg]

Amiga Workbench, right after loading, presented you with an icon / label for every connected storage device, and a menu bar. Clicking on the icons brought up a file browser window for that device. One of the icons was labeled "System". That was a blatantly obvious, intuitive interface. Virtually everything that came after that - sadly enough including post-Commodore versions of AmigaOS itself - went down eye-candy lane.

That is probably why I always go straight to My Computer in Windows, then just select the drive I want to view.

The Amiga never really had a need for start menus or fuxbox type menus because, in my case anyway, I just have a partition for my applications and then each app is placed in it's own directory on the partition, simplicity it's self. My dad could use the amiga easily, he found getting used to windows a struggle. There were shared libraries that got installed into the system partition so not knowing what they were made uninstallation a bit of a pain but appart from that it just worked.

As Pype said, these days with loads of partitions, the old Amiga way would mean a very clogged up "desktop" what ever you want to call it. Maybe a mixture of Windows an Amiga would be a good compromise. So you have a main one called "drives" say, then all the drives come from that, the drives window would get cluttered, but the main "desktop" wouldn't.

srg

[Dex4u]

All you need is a simple menu like "Dex4u" Gui.
http://falconrybells.co.uk/gui.png

[distantvoices]

But that wn't really sell, see? despite all simplicity, today's people prefer quite some eyecandy -- thing sto click on things to move around ... *shrugs* graphical hints about what the given thing on the screen should be (not as if it isn't plain regarding your menue).

[Solar]

The thing is, human eyes are faster at recognizing shapes than they are at reading. Once you know that dinosaur's head means "start Mozilla", you find that icon on the desktop much faster than the string "Mozilla" in a menu. And if you focus on what you're doing in your start menu, you'll realize that you aren't reading menu entries, you are recognizing the shapes of the menu entries.

Unless you have problems with reading, which basically means you have problems recognizing the "shapes" of words.

So, yes, icons are a big benefit. It is also true that human eye locks on movement.

But somewhere between carefully engineered 256-color icons and truecolor alphachannel 128x128 iconography that animates when you mouse-over, they overdid it.

[Dex4u]

I would of agreed with you a year or so ago, but the latest "start" to come from M$ is not that much differant from "Dex4u" menu
http://www.winsupersite.com/images/revi ... ew_013.gif

[AR]

I hope your not trying to say that because you came up with it that it's perfect...

I'd be inclined to agree with Solar, if you think about, each letter in the alphabet is a "graphic", in order to understand text you have to recognise each letter then assemble the letters into a meaning, pictures can be recognised immediately without requiring "understanding" first.

[Solar]

Icon labels are for finding your way through an UI you don't know yet.

The icons themselves speed up things once you got the hang of it.

Animations distract. Try hitting the "reply" button, then stare at the screen unfocussed. What to you still "see"? Correct, the two smileys rolling their eyes and the "Marquee" button.

In my book, icons are a must-have (and of course Microsoft screws that one up, and actually change the imagery at every opportunity to really screw up recognizability), and the only things that should be animated on a desktop are the cursor and [move]ALERT Messages![/move]

[Pype.Clicker]

oh dear ... i even tried to catch the "ALERT messages" by clicking it ...

@dex4u ... you must have been M$'ed ... what's the point of having "My Music" or "My Photos" ? ... The computer is yours, right ? so everything is there is yours ... "Music" and "Photos" would be way enough, wouldn't they ...

Btw, i used to love the way newer file explorer allow you to 'customize' the folder icon for some of your stuff (so that i use to have a fat-penguin-folder for linux-projects). Among all the other, it makes them more recognizable. It would even get better if i could see 'just folders i use to browse' or if i could have a graphic reminder of the shell location while on the shell, esp. when the shell get iconified.

Of course, all those are a matter of preferences. If you're barely using two shells, getting an immediate recognition of the current shell is simply useless eyecandy ...