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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: [kde-devel]  3 D Desktop
From:       Tim Jansen <ml () tjansen ! de>
Date:       2003-12-09 19:58:08
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On Tuesday 09 December 2003 16:12, Wout Mertens wrote:
> When a window loses focus, it smoothly becomes transparant. You can
> double-click on the title bar and that rotates the window, where you'll
> find a sticky note that you can write stuff on :).
> The bar at the bottom contains live snapshots of the running windows.

The demo just fails in a very important point: how does it make the desktop 
more effective to use or easier to learn? That's the problem that all the 3D 
desktop attempts did not solve, they rather make your life more difficult.

Notes on the back of a window belong to the most useless ideas I've ever 
heard... the excessive use of features that seemed to be hidden under 
keystrokes rather make it much more difficult to learn. They did not solve 
the problem that users do not know their options, but rather made it worse by 
not showing them... The CD app is useless (do you know what picture is on a 
audio CD?), does not scale (how do you browse through 100 CDs?) and could be 
done in 2D - 3D is only used as an effect.... showing live snapshots of 
windows may be useful in some cases, but for text it is completely unusable, 
since you can't recognize a window full of text when scaled into a 64x64 
bitmap... they completely ignored Fitt's Law (the bigger an area is the 
faster it is to click, and areas at the border have a near-infinite size) and 
instead let clickable-objects float on the screen. 

I'd rather go from today's WIMP model to something that is simpler, like 
ratpoison (the WM, not the poison), and not make it even more complicated.

bye...

 
 
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