On Fri, 2006-02-24 at 10:14 -0500, taharka wrote: > Full story at; http://news.com.com/2061-10795_3-6042651.html Hmm, looking at it, and a couple of the links branching off it, I wonder if it really adds anything useful? And will it mean that you'll need a super duper, hot and noisy fan-cooled graphics card for a basic machine? Mac has had zooming windows for years, though I wish it didn't - I found it annoying. But whether you zoom with an outline, or melt the window, down to where it's been shrunk down to, or some other neat looking effect, the user has a quite obvious indicator of where to find it to re-open it. The more fancy you get about this, the more you'll have to wait for it to finish, because it's going to get in the way. Rotating desktops would be hideous. A huge block swinging around at you would give me motion sickness, not to mention that it's going to mean a big delay instead of just switching desktops. Fading/scrolling menus are just another thing that delays you from using them. Someone comes up with an idea to make it quick and easy to find things, you right click and a menu pops up, and sub-menus if needed. Someone else takes that idea, and makes it inefficient. Now its first opening is slow, as the system trawls the hard drive to find the icons (most of which are unintuitive), the menu slowly appears (slowing down your work rate), and likewise for sub-menus. I've used other people's PCs which are tarted up to the hilt in those sort of ways, and they're slow to use (much slower than using my own system with things that just snap to it, even though my overall PC power is far less - half the ram, a quarter the CPU clock rate, etc.). Every GUI action that I take to get a task done, on their system, involves waiting for it to finish doing its song and dance. -- (Currently running FC4, in case that's important to the thread) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
