history of CADT

Posted May 10, 2016 8:15 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: history of CADT by louie
Parent article: Devuan Jessie beta released

Your 1.4 prefs dialogue is using the stock widget look. If you were trying to make 1.4 look bad, that's what you'd choose. I doubt anyone shipped with stock/no-theme as the default theme. There were a lot prettier themes. E.g. "ThinIce" still looks fairly good today.

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history of CADT

Posted May 10, 2016 15:37 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (6 responses)

That is a very weird thing to say, that showing the default operation of a particular software would be considered "trying to make it look bad" and that this would be considered a defense of the software in question. Are you saying that the people who built this software and chose the default look were "trying to make it look bad" ??!! My head goes all 'splody trying to understand what you are implying here.

history of CADT

Posted May 10, 2016 15:46 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (5 responses)

Louie seemed to be arguing that the GTK look from GNOME 1.4 days was ugly and using that as evidence for some greater argument about need for GNOME to rewrite stuff. I agree the /default/ GTK library look from those days, as shown in the example, was indeed a bit ugly. However, I don't think any distro shipped with the stock/no-theme default widget set as the distro-default. I don't know why the library default was ugly, but that library default look was *not* what users got anyway in those days - so using a screenshot of that library-default seems unrepresentative, and hence not a good support for whatever argument louie was making.

history of CADT

Posted May 10, 2016 16:00 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

> Louie seemed to be arguing that the GTK look from GNOME 1.4 days was ugly

That isn't it at all. The image shown is the control center setting overloaded with geeky options. The look of the toolkit is irrelevant to the point being made there.

history of CADT

Posted May 10, 2016 16:11 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

I think the point wasn't the actual widget appearance, but the complexity of the preference dialog and the implications it had for both usability and testability of GNOME 1.x as a whole.

history of CADT

Posted May 10, 2016 16:36 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Ah. :)

Ok. On that, I'd whole-heartedly agree. GNOME 2 was a huge improvement in that regard. It should be noted that, a factor in the (eventual) success of GNOME 2 was that the changes were driven by empirical HCI studies carried out by Sun Microsystems. The results of which led to the GNOME 2 HIG.

GNOME 2 wasn't just arbitrary change. It was change based on objective evidence.

history of CADT

Posted May 10, 2016 16:12 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

> Louie seemed to be arguing that the GTK look from GNOME 1.4 days was ugly

I didn't get that at all, I didn't see this as making a comment about the aesthetic qualities of grey, which I think is largely irrelevant, but as a comment about the organization and number of preferences, which was greatly simplified in the move to GNOME 2, so that every user didn't have to wade through a cacophony of irrelevant sliders and tabs, to change the few options that were most likely to be changed, while still retaining many of the variables exposed in a more advanced interface for those who want it.

This was a major change and rewrite that most people seemed to like better than the old tool in time, you could make the same kind of comparison between Sawmill and Metacity, would GNOME be stronger today if Sawmill had stayed as the default, to maintain compatibility, same as if the original Control Center had stayed?

history of CADT

Posted May 10, 2016 21:41 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I would certainly be hugely happy if Saw{mill,fish} had stayed alive, rather than its main developer being hired by Apple on the condition he stopped working on it. It was and is the best Lispy WM out there, bar none.