XGL + Compiz

It certainly has more eye-candy than OS X... but I'm not sure it's so much more usable. Multiple desktops obviously appeal to the Linux crowd, where it's been a well-established thing for many years... but I wouldn't want to try to manage multiple desktops myself, ESPECIALLY if I had two monitors.

Ripping off Exposé was obvious, and no wonder, it's an awesome feature (though, without the complement of spring-loaded folders, I'd find it less useful). The whole wobbly/warpy windows bit seems a bit pointless though, the kind of thing that's just to show off that yes, it's 3D. At least the genie effect for minimizing on OS X has a purpose—to help guide the user to where their window went, physically.

Also, I notice XGL seems to make a lot of the same mistakes OS X made in its first iterations and Vista is making now—that is to say "a lot of transparency everywhere." Yes, obviously 3D compositing makes translucent windows possible. But it's WAY easy to get slap-happy about that shit and not think about readability and usability. That's why translucency in OS X has been SERIOUSLY toned down since 10.0/10.1.

My philosophy is that compositing windows in 3D should be about improving UI speed and smoothness, plus allowing for useful window transformations, a la Exposé, not useless eye-candy like blurry glass window borders (Vista) or warpy/wobbly windows (XGL). There definitely are some good ideas in here, but I think that both XGL and Vista could learn from Apple's mistakes instead of repeating them.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Magic

I don't remember any transparency before Expose. Where was it? I think the only time I ever activated transparency in OS X was to get a neat-looking terminal window.

Menus used to me much more transparent than they are now. Additionally, title-bars on out-of-focus windows used to be semi-transparent. Combined with the much more intense pinstripes in earlier revisions, it made readability somewhat nightmarish.

A terminal window I can SORT of understand, if you're just doing terminal-like things that don't fill up the whole terminal with text. But for any window that's full of text/graphics? I don't want to be able to see through that shit—I want to be able to READ it. If I was running irssi in a terminal, I wouldn't want to see through that either. It impedes readability and hence functionality.

That's why I feel that way about Vista's glass title-bars. Yeah, it LOOKS neat, it's a nice tech demo, but A) with different blurred colors coming through, reading text can be hard, and B) it's difficult as fuck to figure out which window is in focus.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Magic

As long as the user can control transparency it shouldn't be a problem, although then everybody gets to complain about what is/isn't enabled by default. Also, in the video they were able to enable/disable transparency through a menu which is definitely a good idea (how about titlebar buttons?).

See, I'm of the opinion that a real UI designer knows better than the user does, and ought to do their best to save them from themselves, not encourage stupid shit.

But yes, for the Linux crowd (which overall seems to be much more into "tweaking" than "usability") obviously the option is a good thing... even if it's a stupid thing.

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