[lug] The deal with applets / notifications / panels / indicators / systray.....

[stimits at comcast.net]

Hi,

All I can say is wow, I was too young to program then, but I remember seeing Plato over at CU. It made a great Star Trek game. In a way it was a predecessor to ATI style GPUs, it actually tiled with 4 independent hardware processors for video rendering of each quadrant simultaneously (radical back then). I think even phosphorus was too slow, thus the plasma display. Funny thing, I just finished a job that printed 1200 dpi, about a meter wide, down a 1 ton roll of paper at about 300 feet per minute...just an extension of the same thing back then (anyone with a 1200 dpi monitor, measuring a meter tall and very wide?).

My comment on applets: I see my android is amazing, not so much because of any individual app, which almost anything can run, but because of how they integrate. There are just so many things that mix and match in a single android, e.g., gps plus web maps, the ability to press a phone number or web address from a text message to dial or browse, so on. My home computer is way more powerful than the android, yet I use my phone more often for non-telephone. I imagine that if my home computer were the size of my android, yet as powerful as it is now, that I would still use my phone more than my home computer for interacting with the world. The analogy I am thinking of is fly-by-wire...there are those who want to automate things, e.g., autopilot...and those who simply want what they have to run more smoothly (the latter is what I want). E.G., the first power brakes and power steering for cars, but the driver still has to do the same job. It's just easier and more pleasant with some of the clumsiness gone.

I'm hoping that as environments get easier for apps to cooperate without programmers having to know about the system (I know, sounds like "services"...but I mean done right, not just for the sake of uniformity or for the purpose of control, and with far fewer hoops to jump through for apps to work together...distributed programming is not easy). When the environment starts to cause easier and smoother app interoperability, I think this take over without anyone really trying. If someone has to try too hard, it usually means it is for their ease, not someone else's. It seems like linux is the perfect testing ground for this (again, android as the example). Everyone wants to do their own thing...some smart person will some day make that easier by accident, or for non-business reasons.

D. Stimits, stimits AT comcast DOT net

...
I've used a crazy mess of GUIs over the years.  Hell, I even designed a crude Unix/32V bitmap font in 1977 for a Plato plasma display.  I've used the Blit/DMD, plain old X11 widgets, Motif, Sun's NeWS system and their other window managers, CDE, xinit, TWM, FVWM, Sawmill, Gnome, KDE, Unity, etc.
......
Neal McBurnett                 http://neal.mcburnett.org/
...
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.lug.boulder.co.us/pipermail/lug/attachments/20120207/9fa1aa9a/attachment.html>