I have been talking to various people with regard to starting an effort here at AmigaWorld for designing alternative GUI themes, which could later be implemented when AmigaOS4 is available and could for example be included with future OS releases.

I will try to get into contact with some of the people I view as being competent for leading such efforts as well as contributing themselves. Would there be much interest for such an effort amongst AmigaWorld visitors? (i.e. sharing graphics / color / functionality ideas)

Brilliant idea.

The default OS4 gui, as has been shown on the first OS4 on tour (not finished) is horrible (old, dull, boring, depressive,...).

It would be cool to gather new ideas about it.

If you managed to find some UI designers with access to OS4 (or even without it, as long as their designs can easily be implemented) then it could be good to use polls to find the consensus of this site. I personally like the current UI, but it's always good to have a few other ones to cater for everyone.

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If you managed to find some UI designers with access to OS4 (or even without it, as long as their designs can easily be implemented)

Yes that's very important. I have someone in mind who would IMO be very competent for leading and co-ordinating this effort. Sadly he has been rather busy lately, but it would be wonderful if we would be able to add him to our team. He already showed an interest though.

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personally like the current UI, but it's always good to have a few other ones to cater for everyone.

Customization and alternative looks could be one of AmigaOS' great selling points, so I believe we should try to take advantage of this as much as possible.

I also like the current design because it is very much consistent with the look of older OS releases and applications but still looks rather nice and modern.

I do agree with z5 though that the colors are somewhat too dark, but I have already shared my ideas on this with various involved Amiga & Hyperion team members.

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I do agree with z5 though that the colors are somewhat too dark, but I have already shared my ideas on this with various involved Amiga & Hyperion team members.

Well, i have asked some ppl, ppl who work in design (websites and stuff) and the answer is always the same: it looks old, cluttered, uninviting, not coherent, bad pattern choice, old glowicons (look at those drawer icons in blue, green, ...)...

In short, they have indeed managed to reach their goal: to make it look like Intuition (which is how old?).

And i really don't understand this: "we did not want to scare away the amiga users". As if amiga users would not buy it if it was different? You'd be surprised, maybe they would like a new look after 15 or so years.

Or another one: "we want to attract ex-amiga users". Do you know what they will say: "Yeah, it's amiga all right, it still looks ugly and outdated".

Instead of trying to reach 99.995 % of the computer users, they decided to reach the 0.005% amiga users, so to speak.

We only see a new OS in how many years? A missed opportunity.

This is not bashing, just giving my opinion. I would like to see some input from the ppl behind this design to learn why and how though.

i would love to be part of this.
To have an actual "theme/skinning" community like www.customize.org and others for alternative platforms.

It's one on the things i really miss on the amiga. So count me in.

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@ z5

AmigaOS4.0 is being designed to provide a *bridge* solution between the old Workench 2.0 style interface to future kick-ass designs. (Both fancy and simple, the current design can remain available for the ones who prefer the old style better)

Consistency with the older applications is very important in Amiga and Hyperion's opinion, but for anyone who doesn't like this design, the community can develop alternative themes and maybe one of these will one day be chosen as the default theme!

Note that the gradients and other AmigaOS4 colors (and textures) can easily be changed to suit your preferences as well. For example here's a more blue-ish variant as presented at the Slovenian 'AOS4 on Tour' event.

I'm afraid you are one of the few exceptions who did not like what was shown of the OS 4 default look.

A quick browse through the 125+ comments on this very website will convince you of that.

AmigaOS 4.0 is intended for the current userbase, not for "Fisher Price OS" aka (Windows XP) lovers I'm afraid.

AmigaOS is intended for people who value functionality, responsiveness and the feeling of "being in control".

The claim that the design is cluttered is moreover completely baseless.

It is certainly not more cluttered than say Windows XP or Mac OSX, which I both use on a daily basis.

Sure, the design is conservative in the sense that it values functionality and sound UI design over fancy bells & whistles which slows your machine to a crawl and which eats up memory like there is no tomorrow.

I note once again that commments like "boring, dull and depressing" are very subjective.

They also do not relate to the functionality but only concern appearance.

Please remember that OS 4 is also intended to run on BlizzardPPC cards which start at 160 Mhz.

Now compare that to your run of the mill Windows XP Box.

You even bring in webmasters and graphicians as back-up.

I have to point out that as a rule these people are completely clueless about UI design which is a very challenging discipline.

Enormous amounts of books have been written about it and I do venture to say that your run of the mill graphician or webmaster will be blissfully unaware of them.

Our design was vetted by three people with expertise in the field of UI design (not graphicians as such).

I

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What I would do:

Collect together a selection of VPrefs/Birdie themes and launch those here. A central place where users can get hold of them. Crucially, each should come with an installer.

Then when OS4 launches, this part of the site can be upgraded/altered to cope with that. That way you have an OS4 themes depot (much like the one at http://my.opera.com for the opera browser) that is ready to go when OS4 is.

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Right Ben, I totally agree with you. But some of these people with subjective opinions that differ from ours are offering to fix it for themselves over and above what comes with AOS4. If they provide a whole bunch of downloadable themes which look great to them and potentially perform slower then who are we to argue?

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Well, i have asked some ppl, ppl who work in design (websites and stuff) and the answer is always the same: it looks old, cluttered, uninviting, not coherent, bad pattern choice, old glowicons (look at those drawer icons in blue, green, ...)...

well, i somewhat agree, esp. to the pattern.
it disturbs the readability and looks crap in 8 bit.. besindes i think the grey is all to grey, a few brighter gui parts. maybe even in grey would have been better.. (but thats my opinion)

if someone is going to make a nice amiga-alike theme (no, i dont want any kde and xp toy looks)
feel free to cantact me for some patterns ;)

@HyperionMP:

It should be noted though that:

- we have been waiting for an OS for 10 years. So basically anything will do for the amiga community.

- i was not talking about UI, i was talking about design, what you call appearance. As you may know, the world of today revolves around appearance.

- maybe you should go outside of this 125 or so comments, hell maybe out of the community and ask them their opinion? Which will, by all means, be a little less biased than 50 amiga users craving for an OS for 10 years.

- "Being in control, responiveness and functionality" could as well be achieved with something good looking, no?

- i don't know anything about UI, but it would have thought that it could be combined with something goodlooking, not with a MagicWB pattern from years long gone.

AND: a nice design is not one full of bells and whistles. One the contrary! The best designs are the clean, simple designs without bells and whistles. Hope you will realise this sometime.

And about the ability to configure it all afterwards: what is the guy in the shop going to say: oh, it doesn't look good but don't worry, you can change it all afterwards?

As i said, you did manage your target: it looks intuition all right.

Somehow, i thought you were a bit more ambitious about OS4 than targetting 2000 potential customers.

@Cojo:

by the way, i totally adored the OS4 backdrop you submitted on Amiga.Org. Cool work. I hope you will make a nice skin

Ok, just to prove a small point for the OS4 dev team.

I took this picture:
http://www.stormloader.com/amiga/osnews/amiga3.htm
And this picture: (which people seem to like)
http://www.simoami.com/images/shots/OS4GUIDesignNG4.jpg

Then i slowly started to replace gadgets, backgrounds etc. and came up with this picture:
http://home.tiscali.dk/6x03p0j2/OS4ScreenNEW.jpg

This MockUp picture, Should be perfectly posible with the new features of OS4.

Btw: it's not totally done, but i have to ge to bed now, i'll proberly give it some more work tomorrow.

All credits, should go to Simoami and the OS4 designers, i only did (alot) of Copy/Pasting.

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The default OS4 gui, as has been shown on the first OS4 on tour (not finished) is horrible (old, dull, boring, depressive,...).

Actually, quite a lot of people thought otherwise. It's a matter of taste really, I like it a lot.

Yes, compared ot MY Windows Xp machine, I thought most of those posts looked downright sexy, especially the ones with clear windows and different backgrounds, and multi colored bars! windows does nothing like it....

@MikeB, thanks for the invite.
@cojo, also loved your bg, as you will see in my pic below
@hyperionmp & rogue.
Regarding the current screenshots. I thik they are a fantastic leap forward from the old. And with a little customization with the default font, tiled bgs, background image and colours could look fantastic. The reason i think people see it as cluttered (me included) is because of the applications gui's shown, which are a different area then the underlying os gui functionality, and as ive said on other sites, im more interested in seeing the underlying os gui toolkit evolve. Things like prefs layout etc are secondary and can be improved at a later date.

Following is a mock up image with an example window and some layout elements borrowed from simo-ami's year old design.

example mock up of a gui (click to enlarge)


Having users help out with some additional themes is great and id feel honoured to be involved, but I would also like to know to what extent will you be receptive to suggestions to changes of the underlying gui toolkit (inutition) I ask because you will notice in my mock up gui that there are functions that are simply not supported in gui's yet, such as the recessed group of window functions, and these sort of changes, i think, are the next step forward in gui design. I dont mean mine in particular, but things like the reccessed group will help application coders have access to a standardized layout for applications and functions thus improving consistency and usability of all amiga os application in future?

Some things i would like to put forward for discussion are:
1. fully customizable window gadget functions where the user can edit via prefs what happens when you click, double-click and drag gadgets, window borders and titles etc (plus same for right mouse).
2. id love to see the inner border of windows dissappear (optionaly. Visually it helps show what the content of the window is, but in reality its simply not needed and imo only adds clutter.
3. window function group area (as shown as the recessed group in my example)
4. Gestures supported at an os level. having used them a while back i feel they are a dramatic improvement to ui for advanced users. The reason the gesture engine would need to be implemented by the os is so application coders have access to it and those who want to take advantage of it dont have to implement their own, making for more consistency in implementation and functionality.
5. With large screens (eg bigger then visibly display) a new zoom/pan navigation control

I'll add a few more as i think of them, ps, As a programmer i have a multitude of ideas regarding implementation of the above as well. As an interface designer as well i try to concentrate on asthetics. As a user i focus on usability. All you have to do is ask and ill spew my ideas forth :-)

Btw, im in no way suggesting that these should be considered for oas4 as its just not feasable. I understand that progress takes time but id also like to know that the team responsible for these improvements are open to the ideas and also share my passion to improve the gui.

Mitch.

@ MikeB

Thx Mike. I think the idea is great.

One thing I love about the amiga I have is the possibility to change it's appearance and the amiga domain has been full of high quality graphics and icons to play with since I started on this platform in 1987.

Not that I have any complaints about the proposed gui shown (some minor adjustments might be needed but they can come later) but it wuld be nice with alternatives for those who want the "flashy" workbench and/or others who just want something different. I really like newicons but I could never reconcile myself with the latest drawer icons, whatever color they have.

Have to agree with the others about XP tough. Can't even begin to imagine how many graphics experts were involved in that project but it still looks like something from a disney game on crack.

I have to activate the traditional "windows" style just to make it bearable so I can use it.

A contributors drawer with skins and backdrops wouldn't be out of place.

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I love the Hyperion default OS4 look. I simply love it.

This is the way a interface should look.

I don't dress my reallife toolbox in different colorschemes just to have a cool grin on my face when picking up a multicolored alphachanneled and textured screwdriver from it.

A computer is a tool (at least for me) and we all know the colour and texture of the tool is seldom what does the job it's how simple it is to use.

As to functionality - A Swiss army knife may be handy but when it comes down to driving in 500 screws with it I'd rather stick to my single function good grip grey dull screwdriver that I know will make my work easier. And I don't mind screwdrivers working the same way for 10 years.

Maybe a little softer handle would do good use. (That's what we have gotten with OS4)

How many of us haven't made the mistake of buying the coolest looking thing of something just to find out the one that look most boring was the best quality of the kind (whether it concerns candy, cars, or tools, or software).

If you, me or anyone was to make a effort for alternative GUI themes, I suggest it should follow the guidelines of Hyperion who knows the limitations and possibilites of the new GUI system.

Then we can draw and create alternative looks following these guidelines. That's the easiest way they'll ever be realised in a reasonable timespan.

However to help out the struggeling Hyperion guys the best way you should put the general public needs before your own creating things like themes for different kind of uses:

Theme for visually impaired.
Theme for reading text clearly.
Theme for people with defect colour vision.
Theme best for LCD.
Theme best for CRT.
Theme for viewing AmigaOS4 on a TV.

And all these with colourvariations.. and ofcourse there is room for a bunch of different font, color and sizing also just for the look of things.

Now if we do this we are helping our friends Hyperion as they are making our future computing experience come to life.

What we also need is a suggestion database where people can vote on ideas. Where a team of people are willing to review and test ideas on users to see how they react to new stuff if it is even to be considered becoming a standard. The file/icon viewing in Workbench might need a few more abilities. The titlebar of the wb screen might need a feature more or two, but we need to find out what idea is most needed out of the 342 ideas there probably are for just the titlebar.

Ok, that was my view now over to someone elses... :)

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Rogue wrote: Quote: The default OS4 gui, as has been shown on the first OS4 on tour (not finished) is horrible (old, dull, boring, depressive,...). Actually, quite a lot of people thought otherwise. It's a matter of taste really, I like it a lot.

Arguing whether the latest OS4 screenshots look good or not, or that people like it or not is a waste of time.

We're just here to help and we have no reason to be negative if just to seek the best for AOS.

OS4 team has put considerable efforts in bringing AmigaOS to PPC and with highly optimized solutions that even defy other popular OS's functionalities. This is to say that you guys don't need to prove you did a good job.