I want more stuff like this. The era 20 years ago (e.g. Enlightenment) was way more fun than the bland monotonic design we have these days. If you like bland modern design, great, that should be an option as well, but we should still have good variety.
I don't know why anybody would. It takes all the lessons we learned about UX from user testing in the late 90s/early 00s and throws it all away to produce something that looks "clean" and "sleek", at the cost of being useful. Discoverability? Who needs it?
EDIT: Though I do enjoy skeuomorphism, I do think the TFA goes a bit too far.
Debatable. IIRC Bell labs conducted a study of whether Unix command names should be changed to something more meaningful than cat, sed, grep etc.
They found that words that convey some meaning related to what the command does had little or no effect on the user remembering what the command does. I strongly suspect skeuomorphism similarly has no claim on functional advantage.
Discoverability is good, but it's probably got a little to do with the icon.
I look back at my Enlightenment desktop with joy. I guess many people hated all the tinkering with drivers & settings etc, but I loved it. Spending a few weekends getting a computer running with Linux and Enlightenment exactly like I wanted it to and then actually using that as my main driver for years are very nice memories.
Man, first Felix Reiseberg[0], then OpenCode 2.0[1], and now this in the last 24 hrs. Really giving off heavy Myst vibes. They are briefly interesting encounters, buy I deeply hope this isn't a legitimate UI trend.
It's hardly even skeuomorphism, it's a almost digital twin with rendered with Phong.
Fantastic. Giving me memories of MS Bob. Put a talking animal assistant in the corner and you’ve got it. Oh, and you could connect the assistant to an LLM of course.
the "paper windows" idea doesn't seem to have been done with as much soul as the rest of the ui. Just a turned up corner. I reckon something done there could really tie this togetjer
fwiw that is the standard term for that kind of fold (to the extent that it has its own wikipedia article), but I agree that the claude prose is gross.
This is neat, it’s not for me (I prefer extreme minimalism) but I could see how some would prefer it. I like how we’re getting more desktop options now thanks to wlroots.
I reckon a lot of the people clamoring for these things are gen z or younger first discovering the idea of customizable OS's and are now going through all the awful decisions that were made before. Pretty sure I've seen a version of this skeuomorphic desktop like 15 times at this point.
Yes! Please bring back the soul we had with retro OS GUIs (and the speed)... it's time for a resurgence. Especially with new systems/RAM/GPUs/etc. not being a thing for quite a while for a lot of people now.
I want more stuff like this. The era 20 years ago (e.g. Enlightenment) was way more fun than the bland monotonic design we have these days. If you like bland modern design, great, that should be an option as well, but we should still have good variety.
> If you like bland modern design, great,
I don't know why anybody would. It takes all the lessons we learned about UX from user testing in the late 90s/early 00s and throws it all away to produce something that looks "clean" and "sleek", at the cost of being useful. Discoverability? Who needs it?
EDIT: Though I do enjoy skeuomorphism, I do think the TFA goes a bit too far.
Debatable. IIRC Bell labs conducted a study of whether Unix command names should be changed to something more meaningful than cat, sed, grep etc.
They found that words that convey some meaning related to what the command does had little or no effect on the user remembering what the command does. I strongly suspect skeuomorphism similarly has no claim on functional advantage.
Discoverability is good, but it's probably got a little to do with the icon.
I look back at my Enlightenment desktop with joy. I guess many people hated all the tinkering with drivers & settings etc, but I loved it. Spending a few weekends getting a computer running with Linux and Enlightenment exactly like I wanted it to and then actually using that as my main driver for years are very nice memories.
What do you mean 20 years ago? I still use enlightenment today (Moksha Desktop)
e16/e17 was a lot of fun, and it was fast.
e17 (Moksha) IS still fun!
https://www.bodhilinux.com/moksha-desktop/
> the kind iOS 6 had
> The room is ray-traced
imho, part of the charm of iOS6 was that everything was baked into native-resolution textures.
Man, first Felix Reiseberg[0], then OpenCode 2.0[1], and now this in the last 24 hrs. Really giving off heavy Myst vibes. They are briefly interesting encounters, buy I deeply hope this isn't a legitimate UI trend.
It's hardly even skeuomorphism, it's a almost digital twin with rendered with Phong.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50082470
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094994
This is very funny. But I think it would make me feel like I was working inside of Papers Please or some similar game.
I love this. Hopefully we start to see more experiments like this.
I like when designers are creative.
This is lovely. I really hope society returns to chasing beauty again. We need it.
> Windows are sheets of paper on a walnut desk.
The calculator is a sheet of paper..
memory 4 GB (DEsk itself 200-450 MB)
This makes it interesting. I may try it out. Moksha uses 200 MB to 300 MB of RAM
Fantastic. Giving me memories of MS Bob. Put a talking animal assistant in the corner and you’ve got it. Oh, and you could connect the assistant to an LLM of course.
Exactly what it reminded me of. Although a lot more functional.
fascinating, I recently was also exploring various skeuomorphic design pattern in Flutter and now this!
Flashback to TabWorks.
Compaq Presario 486 1994, I was 10.
And yes, played Myst on it.
Tempus fugit…
Did it have that tiny rollerball on the side?
We bought a bunch of TabWorks-based Compaqs back then for a medical office where I was doing IT work. I thought it was slick at the time.
the "paper windows" idea doesn't seem to have been done with as much soul as the rest of the ui. Just a turned up corner. I reckon something done there could really tie this togetjer
A “dog-eared corner” in fact. The readme is painful to read if you have an aversion to Claude prose.
fwiw that is the standard term for that kind of fold (to the extent that it has its own wikipedia article), but I agree that the claude prose is gross.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_ears
This is neat, it’s not for me (I prefer extreme minimalism) but I could see how some would prefer it. I like how we’re getting more desktop options now thanks to wlroots.
I love this, at least from the screenshots. I'll test it out tomorrow. I hope this kind of design makes a comeback.
How come the 'documents' are floating above the wood surface creating such deep drop shadows?
Love it. Maximize skeuomorphic design.
I see that this very bad idea is returning from the 90's.
Personally, I found skeuomorphic design to be something that I really enjoyed, for a couple of days, but rapidly got sick of.
That may have more to with the skills of the implementors, as opposed to the concept, as a whole.
I do find modern "flat" design to be less "fun," but I get a lot more done with it.
I reckon a lot of the people clamoring for these things are gen z or younger first discovering the idea of customizable OS's and are now going through all the awful decisions that were made before. Pretty sure I've seen a version of this skeuomorphic desktop like 15 times at this point.
In the last century, there was an app for Apple's Mac OS (before MacOSX), called Kaleidoscope[0]. It allowed massive customization.
Fun, but most themes were basically unusable.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidoscope_(software)
What's so bad about it?
Yes! Please bring back the soul we had with retro OS GUIs (and the speed)... it's time for a resurgence. Especially with new systems/RAM/GPUs/etc. not being a thing for quite a while for a lot of people now.
okay, now use this for a month and report back
I don't hate skeuomorphic design but come on man