I love the NeXT aesthetic, I'm ready for the the next UI design trend to go retro.
We eventually got back with some promo material and the idea that we were did indeed experience a milestone in the IT development, but the price tag was something a very small company could not invest for research alone, so they abandoned the idea.
About WindowMaker: I loved it and used it extensively both at home and work in the early 2k. In one project I had to build the simplest possible user interface for roughly 50 remote stations hundreds of kilometers away where the users were mostly completely new to computers, therefore the risk of clogging the support seat with panic calls was really high. Luckily WindowMaker and its kiosk mode came to rescue: I built a really basic desktop screen in which the user could not alter the system in any way, providing buttons for simple tasks like running a browser, fetch or send mail using a client, ask for remote support, print documents we sent through scp or mail attachments, shutdown/reboot etc. An interesting challenge was easing the support login since all those terminals had dynamic IP, and we simply couldn't ask to the operators to start a reverse ssh from their side, but thanks to some Ruby scripts in the background, each remote machine would obtain and send its public IP and some more information to the local server in which a Ruby+Glade GTK app would add them to a list, so that the support operator would click on a station name and the ssh to that machine would open in seconds. In the end it worked so well that the support colleague spent most of her time twiddling thumbs.
These days it seems like people are coming up not realizing that X desktops can be anything else than what Ubuntu gives on a default install, as if a full DE is mandatory. They don't know about launching a simple wm from ~/.xsession or ~/.xinitrc or editing the menus in such a WM.
True but I wanted to avoid menus so that users would have immediately the options at hand, and other WMs, most of them at least, didn't allow fixed buttons on the desktop. If I recall there was also a kiosk mode on KDE which was more advanced than WindowMaker's but at that time one would have to double the system RAM just to run KDE without swapping, while Wmaker (as AfterStep before, thanks to another commenter for mentioning it) was much faster and less memory hungry. There was also a less known WM, probably Openbox or a similar named one which could be arranged with a kiosk mode, but turned out to be less stable and less udser friendly, so in the end WindowMaker made the best compromise.
The purpose was essentially to give users a panel with buttons, to avoid those errors most of us would never think as possible but non technical users often do, like losing icons by dropping them into windows they then close, or call a software with the wrong argument by dropping an icon onto another icon, delete them accidentally, clogging the desktop with files, etc. A powerful unrestricted desktop environment in the hands of a non technical user can turn into many otherwise unneeded support calls, so it was necessary in that context.
I recently started to revisit fvwm2 as a sort of retro/nostalgia thing. It was nice.
I think we are many who agree.
Source: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/01/20/instagram-for-w...
- keyboard shortcut for (horiz|vert|global)-maximizing
- keyboard shortcut for hide app, miniwindow window
- window shading (huge feature)
- middle-click select and alt-move of multiple windows at once (so I can 'click click click 3 windows, alt click and move all 3)
- plus emulate appicon based on window title
this makes grouping windows and managing them much easier than anything else i've found that is still mouse driven
dockapps were really cool as well.
Back when bowman/afterstep/wmaker came out, pretty much no one who used them was familiar with the NeXt interface, beyond having seen one in a magazine or knowing its look-and-feel via Win95 copying some of it.
As far as I can remember, the popularity rested on a few pillars: For one, it's a pretty sleek look compared to twm or mwm. It also had a rather good resize functionality -- big enough handles to grab at the bottom, while saving a few valuable pixels at the sides.
A lot of people also like(d) the dock apps that came with it. Even other window managers adopted them.
Can't say a lot about general dock/shelf usage, as I never got into that.
Window shading was nice and probably introduced into common usage by that family of WMs.
Same here, and that's even before I knew about the elegance of the underlying software design. (Which amazes me even more, because a lot of the fundamentals of the software were already in shape back when Windows was 2.x and MacOS was known as System 6.)
GNUStep is just the programming framework, aka AppKit aka Cocoa.