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Round rectangles are everywhere

folklore.org

74 pointsomarfarooq26 comments

I recently got tip on a 3D version of round rectangles, called octasphere: https://prideout.net/blog/octasphere/

It's not a direct-to-screen rendering technique like the article, rather a way to procedurally construct the 3D mesh based on few parameters (W,H,D, radius, # of subdivisions). Just like rectangles in 2D, boxes in 3D are too simple and have harsh sharp edges. Adding rounded edges makes them nicer to look at. Additionally, the octasphere method gives you capsules and spheres and everything in-between.

Edit: Oh look - there's a front page article that talks about this in-depth: https://wwwtyro.net/2021/09/24/rounded-box.html

Windows 11 just re-introduced rounded rectangles for window borders, and I kind of like it. Also seems we're leaving flat surfaces behind for something more skeuomorphic again.

I started writing a comment akin to "fads recycle" but then I got to thinking, the past decade or more has seen UI fads come and go blazingly fast because of how quickly the web moved, which is probably why I think this is just another loop around the cycle.

But in OS land, specifically in Windows land, this is actually a pretty big step in a product with few refactor opportunities. Win doesn't have the luxury of changing the UI every 6 months like websites/apps do, and so they're placing a pretty big bet on this UI being a reasonably long lived product. I wonder how much that influences their willingness to chase trends.

Microsoft change UIs more frequently than any other OS.

Take the last ~20 years of NT:

- 2000 (looked a bit like 9x but with a little bit of polish)

- XP (massive bold colours and chunky themes)

- Vista (transparency and rounded edges galore)

- 7 (a lot like Vista but refined a little so feels less like a toy)

- 8 (another massive redesign. Now everything looks like Windows 1.0 in HD)

- 10 (a lot like 8 but refined so feels less like a toy)

In that 20 years we've seen 4 completely unique UIs with another 2 relatively significant updates too. That's an average of a complete redesign every 5 years!

Compare that to the Mac where OSX/macOS has had a few relatively significant updates but nothing as grand as any of the 4 overhauls that Windows has had. Likewise with KDE. In 20 years we've had the release of KDE 3, 4 and 5. 4 and 5 are visually very similar. KDE 3 differs quite a bit from 4 but still nothing as contrasting as Windows 7 to 8. Same is true for GNOME and other Linux desktop environments too.

I would just note that a completely unique UI/complete redesign is saying a lot when I still have to use control panel items that have been around since I used Windows XP.

A lot of the control panel items date further back than that :)

The difference here is that if you like Apple hardware, Apple do not have to up-sell you the OS - it's baked in and for most people the only option. So Apple do not have to make radical changes to draw you in.

Whereas, Windows sits on fairly open hardware. PC users have another option of OS in Linux (and maybe BSD...) So Microsoft are aware that they need you still be invested in their OS every few years.

It's like selling a car. Every few years the car manufacturer refreshes the body shape of the car to keep people loyal to that model and encourage them to refresh their older version even though fundamentally the newer model is no different.

I believe that's what Microsoft believes but I don't believe it's actually true. The majority of Windows users are non-technical people who groan whenever anything on their computer changes.

Sure, there will be a subset of people who get excited by jumping to the next shiny new thing but I don't believe that is enough to justify the frequency and significance of the changes that Microsoft implement.

The proof is already out there, if you look at XP, that had official support for 8 years. Microsoft extended support a few times because of demand and lots of people still complained when Microsoft did eventually retire it. If it were the case that Microsoft needs to create a UI redesign every 5 years then XP wouldn't have been as long lived as it was.

Then look at Windows 10, Microsoft had to literally give it away to get the average person to upgrade (and that's despite Win10 getting good reviews vs Win8 being hugely unpopular). Adoption was so underwhelming that Microsoft even made a statement that they weren't going to do any more major releases and follow Apple's release model with macOS. I think their OS department just got a little bored and decided to create Windows 11 regardless.

> I think their OS department just got a little bored and decided to create Windows 11 regardless.

100% agree with this statement. The Windows II UI is a pointless update[1]. They could have rolled all the backend improvements into a Windows 10 feature pack, but apparently didn't want to do that.

Not to even mention that they hadn't even finished building Windows 10!

---

[1] Like a spoiler on a hatchback car.

Article & Source Code: http://wg20.criticalcodestudies.com/index.php?p=/discussion/...

It is amazing that in those days, interface design belonged more to R&D departments (having people from academia) than marketing and design. For example, professors, PHDs and their students (Jef Raskin, Bill Atkinson) worked on Macintosh design. Similarly at Xerox Park.

Given the limited capabilities of that hardware, it probably would have been a waste to have non-technical design teams coming up with unimplementable ideas.

Related ongoing thread:

Procedurally generating a rounded box mesh - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28677064 - Sept 2021 (21 comments, particularly https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28677781)

Past submissions of the folklore.org article:

History of Rounded Corners - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7062706 - Jan 2014 (1 comment)

Steve Jobs and Rounded Corners - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3096927 - Oct 2011 (1 comment)

The story of round rectangles - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636358 - Aug 2010 (77 comments)

Very interesting story. All the stories about Jobs it seems he got more "intense" if he didn't get his way.

From stories I've heard, Clive Sinclair also had a very "intense" personality.

Something about the early computer industry is it's tolerance of rough, lumpy personalities.

Not sure exactly how to express this but I hope we don't totally loose that sort of space as the industry matures. These personalities are both difficult to work with but also very interesting.

I am curious why the rounded rectangle would be hard to draw. The circle primitive is already going to exploit symmetry and draw four (or eight) symmetric points at a time, computing them centered at (0,0) and shifting them to the center of the circle. Why would it be hard to shift those four pixels by four different centers (the four corners of the rectangle plus/minus the radius)? Filling them would not be any harder, either, and drawing thick lines would be harder but---again---just as hard as drawing a circle with thick lines.

You don't write a routine that draws circles and then think that rounded rectangles are going to be hard, that's just not going to happen. Either this part of the story is made up, or Bill Atkinson was playing mind games with Steve Jobs.

I put it down to the limitation of the hardware at the time. Drawing a circle is the same math throughout the shape. Same with the square. But a rounded rectangle requires breaking the routine into two distinct mathematical operations at 8 different intervals. Doing so on a system with highly constrained resources might not be as simple as "I figured circles and squares out, so rounded rectangles must be a bit of both". Baring in mind the goal of this was to create a performant production-ready routine rather than a pretty tech demo that isn't really suitable for everyday use.

I remember my days working on similar (and older hardware too) and stuff that was conceptually simple would often be much harder to implement in practice. And not always just because of hardware limitations, some of the algorithms we take for granted today hadn't been invented back then either, so we were having to figure all sorts of things out for the first time.

To draw a rounded rect, you don’t want to draw four lines and four quarter circles. That will run into problems if you want to use transfer modes such as XOR, fill with a pattern (phases of the patterns won’t match), etc.

On the Mac, you also needed to do clipping against arbitrary regions (https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...). Doing that at reasonable speed wasn’t easy at the time.

I didn’t check the source (https://computerhistory.org/blog/macpaint-and-quickdraw-sour...) but I guess the drawing routines created scanlines top-to-bottom (that’s how regions worked on the Mac), and Bill tweaked a copy of the oval drawing code to insert extra pixels in each line and extra identical lines for the straight vertical parts.

Yes, you'd do it in a single routine to not mess up patterns etc., but the math to find the start and end for each scanline is the same as for Bresenham-style ovals.

The hard part was to do it in a efficient, fast way with the hardware of that time.

The solution you propose, seems to work, too, but has a hacky feel. If you work with fixed pixels, it is hard to increase border-radius at will for example.

Looking at the QuickDraw source, it's exactly what he did[1]. Ovals and roundrects, both solid and hollow, are all handled by a single DrawArc function. Essentially an oval _is_ a round rect whose border radiuses are the entirety of the oval's radiuses.

Arcs are also handled by DrawArc, but of course there's a fast path for when start=0 and end=360.

[1] https://d1yx3ys82bpsa0.cloudfront.net/102658076_quickdraw_ac...

this made me think, what's the math for a rounded rectangle then https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1649714/whats-the-e...

Interesting read. The stackexchange is about rounded rectangle, but I think the article is about rectangles with rounded corners (which is different and easier to implement).

I don’t think the Valley will ever see a PM/product marketer as great as Jobs.

Infamous maybe.

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