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Comment by trotsky | Hacker News Reader

Since you seem rather familiar, I've always wanted to ask what the story with the widgets/theme is. I have nothing but respect for all the work that's been done. But the UI really stands out as distinctively from a very specific era and just doesn't feel very appealing now. So I'm curious what the primary driver is there. Faithful recreation as a core value? Sort of a badge of honor type thing for the BeOS faithful? Lack of ui/ux contributors? Or just lower on the priority list?

I'm not knocking it, rationally i don't have a problem with it, but at the same time i can't imagine i'd be up for using it as a main os.

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The UI was one of the few components carried over from BeOS, as it was open-sourced (OpenTracker): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenTracker

There have been some refinements made to the UI during the Haiku era (such as Stack and Tile windows and vector icons by default), but has otherwise remained stable. What's the main reason behind that? It's not a priority for R1 (the first stable release). No reason it can evolve in time.

What in particular do you dislike about the look? Should point out the deskbar can be moved around to be more 'Start Menu'-like if you so wish. http://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/deskbar.html

Oh, I don't mean app positions or use patterns or anything like that. I mean toolkit widgets like sliders, buttons, chrome, window manager elements, that kind of thing.

And for the record i feel the exact same way about plain xtk, old style gtk/gnome and probably win2k and earlier if i saw em.

I had to go and look at a bunch of screenshots to come up with an answer besides just the "feel". I think a big part of it is the heavy reliance on thin embossed/3d borders and lines, no rounded or softened elements, the limited palette use in core elements, no rich gradients or transparencies.

I didn't realize it at all until i made the list, but I guess a big part of it is the look of a toolkit/window manager that was built on top of a 3d api and compositor.

I guess the gpu industry norms are a huge barrier for anyone on an alternate path.

> Faithful recreation as a core value?

> Lack of ui/ux contributors?

It's really both of these. For a long time, the constraint was fidelity with BeOS R5, which kept focus on an achievable goal.

However, there has been some interest in making UX/UI improvements; the problem seems to be that there just isn't much (if any) design/UX expertise in the open source community.

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