Eye Candy, Was: Re: [conspire] Linux program to remove mail from server?

[Edmund J. Biow]

g0d at mrplaydoh.org wrote:

>>On Wednesday 27 April 2005 19:33, Ross Bernheim wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>One of the great complaints that I hear about the OS X interface is all
>>>the eye candy. I agree that some of it is excessive,
>>>      
>>>
>>Despite having a 733 MHz CPU, it was
>>pig-slow because all the eye candy (the thing that annoyed me the most
>>was the undulating & dissappearing Taskbar equivalent).  With Windows
>>and Linux I know how to turn all those quasi-transparent animated &
>>shadowed thingamabobs off, but I had no idea how to do so with the Mac
>>(the settings were all really buried, so they resisted my initial
>>efforts & I didn't have time to Google around).
>>
>>    
>>
>
>now this is hardly a fair review of osx. 'settings' are *always* buried
>until you've learned the os, which you clearly hadn't when you worked on
>this box. 
>
Of course settings are buried, but I'm not an idiot (OK, I am, but 
that's neither here nor there).  I know how to find settings even on 
desktop environments that I'm unfamiliar with, and I needed to hockey 
with a lot of them to get my friend's network up and running.  But the 
eye-candy settings really did seem to be deeply nested, even after I 
played with all the places where it would seem logical to wedge them.  
Of course not having a real rodent with a context menu that day 
undoubtedly hobbled my efforts.

>admittedly, its a very pretty os and fueling that takes a fair
>bit of system resources, but its a client os (regardless of apple's
>wouldbe-server xserves), so why not make it pretty? real men can admit to
>liking attractive guis, imho.
>  
>
No quibble here, I don't mind if an operating system turns on all the 
eye candy by default.  Just make it easy to turn off.  KDE has a great 
approach.  When you first create & start a user account you get a nifty 
wizard that asks you how you want the desktop to behave and which 
GUI-candy you want left.  You can adjust it with a slider or pick 
individual settings.  I generally disable most of it except desktop 
wallpaper and antialiased fonts, no matter how fast the computer, 
because I don't want to wait 300 milliseconds for a menu to appear. 

Geez, Slackware really is a speed-demon.  I didn't realize until a 
second ago that most of the eye-candy was enabled, and it still seems 
really fast (and X starts in a giffy) on my admittedly very fast KT266 
Athlon XP1800+ machine.

Initializing CPU#0
Detected 1470.029 MHz processor.
Console: colour VGA+ 80x25
Calibrating delay loop... 2929.45 BogoMIPS
Memory: 644980k/655296k available (1844k kernel code, 9928k reserved, 
618k data,

Windows is actually probably a bigger offender in terms of eye-candy 
accessibility than OSX (I wouldn't know for sure, since I didn't spend 
enough time around OSX to figure out how to turn the stuff off).  You 
can't turn off most of that crap without installing a third party bit of 
software or probably best, an unsupported Microsoft program called 
Tweakui.  The first things I do when installing Windows is to install 
tweakui, dial off the eye-candy, and tell Windows Explorer to work in 
"classic" mode with two panes, file details, no html, etc.  Windows out 
of the box annoys me endlessly, and XP drove me around the bend the 
first time because they added far more eye-candy and made it a lot 
harder to turn off.

Edmund