Re: Our self-presentation, not just on our website. (Was: Re: GS based app release: djay by Algoriddim in Beta)

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi Daniel,

Daniel Boyd wrote:
> > They shall not automatically hide! That's NeXT design - never hide something, 
> > deactivate it.
> Riccardo—I’ll be the first to agree with you that autohiding scrollbars are 
> usually terrible. I say “usually”, because there is a notable exception: touch 
> UIs. In a touch UI, scrollbars themselves are terrible.
>
> So two comments: 1) because there are situations where auto-hiding scrollbars 
> are desirable, I believe the theming engine should support it. That way, people 
> can design a touch-first theme that delivers a first-class touch UI experience.
>
> And 2) it seems to me that sticking to every NeXT design principle is silly—at 
> least at the level of preventing new themes from going in a different direction.
>
> I totally agree that NeXTSTEP was amazing, particularly when you compare it 
> against its contemporaries. But 1) the NeXT team was composed of imperfect 
> humans and 2) they were designing interfaces quite a long time ago. We should 
> allow for the possibility that somebody has had a good idea in the years 
> following 1997.
>
> The wonderful thing about themes is that it is not necessary for us to agree on 
> what the perfect UI looks like. But we would make a mistake if we limit the 
> capabilities of the theming engine itself based on something NeXT decided 30 
> years ago. Some themes can follow NeXT’s conventions and others not.

I fully agree. That's also what I think: options in gui to support it. I 
hope I was clear, I wrote it exactly after the explanation. We aren't 
much into touch with GNUstep itself (and neither is Apple, since for 
touch they use UIKit...) but it would be positive to support it. I even 
proposed "overlay scrollers" since autohide means something different.

Instead of touch, I try my luck on my Tablet with stylus, sometimes. 
There, the opposite is true: Everything must show!!! Since the cursor 
"jumps" directly to where it is needed compared to conventional 
mouse/touchpad/trackball any position based or focus based thing is 
incompatible wit it.

Traditional NEXT style instead works quite well, including the floating 
menus, even if originally it was not conceived to be used with a stylus. 
I believe none existed for Black hardware, at most perhaps something 
compatible later, on x86 white hardware.

Riccardo