Eye Candy

[eye_doc]

Eye candy ought not to be important - a simplistic, uncluttered interface is a efficient and a joy to use.

BUT the Palm OS interface is not pretty, funtional yes, but not pretty.

As the mobile phone industry has proven, the most important factor for most people when they chose a phone are the looks. The iPod also illustrates the point. It is not the most fully featured MP3 player, but it is the prettiest. It is likely to be similar when people buy PDAs.

Modern PDAs have the processor power, memory, resolution and colour screen for oodles of graduated menu bars, translucent buttons, animated menus and the like. However the interface is stuck in monochrome hell.

Particularly annoying on the lifedrive is when a dialog box pops ups and so does the graffiti area! Why?

Garnet does exactly what I need it to do. I propose that the next step in terms of OS is simply to look pretty.

[Cyker]

PalmOS just wasn't designed for it (DG's nifty SkinUI mod and the AP's fontsmoother stuff aside ;))

Like Windows, there is a lot of baggage in PalmOS that it has to drag around to maintain backwards compatibility, others is just programming style. I know that the dialog graffiti-area popup thing can be avoided 'tho (QuickNews is a good example; One of few programs that has support for HiRes+ right down to the dialogs!! :D), but depending on how the proggy is coded it might be more trouble than it's worth.

And aside from Palm's newest PDA's, most PalmOS devices couldn't really cope with the eyecandy guff that you suggest; I know my TH55 wouldn't like it! ;)

But all this 'looks' stuff is very subjective - Take me for instance; I'm a very extreme case of a function over form personality. I absolutely hate the PocketPC interface, which most people regard as much prettier than PalmOS.
I absolutely despise Windows XP's interface because, while it looks pretty, it's a huge pain in the *** to use. I have to dig through all sorts of things to get file data which Win98 would give me in the status bar for instance.
I'm anticipating that I will hate the Vista interface too - I bet that, while it will be very showy (Assuming you upgrade your CPU, RAM and VGA card to cope), it will be worse than XP's interface for usability.


In contrast, I love the PalmOS default launcher - It's simple and does all that I need and doesn't try to do anything more. One thing that annoys me about my Zodiac is they took out the Palm Launcher; You *have* to use their stupid rotary launcher, whereas my TH55 has Sony's launcher, the Clie Organiser launcher and the Original (Choice Is Good)

I love the Enlightenment window manager for Linux - You can make it all eyecandy if you want (And I have a bit ;)), but it's fast, doesn't get in the way and is very customisable.

I hated the old MacOS interface, but OS-X is such a big improvement - It's nice and clean; The frilly bells and whistles are there but not in an obtrusive way like in XP... it's just, nice!


Now, there are probably loads of people who think I'm nuts/blind/have no sense of design, but that just proves my point about how this sort of thing is very subjective.

I do like SkinUI 'tho - You can change the superficial look of stuff without actually affecting the real interface underneath, so I can make my TH55 look ultra cool without making the UI into some sort of usability hell :D