Trillium was a user interface design environment for simulating and experimenting with interfaces for simple machines. Developed at Xerox PARC in Interlisp-D, Trillium was used also for fast prototyping and testing of interfaces for Xerox copiers and printers.
An overview of Trillium:
Thinking of NEXTSTEP this morning...I'd guess many aren't aware of the unusual color display arrangement.
The NeXTstation, which was the first "affordable" color solution for NEXTSTEP, has a 16-bit framebuffer, but instead of rendering the desktop in 65,536 colors (as per Windows or Mac hardware, say), it rendered in 12-bit color with 4-bits of alpha channel (transparency).
That means it had a palette of 4096 colors, with all colors available at once on the display (not like, say, the Amiga or Apple IIgs with a 4096 color palette, but video modes with a small subset of those colors available (yes, yes, HAM mode excluded). Additionally, anything on the screen had 16 levels of opacity available.
It's interesting to see in person, on the actual hardware (especially on a good LCD display). With dithering, it looks very close to 24-bit truecolor.
(The NeXT Dimension color board for the Cube allowed 24-bit color with 8-bits alpha, but that was not so frequently used -- less so than most NeXT hardware even...)
But that's not nearly the weirdest that NEXTSTEP-capable hardware got, when it came to color video display...
@bitnacht Good point, re: the busy bee.
As for the spinning disc (or "beachball"), it got its start in NEXTSTEP as a greyscale spinning magneto-optical disc rendering indicating the system is busy / data is loading, which was seen quite often on the early NeXT Cube, as it came with no HD but only an MO drive, and it used that drive for _swap_, if you can imagine...
That spinning disc became color when NEXTSTEP gained a color display on later hardware, and from there it evolved into the spinning "beachball" we know today (macOS being structurally based upon and evolved from NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP).
EDIT: Oh, I think I misread - you are talking about the busy mouse pointer icon in Windows, I think. I'm not sure of its specific history. Apologies.
A drag and drop #GUI builder for #Python. Early days, currently only supports TKInter, and is a bit limited. But it does export working Python code. Worth watching to see how this project matures.
PyUI Builder:
* https://pyuibuilder.com/
* https://github.com/PaulleDemon/PyUIBuilder
I just made an Erlang GUI "Hello World" in a Fedora 41 Toolbox.
$ toolbox create erlang
$ toolbox enter erlang
$ sudo dnf install erlang
$ erl -smp
1> wx:new().
{wx_ref,0,wx,[]}
2> M = wxMessageDialog:new(wx:null(), "Hello World").
{wx_ref,35,wxMessageDialog,[]}
3> wxMessageDialog:showModal(M).
Thanks to:
https://arifishaq.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/wxerlang-getting-started.pdf
Operating System Emulationen of historical Mac OS, Mac OS X or NeXTStep from the 1980s, 1990s, early 2000s, or your own custom versions of this systems, as a Webapp in your Browser:
Tauri (a #Rust-based cross-platform #GUI library using a browser as the display surface) has come a long way in the last year. But I think the best new (coming soon?) feature enables an embedded instance of Verso (a Rust-based browser).
> Experimental Tauri Verso Integration. https://v2.tauri.app/blog/tauri-verso-integration/
Carl Svensson on why desktop user interfaces haven't evolved much:
"To me, trying to reinvent the desktop experience feels a bit like complaining about steering wheels in cars."
i've been using relm4 for a while and i'm really happy with it. i love the #elm architecture - your app's state is a struct (or object), your user interface is rendered by a function that takes your state and returns a tree of widgets (or similar), widgets emit messages, messages modify state. i find it so much cleaner and easier to wrap my head around than traditional imperative methods or MVVM.
what are some other nice cross-platform #desktop app frameworks that use this architecture? i'm mainly familiar with #relm4 and #iced in #rust. 
Twelve days in using Gnome without some form of dash or dock extensions is proving to be somewhat... I'm not sure what the correct word would be...
Sometimes it's no big deal. Pressing Super to get to the built-in dock or overlaid app or to start typing to launch a new app is not a big deal.
Other times it seems very jarring as all the windows fly around the screen to the view that shows all windows.
I think the difference of whether it is jarring or nor is the difference between having a few windows open vs many. Many is more jarring.
Could be a focus level thing as well. More focused makes it more jarring. Tend to be more focused with more windows open.
The method/presentation interferes with the 'deliberateness' of working perhaps?
I'm not saying that the dock/panel paradigm is all that great either. Potentially wasted screen real estate and other than having a pinned (auto-hide or not) dock/panel is the same work flow otherwise.
On top of this I still occasionally have my finger memory hunting for the dock/panel as if the extension was loaded.
I work on two main workstations. One is a laptop with a 17" 16:10 screen running at UHD+ but scaled @ 200% with Tweaks setting fonts at x1.2.
The other system is 32" UHD with similar scaling - not in front of the system ATM so don't have exact numbers. Tweaks is setting fonts ~1.4; can't remember if Settings is 100% or not.
I'll give it a few more weeks I think. Much ado about such a minor thing.
GitHub - tale/headplane: A feature-complete Web UI for Headscale https://github.com/tale/headplane #self-hosted #OpenSource #tailscale #wireguard #GitHub #webapp #GUI #vpn #web
CoolerControl
CoolerControl is a feature-rich cooling device control application for Linux. It has a system daemon
for background device management, as well as a GUI to expertly customize your settings.
Weird question, I'm wondering.
Is there a correlation between decorating your house and customising your computer's GUI (Desktop)?
#Free95 is a new #OpenSource #Windows compatible #OperatingSystem available on #GitHub. In its current form, it can run very basic Win32 #GUI and console applications, but its #developer says #DirectX might be added and even game compatibility.
https://www.reddit.com/r/osdev/comments/1j3y9p7/i_built_an_os_to_be_compatible_with_windows/
As I use Canvas LMS, I am more convinced that we shouldn't let web developers just invent their own basic UI widgets like buttons, check boxes, etc. lol.
Make them assemble pages like in Visual Basic.
Canvas LMS checkboxes let you check the boxes about 75% of the time? If they didn't build their own GUI and used some standardization maybe I could check "this quiz question corresponds to course catalog requirement IV-3-a" 100% of the time.
hi,
I have a little question: I have a #MiniPC #B_MAX #B1Pro and not all #Linux #Distributions can even display the #GUI, thus far, I successfully tested #SnowflakeOS , #EndeavourOS and #LinuxMint , however, the regular #NixOS and #SyphaxOS did not work
it goes without saying that winlol works, 10 and 11
what could be the cause?
I want to like Tuba, I really do, but it is SO ... SLOW. Not just in normal interaction (yes, that's slow), but when it goes to fetch new toots it just jumps out of the window for minutes at a time and due to the shit that is GNOME/Gtk4 that means all the window-level controls are dead: can't iconify, can't move it aside, ... and no, I don't use GNOME as an environmeng and tbh I don't understand why anyone does.
Whalebird is worse, performance-wise. Tokodon is at least as bad.
Is there no deck-style native Fediverse client for Linux? Preferably that is not based on Gtk4/anything GNOMEish?
