Malleability of certain display characteristics is an important feature (largely for accessibility reasons), eye-candy is just marketing and signaling.
While I understand not wanting any useless eye-candy for functional purposes, I think there is also pleasure derived by simply "looking at pretty things".
It does not need to involve any external motivations.
"Eye-candy" can be supportive of said malleability.
Inferring form what you wrote, I think your working definition of marketing is wrong. Maybe you can clarify what you mean by "marketing"?
I am also unsure what you mean with "signaling". If you mean communication with the user via visual cues, than I would say signaling is an important feature.
Eye-candy is important with many things made for humans, not just computer displays.
By "marketing" and "signaling", I mean ricing. People want their GUIs to look pretty mostly as a way to either sell them or express their fashion sense to others.
I feel like the sweet spot for malleability was Win95-era theming. You could adjust the color of everything, and the typeface of everything, and that was it.
What's up with this glorification of Win95 style UI?
It's objectively ugly. Everyone I know or have known, in my entire life, without question, thought so back then, and does so now.
I am just so, so puzzled by this I had to type out this comment. Ignoring functionality, accessibility and all that, does anyone actually think it looked aesthetically pleasing, and I don't mean that in a 20-years-after nostalgic vaporwave way? Why is there a sudden wave against things being allowed to look nice and pleasing to the eye?
I liked it, for one. Especially after win3.1 The 3D buttons were much better than the flat rectangles in vogue today.
The UI might not have been perfect, but they gave an interface that provided a decent feedback while getting out of the way if you wanted to get work done.
Now if this is against being allowed to look pleasing? That depends on what you are comparing against, of course. Next and osx i could live with equally well, i guess. Modern win10, otoh, should be shot.
But thats my opinion. Do on your PC whatever you want.
"Instead" refers to the exclusivity of eye candy. So I'd rather see additional features enabled instead of an exclusive focus on flaming or squigly windows. Both would be fine, but if I had to choose...
Ok, understood. There is a diminishing return with every additional feature. I have to have a use case for every feature, otherwise it is useless and only takes up resources. My maximum number of use cases is finite.
Comments
Why "instead"? Best would be to have both. Eye candy is an important feature. No need to sacrifice one to get the other.
Malleability of certain display characteristics is an important feature (largely for accessibility reasons), eye-candy is just marketing and signaling.
While I understand not wanting any useless eye-candy for functional purposes, I think there is also pleasure derived by simply "looking at pretty things".
It does not need to involve any external motivations.
"Eye-candy" can be supportive of said malleability.
Inferring form what you wrote, I think your working definition of marketing is wrong. Maybe you can clarify what you mean by "marketing"?
I am also unsure what you mean with "signaling". If you mean communication with the user via visual cues, than I would say signaling is an important feature.
Eye-candy is important with many things made for humans, not just computer displays.
By "marketing" and "signaling", I mean ricing. People want their GUIs to look pretty mostly as a way to either sell them or express their fashion sense to others.
I feel like the sweet spot for malleability was Win95-era theming. You could adjust the color of everything, and the typeface of everything, and that was it.
What's up with this glorification of Win95 style UI? It's objectively ugly. Everyone I know or have known, in my entire life, without question, thought so back then, and does so now.
I am just so, so puzzled by this I had to type out this comment. Ignoring functionality, accessibility and all that, does anyone actually think it looked aesthetically pleasing, and I don't mean that in a 20-years-after nostalgic vaporwave way? Why is there a sudden wave against things being allowed to look nice and pleasing to the eye?
I liked it, for one. Especially after win3.1 The 3D buttons were much better than the flat rectangles in vogue today.
The UI might not have been perfect, but they gave an interface that provided a decent feedback while getting out of the way if you wanted to get work done.
Now if this is against being allowed to look pleasing? That depends on what you are comparing against, of course. Next and osx i could live with equally well, i guess. Modern win10, otoh, should be shot.
But thats my opinion. Do on your PC whatever you want.
"Instead" refers to the exclusivity of eye candy. So I'd rather see additional features enabled instead of an exclusive focus on flaming or squigly windows. Both would be fine, but if I had to choose...
Ok, understood. There is a diminishing return with every additional feature. I have to have a use case for every feature, otherwise it is useless and only takes up resources. My maximum number of use cases is finite.