Another school year is among us. As for myself, i've just started up my second year at two junior colleges, and working part time. Obviously I didnt come here to talk about school... it's the last thing I want on my mind.
Justing looking for an honest outlook of things to come, design/trendwise, for the rest of '04 into '05... as you know longhorn isnt scheduled for launch till mid-late '07. MacOS 10.4 is coming just around the corner... so heck, what are we going to do till then?
We've seen almost every style evolve, take shape, and fall off the face of the modern world.. anyone see the return of super detailed tech-esque themes and "trendwhore" abstract? minimal here to stay? new innovations to desktop management? eyecandy? mac emulation? or something brand spankin' new to take the internet by storm? dare I say EVO?
As for my input? Lately i've been seeing a recent trend taking more shape than ever... not just clean cell shaded vector, but a very stylized, almost retro futuristic vector art coming into play on the web.
What do you guys think? What are you outlooks? keep it clean and take it easy, try to keep this an open minded thread.
sticboy [stic] Customize.org Staff Design Development --------------------------- "still keeping it clean, simple, and functional."
10:47 am, Wednesday, September 08, 2004 (5 years ago)
yo! ... figure id try to liven things up around here... honestly im stoked to see what's to come in the coming months. Trying to be as optimistic as i can during this busy year.
what's next for desktop customization? two words: active desktop. this dark corner of the desktop has rarely been explored as it is just so easy and non-invasive to plaster a bmp or a jpg on the workspace. as for me, i have always been strangly intrigued in having an interactive wallpaper; i would love to dabble in flash and have something cool end up on my computer screen, but i too have fallen victim to the realities of being in school and working hard for the money.
stic: one more thing. make a cell shaded vs and lets colab on some litestep :)
I finally went back to college myself. All I can say is there is ass, ass, ass, ass, and more ass. It's amazing how I, in my mid 20's, can feel like a dirty old man being in classes with all the 18 year old freshman girls.
I wonder how long before some of them ask me to buy for them...?
_______________ "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." ---Theodore Roosevelt
sweet i've been trying some experimental stuff with active desktop... xp is a little weird with that function... like any active desktop it eats up some resouce.. and has a weird way of refreshing it self... try to find/design my way around that...
stic: sounds good.. i tried active desktop ONCE but i gave up real quick.. i think i had a problem with having some sort of border put on my desktop or something.. don't quite remember exactly what it was. o well.
i would like to try to have some kind of a flash menu and smooth animations on my desktop what is possible technically but dunno about ressource usage...
well all it is is running iexplore full screen on a desktop refreshing every time you open a program or close a big document.. or make some type of system change... it can get heavy depending on how much crap you have in it.
sticboy [stic] Customize.org Staff Design Development --------------------------- "still keeping it clean, simple, and functional."
Am finding that am just getting bored of more and more desktops that i see , just the same ol same ol. Its not to often you find something that really stands out now and is 100% orginal and exciting
Desktop customization is in a bit of a rut at the moment, as nearly all aspects of it have been done and its hard to create something orginal.
But who knows what the future will hold , there are many talented people here at custo and am sure we will be surprised by something new soon.
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I think the corporate marketing used for digital recreations and the "retro" for everything makes a big part of the future which i experience.
personally i don´t like it. the present i live in and the present i see here on my screen is different. The one i see and interact with is holding on the past and is proud of innovations or angry about failures from the past. the little ones growing up in this present get my attention. i totally include myself and feel guilty, too. when i see little kids who corrode the little silver portion out of old harddrives working for their jobless parents to earn money for the family and kids who take more medicaments than needed ( i am sorry for those examples.. it could be a totally differnet thing) i feel guilty.
sorry for my bad grammar and the wrong words i used. but i hope you get me
holy shit that's a badass site. time to get myself crackin. i need to find a way to develop hardcore interfaces like that.. but as a working desktop...
man that site Imkik gave out is nuts...Must learn flash, must learn 3D's max!
and I also believe that Active Desktop is the next 'Big' thing. There's not much else left in a 'Normal' desktop these days. With the help of WinT and the other's every corner of windows have been customized. The only thing left is the cool shit u only see in movies. IE: the clear interface that they show in the matrix when the nieberkanesser(sp?) came back...
I know I’m just a little person here, but I’m going to dare to comment lol.
I think that there should be more uses for a desktop other then a wallpaper. I've seen some cool stuff done with Active Desktop, but nothing to crazy. There are limitations with AD also. I think some time there are going to be more intense programs to do those type of things. Like Samurize, Rainmeter, Sysmetrix, etc.
Who knows maybe they will get to the point of that clear interface in Matrix. I mean they have touch screen monitors. All you need is some really crazy skins to go with it. By the way I think it's spelled Nebuchadnezzar. But other then getting interfaces like in the movies we are kinda stuck.
I know it's been a while since any one has done/seen some thing really jaw dropping. And I doubt we'll see it any time soon. But maybe in a few years we'll have some thing good to look forward to. Who knows though...
totally.. but, remember they had those msaller desktop interfaces that used a trackball/keyboard/touch and drag screen.... on to those small pieces of glass... holy crap thats awesome. .. anyways..
i suggest everone check out the keynote for the newest mac osx 10.4 "tiger" .. they have some truly nice features.. not to mention eyecandy coming in there next os update... yes i know it's mac... but think about the interaction and functionality as a whole... some of those features have TONS of potential...
windows is definitely lacking in the making the interface more engaging... i, myself have been experimenting with some windowsFX (by stardock) coding... definitely a step in the right direction.. puting the fun back in Comp(f)u(n)ter... uh..yea, just messin on that last one.
sticboy [stic] Customize.org Staff Design Development --------------------------- "still keeping it clean, simple, and functional."
Just speaking for myself I would like to see a resurgance of the more artistic styles we saw up to around 2002. More techie, grunge, goth, abstract work now that 'common sense' usability is taken more seriously. A lot of people seemed burned out on that back in 2003, but the community is big enough to support a lot more styles than we're seeing now.
Winamp 2 (I'm sorry, 'Classic') is going to make a big comeback when people realize they don't like relearning their audio player's interface every time they download a new skin.
I think fewer people will publish their skins publicly - we're seeing that already, kind of. I think it's very difficult at this point to "Review" skins and assign them a number grade. I think people will just show off their personal work via screenshots and only publish it if there's a lot of demand.
Screenshots will need to evolve somehow. So much is being done with states and animation that a still shot isn't a valid means of showing off a desktop anymore.
what's in: VECTOR, with photomanips... unlike back in the old days when 3d was wow, vector is majorly breaking barriers. the minimalist definitely. the simpler the better. thats what rocs about minimalism, unlike trendwhore, minimal pieces depend a lot on design psychology. negative space, balance, weight, emphasis all work together for minimalism. that's why its so hard to make a winning minimalist piece. you need that knowledge to make it work.
and as for screenshots, wasted pixels, how about teeny flash ones? then all mouseovers, clicks can be previewed. they can replace the static 'large view'...
That's a thought I'd had a while ago, but having to sit down and keyframe every part of a desktop is kind of cumbersome.
A really flawlessly executed 'skinpacker' could be the ticket, an all in one file which installs and configures all of the skins in a suite. One little download that could install a screenshot on your PC - right down to the coordinates of the windows - would be a much better means of distributing these things than "Here's a list of what I used. Oh, and I made some of it from spare graphics. And the icons are from a website that doesn't exist anymore. Have fun!"
Of course that opens up a whole slew of compatibility issues and copyright issues, but maybe those need to be addressed anyway. ;)
Its been featured on most of the designer sites, but for those who don't frequent those much check it. Full featured design, but simple enough to run on my old school ibook.
My thoughts are the 'elite' will go their separate ways to artgroups, work, or... Others will burn out much like they are now. The new groups will eventually have to start doing content creation which will breed a new set of trends based off the foundations of what's currently working for us all.
As for myself, I actually enjoy the retro-future style that's been going around. My own style is, after all, a bit retro based.
As for an outlook, I see a continuous strive toward efficiency. Not just in one particular area, but in the entire scheme of things (i.e. operating systems, interfaces, skins, desktops, resource management, energy consumption, and of course digital art in all its mediums). People are focusing on doing more with less and I think its a wonderful yet challenging trend that should be embraced for so many reasons ;)
As for the future I don't know. I would like to see active desktop take off. Mainly because that's all I can really contribute to desktop customization.
PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
in my opinion, the current state of the customize industry is in the grips of something similar to being deregulated (the major players (which include ourselves) dissolve the marginals to create super-custo communities). the advantage of this trend is the accumulation of pieces here where we can all view and assess it. the downfall being we start to feel out a trendwhore environment which will force marginal artists into creating their own communities, and so the cycle repeats.
as for active desktop, i have my doubts. i mean i had trouble loading up most of those flash links without crashing the browser let alone have one as my gui. theres room for it in this community, but it won't be able to really take off till an external program is developed which cleans out its current rather unusual config (similar to what litestep and bb have done) which can manage resources.
my outlook for the near future is the revert to the first stage of the cycle in gui, back to the cli (command line interface) with a range of intelligent software that need very limited input such that desktop computers become redundant and are replaced by intelligent devices.
i'm only being open minded, its the only proof i'm still alive
What if you were thinking about a code that specifically writes as a code but recoded into another form of code in the coding process?
ok, my brain and pc will shutdown now.
---------------------------------- Lookey Private, I made a little red dot on your forehead.. *chuckle* Sir, please don't play with the smart bomb guidance laser. http://www.customize.org/details/35235
But we wouldn't even need to write the code for it. It'd write it's own code. You know, from your brainwaves. Haha, that's fun to think about but that'd be so hard I bet like 50 scientists and programmers would commit suicide in the process.
I want to go BEYOND code. Why can't someone make a program with so much information in it that you can tell it what you want it to do, and it formulates accordingly? Say..like a giant database with speech recognition and AIML that could do whatever you say-- however you say it.
with microsoft announcing the next release not till 2007 (or something like that) this break is going to give alot of the 90+% of computer users (on windows) the chance to experiment with other os's. as for the speech recognition thing, we already have it, its just not available to the public domain for another 80 years.
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"We don't need no stinkin' robot-assembled, computer-controlled black plastic throw away stuff pretending to be audio gear."
