Tag: GUI

In her never-ending quest for interface perfection, Lifehacker Gina Trapani has written a great Geek to Live tutorial called Consolidate Firefox's chrome. In it she teaches you how to pare down Firefox's menus, toolbar, address back, and bookmarks toolbar until all that's left is what you absolutely need. To be specific, you'll learn how to eliminate entire menus from the menubar, how to keep ...

The Windows Client team, the division of Microsoft responsible for the user interface in Windows Vista (and previous versions), has finally jumped on the bandwagon and started a blog: Shell: Revealed. The new blog is a place for Microsoft's UI developers to talk about the changes in Vista and communicate with developers and enthusiasts. So far the blog hasn't revealed anything especially stunning, ...

It's easy to forget all of the computing operating systems that existed before Windows, Mac OS, and the various flavors of Unix / Linux. But if you ever feel like taking a walk down memory lane and checking out some screenshots of some of the oldies, check out the Graphical User Interface Gallery over at Guidebook. There are a bunch of beloved bygone GUIs, as well as a few that I had never heard ...

Curious where KDE is headed? KDE programmer Stephan Binner has posted a cool sneak preview screencast of "Kickoff", the brand new start menu that will be debuting in openSUSE 10.2. The redesigned menu looks pretty slick, incorporating a search box at the top and tabs at the bottom for flipping between your favorite programs, recent programs and documents, my computer and all programs (which have a ...

You know, the desktop hasn't really changed that much since 1984 when the original Macintosh debuted. Windows still work pretty much the same way they always have, and so do desktop icons. Now we have things like the Start menu and the dock, and widgets basically everywhere, but apart from pretty colors, rounded corners, and transparency, the desktop today would probably be pretty recognizable to ...

Speaking of new looks, Microsoft's design site (which I didn't even know existed) has a page on some of the new design elements in Office 2007. We've heard plenty about the ribbon, of course, but the site also goes over Office 2007's three themes (sky blue, OS X silver, and Vader black), as well as the new application icons that are coming soon to a desktop near you. Office 2007's new aesthetic is ...

Firefox 2 Beta 1 may be nearly feature-complete, but there's one thing missing still: the theme. Mozilla designers are still working on the theme that will be the default when the final version of Firefox 2.0 is released. Some mock-ups of the theme have been posted to the Mozilla Wiki, and people who like the Firefox 1.0-1.5 theme will be relieved that it stays true to its roots. Most elements ...

By now you've probably seen a few screenshots of the new "ribbon" interface that will replace the menubar and toolbars in Microsoft Office 2007. It doesn't seem so mysterious to me, but then I'm not really Office's average use case. If you want a better idea of what using Office's new interface is really like, I recommend this streaming preview video (direct link to WMV stream) that ...

"The default [user interface] of Firefox has not been altered since the launch of Firefox 1.0. It would be presumptuous to assume that the way in which users interact with their browsers has gone unchanged between that time and our planned 3Q2006 release date for [Firefox 2.0], and even more presumptuous for us to assume that we got things 100% right with Firefox 1.0." That's how ...