A toolkit developer's

view of the X window system

Owen Taylor

otaylor@redhat.com

Boston, MA

April 2004

Trends in hardware

Large screens: 21" or more

Moderate resolutions (~5M pixels)

Lots of memory

Huge amounts of pixel-pushing power

Diversity of form factor

Trends in user interface

Movement away from strict overlapping windows

Popups

Alpha transparency

Proritization of information

Computer is actively seeking information

Explanation

Computer is acting on behalf of user

User experience now

Still many areas of improvement

No excuse for:

Visible redraws

Inconsistent response times

Cut-and-paste / DND not “just working”

User experience in 5 years

Tight integration of multimedia

Actions animated where appropriate

Richly detailed desktop

Sucessful extensions

Do things that apps can't do themselves

Don't force particular architectures on apps

Common toolkits are cross-platform

Provide obvious benefits to applications

Beauty doesn't generally matter

Mottos

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush

Ignore the man behind the curtain

2003-05-10T18:37:58