While I enjoyed 4dwm when I had a sgi, I am not convinced the desktop environment was that great, it did however have a very nice file manager, which I guess is 90% of a desktop environment, so perhaps it was pretty good after all.
The best sgi ui innovation, which unfortunately I rarely see anywhere else, was the use of drop pockets, these are drag and drop targets, small squares that are uniformly styled to give the user a hint that dropping something here is useful.
I was unable to find a good example with multiple pockets, but for example: when you see that blue square in the file manager, you know you can drop something there and it will try to use it as a path.
Vaguely related, I saw an extremely nice little bit of UI on a MRI machine console the other day. When planning a sequence of scans, you drag them into a listbox. But once that listbox is "full" from top to bottom, it's hard to append to the end (rather than inserting between two existing scans), because you keep having to hit that tiny 1px wide target between the bottom of the box and the last entry.
So someone at Bruker noticed this, and made a drop target UNDER the listbox that's labeled Drop Here to Append. It makes things SO much more pleasant.
these are drag and drop targets, small squares that are uniformly styled to give the user a hint that dropping something here is useful.
Something similar exists in macOS, but isn't widely used, as far as I can tell.
You can create a script in Automator that does things with an input file, and then save it as a desktop icon that you can drop things onto. I have a few of these for auto-resizing images.
(Bonus: Because it's done in Automator, you can also have the same script appear under Quick Actions when you Option-click the file/s.)
Panic's Transmit allows you to create a desktop icon that sends whatever's dropped on it to a server via FTP, SFTP, S3, Google Drive, or a dozen other methods.
Had great scrollbars. When dragged there would be a shadow to show where the bar was. So you could go back if needed. Also the first platform I noticed that you could middle click the scrollbar to move directly, or control click the titlebar to lower. Though those conventions may have been from Motif?
It listed wm hot keys on the window menu and had vector icons. Yes, believe it was the best desktop of the era.
Would like to see an improved version of it, not merely a faithful reproduction. I hesitate to say modern because it often means dumbed-down. But made for higher resolution would be great.
When I worked at HP in the mid 80s I met the guys there that developed the UI design of CDE. Ironically done on Macintosh IIs using Pixelpaint. It was a very nice design.
I've often said I would LOVE a modernized version of CDE. Smooth out some of the edges, GREATLY improve the font rendering, etc. but keep the feel that this is a system designed for work. I love the polish of macOS, but there's something about the feel of old-school Solaris 8 that I really miss. It felt like it wasn't a toy. It was meant for something more important than that.
Little known fact is that the SGI 5.6+ (certainly 6) settings controls was the first "electron app".
It ran a mozilla process, with CSS1.x to style the controls like Motif. And the Javascript code interacted with the underlying XUL hacks in a manner not much different from WebOS palm used decades later.
The name makes me think of Holomaxx Technologies (styled as holoMaXx technologies), the vanity DBA of one Ilarion Bilynsky, also known as SsZERO. SsZERO was a squirrely guy with an interesting USENET presence in the late nineties. At first he was a bit like the later Imari Stevenson: a spoiled, videogame-obsessed teenager whose confidence far exceeded his competence. He promised the Holomaxx Ultimate Video Game Project or UVGP, a kickass game console that would beat all others and even feature AGI, to everyone on rec.games.programmer and several other newsgroups, and became quite truculent, to the point of rudeness, when actual game devs replied with constructive criticism. He accused them all of "thinking linearly", as opposed to his own "dimensional thinking". This was a TimeCube-like epistemology of Ilarion's creation, under which a circle can be a straight line at the same time, if you rotate it by 90 degrees, given by 90(n) so 90(45) would be a line at a 45-degree angle, that still had the properties of the original circle. It was also critical to how the UVGP worked, as it would possess "dimensional logic" and a "dimensional information crossover" or DFX. If you note that "information" begins with I and not with F, well, you're just not thinking dimensionally my friend.
Needless to say the UVGP never came to fruition, or else it exists in a higher dimension us linear thinkers just can't comprehend. Ilarion would then pivot Holomaxx into a reseller of computer and audiophile parts (thousand-dollar speaker wires and the like), as well as a bespoke web development company (I think they claimed Kazaa as a client). They are most famous, however, for unsuccessfully suing Microsoft and Yahoo! because the spam filters at those two providers filtered out correspondence originating from Holomaxx as spam. The case of Holomaxx Techs. v. Microsoft is cited in case law concerning the reach of the CAN-SPAM Act and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, in terms of how much discretion a provider has in filtering communications going over their network that are, in the provider's determination, harmful.
I don't know where I'm going with this except to say that until I dived in and checked out the authorship, I wondered if Ilarion were involved with this desktop project. It sounds like the sort of thing he might get involved with, especially since SGI was synonymous with "kickass computing power" among gamers in the 90s. Thanks for the trip down 90s USENET memory lane, MaXX Desktop!
They killed galleon in Gnome 2, which was the best browser of its era, replacing it with epiphany. iBM was behind it. Ever since then there has been a lack of innovation on Linux with web browsers and since konqueror is a former shell of itself, killed file manager innovation as well
They did (sort of). They were called demos and trials. But there was no DRM. FlexLM was easy to crack. The WWW was largely plaintext.
I sadly fried my Octane 2 at some point (and got my Indy's, DS10L Mac Pro G5 (also RIP and Suns to the garbage waste disposal). The Octane 2 specifically was also using a lot of Watt. But it was fun to play with, and of course it ran IRIX ;)
(I still remember how good the audio card in the Indy was compared to my PC's.)
I noticed other day prices are still high on eBay. Better off buying recent enterprise stuff (mind the Watts though).
One funny thing to note is SGI completely missed out on the AI era and boom.
What upgrades do you have? I only have a 500Mhz cpu, but i have 4 Gb and I put in an ssd. I also put in a modern power supply which makes it a little less loud.
In addition to bumping it to 4GB, the only upgrade I did was for the HDD. I'm not sure if mine has a quieter PSU, but it doesn't seem (to me at least) to be louder than any other PC when running.
I'm a little confused of what the current state of the project is.
The Photo Gallery [1] features a couple of installations, running on 4k screen hardware and a Xeon X5690 as it seems, but is still based on CentOS from 2004 and running a Linux 4.18 kernel?
Do they have compilation problems or kernel mod problems, or that they need to port their display server and kernel mods to newer APIs in the upstream kernel?
Looking at the roadmap [2] this looks like a major development effort with huge stories along the way. Is there a foundation people can support financially?
> I'm a little confused of what the current state of the project is.
The project seems to be sleeping. The development was veeery slow. It was not open source so, in the end, CDE is the way to go if you need something like this.
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The best sgi ui innovation, which unfortunately I rarely see anywhere else, was the use of drop pockets, these are drag and drop targets, small squares that are uniformly styled to give the user a hint that dropping something here is useful.
I was unable to find a good example with multiple pockets, but for example: when you see that blue square in the file manager, you know you can drop something there and it will try to use it as a path.
https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/books/user-experience-ux/pa...
So someone at Bruker noticed this, and made a drop target UNDER the listbox that's labeled Drop Here to Append. It makes things SO much more pleasant.
Best screenshot I could find online: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Horea-Christian/publica...
https://telcontar.net/Misc/GUI/RISCOS/#files.operations
Something similar exists in macOS, but isn't widely used, as far as I can tell.
You can create a script in Automator that does things with an input file, and then save it as a desktop icon that you can drop things onto. I have a few of these for auto-resizing images.
(Bonus: Because it's done in Automator, you can also have the same script appear under Quick Actions when you Option-click the file/s.)
Panic's Transmit allows you to create a desktop icon that sends whatever's dropped on it to a server via FTP, SFTP, S3, Google Drive, or a dozen other methods.
It listed wm hot keys on the window menu and had vector icons. Yes, believe it was the best desktop of the era.
Would like to see an improved version of it, not merely a faithful reproduction. I hesitate to say modern because it often means dumbed-down. But made for higher resolution would be great.
Also CDE is now open source, being actively maintained, and is still the CDE you remember. Even on a vintage hosting platform https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/28/battle_of_the_retro_d...
It ran a mozilla process, with CSS1.x to style the controls like Motif. And the Javascript code interacted with the underlying XUL hacks in a manner not much different from WebOS palm used decades later.
Needless to say the UVGP never came to fruition, or else it exists in a higher dimension us linear thinkers just can't comprehend. Ilarion would then pivot Holomaxx into a reseller of computer and audiophile parts (thousand-dollar speaker wires and the like), as well as a bespoke web development company (I think they claimed Kazaa as a client). They are most famous, however, for unsuccessfully suing Microsoft and Yahoo! because the spam filters at those two providers filtered out correspondence originating from Holomaxx as spam. The case of Holomaxx Techs. v. Microsoft is cited in case law concerning the reach of the CAN-SPAM Act and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, in terms of how much discretion a provider has in filtering communications going over their network that are, in the provider's determination, harmful.
I don't know where I'm going with this except to say that until I dived in and checked out the authorship, I wondered if Ilarion were involved with this desktop project. It sounds like the sort of thing he might get involved with, especially since SGI was synonymous with "kickass computing power" among gamers in the 90s. Thanks for the trip down 90s USENET memory lane, MaXX Desktop!
Deleted Comment
I sadly fried my Octane 2 at some point (and got my Indy's, DS10L Mac Pro G5 (also RIP and Suns to the garbage waste disposal). The Octane 2 specifically was also using a lot of Watt. But it was fun to play with, and of course it ran IRIX ;)
(I still remember how good the audio card in the Indy was compared to my PC's.)
I noticed other day prices are still high on eBay. Better off buying recent enterprise stuff (mind the Watts though).
One funny thing to note is SGI completely missed out on the AI era and boom.
What upgrades do you have? I only have a 500Mhz cpu, but i have 4 Gb and I put in an ssd. I also put in a modern power supply which makes it a little less loud.
Man that thing is loud
The Photo Gallery [1] features a couple of installations, running on 4k screen hardware and a Xeon X5690 as it seems, but is still based on CentOS from 2004 and running a Linux 4.18 kernel?
Do they have compilation problems or kernel mod problems, or that they need to port their display server and kernel mods to newer APIs in the upstream kernel?
Looking at the roadmap [2] this looks like a major development effort with huge stories along the way. Is there a foundation people can support financially?
[1] https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/books/misc/page/photo-galle...
[2] https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/books/whats-next/page/novem...
The project seems to be sleeping. The development was veeery slow. It was not open source so, in the end, CDE is the way to go if you need something like this.