[HN Gopher] Round Rects Are Everywhere
___________________________________________________________________
Round Rects Are Everywhere
Author : zerojames
Score : 407 points
Date : 2024-06-24 22:38 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.folklore.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.folklore.org)
| wanderingstan wrote:
| I've enjoyed this story over several decades, but what stands out
| to me now is the fact that Bill Atkinson was working from home
| during the creation of the Macintosh.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Where would you rather take LSD, at home or in the office?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19238322
| msephton wrote:
| IIRC he did the more complicated stuff at home so he wouldn't
| be disturbed. But he also worked from the office. A healthy
| split!
| m463 wrote:
| Rounded corners are one of the common things on macos that make
| it look modern and cheerful. iphone icons are more pleasing
| because of this.
|
| other platforms should add more of this.
| gibolt wrote:
| It is standard for web elements. Very easy to set border radius
| EGreg wrote:
| Bill Atkinson wasn't aware of that feature.
|
| Also, Susan Kare didn't know about vector graphics. That's
| why all her icons ended up pixelated! But it was... quite
| iconic at the time.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Whatever Susan Kare knew about vector graphics, that's not
| why the icons were pixelated.
|
| It was because she had only two colors to work with, black
| and white, and only two icon sizes, 16x16 and 32x32.
|
| Steve Jobs and Bill Atkinson only got 32x32 B&W icons for
| their own portraits:
|
| https://www.folklore.org/Steve,_Icon.html
|
| > _Icons were only 32 by 32 black or white pixels, 1024
| dots in total_
|
| Susan posted more examples here:
|
| https://www.behance.net/gallery/81132387/Macintosh-icons
| michaeljsmith wrote:
| (I think that was the joke)
| ftio wrote:
| That hasn't always been true!
|
| I remember with great displeasure the bad old days of
| creating a 3x3 table for every container and jamming a
| rounded corner gif into each of the four corners to create
| this effect.
| lelandfe wrote:
| See also the old sliding doors article breathlessly making
| rounded tabs:
|
| https://alistapart.com/article/slidingdoors/
| aalvarado wrote:
| A list apart was my go to resource for a long time. Css
| zen garden was great
| gary_0 wrote:
| I dunno, I look back on the <table>-based layout days with
| fondness, probably because I was young and the Web was
| nothing but rolling green fields and endless potential. I
| didn't see the limitations, only the opportunities for
| inventiveness. I'll never feel the same satisfaction as I
| did when those first few website designs came together.
| reddalo wrote:
| I feel like responsive websites killed that magic,
| because now it's way too complicated to make interesting
| designs.
| nayuki wrote:
| Indeed, CSS border-radius was introduced around year 2010.
| I was both browsing the web and writing pages before that
| time. https://caniuse.com/?search=border-radius ,
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/border-
| radi...
| aalvarado wrote:
| In games you had to do this 9 piece slice, one slice for
| each of the 4 corners, all 4 straight sides that can be
| repeated as a pattern and the middle background piece
| filleduchaos wrote:
| Nine-patch image scaling[0] is still a thing, and is only
| orthogonally related to setting a border radius (it's a
| hell of lot more versatile than that).
|
| 0: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/9SliceSprites.html
| kccqzy wrote:
| Do you not remember a time before border-radius? Or -webkit-
| border-radius? I remember including a premade rounded
| rectangle button in _Flash_ just to get that visual effect.
| karaterobot wrote:
| To be fair, the original comment said other platforms
| should _add_ this, and border-radius has been widely
| supported for at least 15 years. You 'd have to look hard
| for a browser that needs it to be added.
| somat wrote:
| ahh yes good ol border-radius, more popularly known as web
| 2.0
| golergka wrote:
| Not only on macos, on the hardware as well. Macbook that I'm
| typing this comment on has a screen with rounded corners on
| top, and it just feels better than right angles on the bottom.
| callalex wrote:
| That effect is 100% done in software. Full black on screens
| is just really good now. If you don't believe me look at a
| photo in full screen while zoomed in.
| 1d22a wrote:
| I'm not sure that's true that it's (always) done in
| software. For example, the newest Framework Laptop 13 has
| higher resolution screens that come with rounded corners,
| because whatever supplier had a large stock of them lying
| around. If it was just software, the concept of having a
| "rounded corner screen" from a supplier wouldn't exist.
| pfg_ wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it's a screen cutout - the corners are
| still rounded when fullscreen zooming, and on asahi linux.
| There's also another cutout for the notch at the top of the
| screen. Also, it's not a great panel and the blacks aren't
| very good - you can still see light coming from the monitor
| with a full back image in fullscreen and it changes based
| on brightness.
|
| So if it is software, then it's very low level and with
| darker blacks than anything else on screen, and has a super
| tiny bezel right at the corner. I'm pretty sure it's a
| cutout.
| trevmckendrick wrote:
| It's underrated how great Steve Jobs's taste was, and how sincere
| the "liberal arts + technology" line is
| karaterobot wrote:
| I don't disagree that it's important, but I don't think it's
| underrated. I think it's very highly rated.
| cynicalkane wrote:
| There's a puzzle in philosophy, where a philosopher points to
| a bear and says, "That's a bear". Except it's only a life-
| size cardboard cutout of a bear. But behind the cutout is a
| real bear. Is the philosopher speaking the truth when he
| points and says there's a bear there?
|
| Steve Jobs is appropriately highly praised, but by many
| people who don't know why he should be praised -- to them
| he's like a movie sort of figure, Elon Musk in his post-
| Twitter phase, a larger-than-life jerk who says smart words
| and allegedly does things. But Jobs actually _is_ that sort
| of genius that a lot of wannabes pretend to be. So is he
| highly praised? Is the philosopher telling the truth when he
| points to the fake bear, having confused it for a real one
| but not knowing there 's a real one behind it?
| lxgr wrote:
| Does the philosopher know that there's a bear behind it? If
| not, it probably depends on your take on the Gettier
| problem :)
| defrost wrote:
| The modern take on that dilemma; What if it's a man
| hiding behind a bear cutout to appear less threatening?
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| Various non falsified interpretations of quantum theory
| say there both is and isn't a bear there until it is
| observed. So I say he's right.
|
| And watch out, there's a bear behind you.
| lxgr wrote:
| I think most philosophers would be fine with treating
| "there is no bear there" and "the amplitude of the
| probability density function of a bear is negligibly low
| there" as the same statement for this discussion :)
|
| An entire bear spontaneously tunneling across a large
| distance or spontaneously forming out of vacuum
| fluctuations is really, really quite unlikely.
| hoseja wrote:
| And then he tried curing cancer with fruit juice.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| I'm not sure "underrated" is exactly the best term here. He's
| pretty much lauded as the greatest "visionary for design and
| innovation in the technology industry", ever.
|
| I agree that every time one of these anecdotes comes up, it's a
| shock to remember. Of all the narcissists we have running the
| world, he's the one I'll most fondly remember.
| zenlikethat wrote:
| That's a great way to put it, ha ha. Toxic human, but hard to
| deny the results.
| 1-more wrote:
| Success like he had is a filter. To be there you have to go
| through a lot of "sure you've done well so far, but you'll
| never make it to the next level" conversations in your
| life. By the time you're Steve Jobs, you've been right in
| the face of doubt thousands of times. Type of thing that
| makes someone think they can cure easily treatable
| pancreatic cancer with crystals or whatever.
| icehawk wrote:
| Maybe not "underrated" but "Jobs only did marketing, Woz did
| all the technical work" is a very persistent comment I see on
| the internet when he's brought up.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Woz is a technical genius, no doubt about it.
|
| But Jobs is who made the boxes something that non-nerds
| wanted to have in their homes. There were dozens of
| computer companies at the time, some (not many, but some)
| of which had Woz-level engineers (e.g. Jay Miner and team
| at Atari). But only Apple survived.
|
| Someone once said there would never have been an Apple if
| there had been only one Steve, and I agree.
|
| Was he a jerk sometimes? Yeah, definitely. But he's not the
| first genius who's been a jerk. At the extreme, Isaac
| Newton was a horrible person.
| eru wrote:
| > But he's not the first genius who's been a jerk. At the
| extreme, Isaac Newton was a horrible person.
|
| Luckily, we had a spare: Leibniz (and others) covered
| much of the same ground as Newton.
| philwelch wrote:
| The calculus, sure, but not the physics.
| eru wrote:
| Newton didn't do everything that Leibniz did, nor did
| Leibniz do everything Newton did.
|
| Other people did other stuff. Once calculus was around,
| much of Newtonian physics would have come naturally
| sooner or later.
|
| Eg even just re-doing an analysis of Galileo's free fall
| experiments with calculus would have gone a pretty long
| way.
| cladopa wrote:
| I will not define Jobs as narcissistic (thinking on himself).
| Quite the opposite, Jobs was focussing on what people needed,
| and he was right: People needed rounded corners way more than
| ovals.
|
| Jobs was obsessed with the customer experience and that was
| what made him a great CEO.
|
| Did he cared more about the product or the customer than his
| own people? This is something that you should ask the people
| that worked with him.
| bityard wrote:
| > This is something that you should ask the people that
| worked with him.
|
| No need to ask around, lots of people who worked for Jobs
| have gone on the record as saying he was the worst person
| they have ever worked for. If you ran into him (or worse,
| had to present something to him), you never knew if you
| were going to get Nice Steve or Angry Steve. Nice Steve
| would thank you for your work and politely inform you of
| changes or refinements that he wanted you to make. Angry
| Steve would verbally berate you in front of your manager
| and peers.
|
| He had a set of close associates that he never or rarely
| treated badly, it is not hyperbole to say that most
| everyone else got the brunt of his wrath.
|
| Straight from Woz, if you don't want to take my word for
| it:
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/08/steve-
| woz...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| He was a genius that had that flaw of being a narcissist.
|
| The problem is all the people using him as a reason to praise
| narcissism itself. And almost never even in people that are
| genial, since very few people are genial.
| jonstewart wrote:
| Who's perhaps underrated is Bill Atkinson. He famously left it
| all behind, but QuickDraw, MacPaint, and HyperCard are a
| helluva hat trick.
| doubloon wrote:
| his girl friend and child's mother Chrisann Brennan was an
| artist. its all in her book.
| paulcole wrote:
| > "No, there's no way to do that..."
|
| This is the key line to me. It turned out it could be done and in
| less than a day. Even very smart and talented people sometimes
| need a jerk to tell them to make it happen. Sometimes it
| backfires and sometimes it doesn't.
| beambot wrote:
| Can someone explain the technical detail a bit more detailed than
| on Folklore...?
| jepler wrote:
| I didn't read it in detail but I did find this version of the
| same anecdote followed by a commentary on the original ROM
| code:
| http://wg20.criticalcodestudies.com/index.php?p=/discussion/...
|
| the underlying algorithm to draw an octant of an arc may have
| been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midpoint_circle_algorithm
|
| You "just" need to draw 2 octants of an oval at each corner of
| the rectangle, plus the remainder of the 4 sides of the
| rectangle, and correctly account for fill/edge flags while
| doing so. This likely leveraged the existing "region" code in
| the Apple QuickDraw, but to be sure you'd have to get down into
| the code or find a more complete commentary.
| novia wrote:
| I viewed this on my RoundRect
| stefan_ wrote:
| > Over the next few months, roundrects worked their way into
| various parts of the user interface, and soon became
| indispensable.
|
| At which point we realized they are just a fad like any other
| design ever was and went to sharp corners and flat design. And
| back to round corners, and back to sharp, and back to..
|
| Hell, I can see this circle of hell happening in front of my very
| eyes. I think a year ago someone at Chrome had the brilliant idea
| to "refresh the design" as happens so often in big organizations
| and suddenly the tabs got round and we got little round corners
| around the navigation bar and..
| thr33 wrote:
| rounded corners are actually a significant accessibility factor
| and powerful gestalt mechanism in design. The border radius of
| a rounded rect makes it discernable at a glance the boundaries
| of the element and what is inside and what is out. Concentric
| rounding can clearly communicate parent child relationships in
| an astutely gestalt fashion.
| wolpoli wrote:
| The only thing constant in modern web design seems to be the
| ever-increasing amount of margins and paddings. Everything else
| goes in cycles.
|
| When Google fully-rounded the corners of a rectangle, they
| added even more margins and paddings. When texture comes back
| in style, I bet we'll see even more margins and paddings.
| nlunbeck wrote:
| Round rect technique aside (fascinating stuff!), the storytelling
| here is really charming. Reads like a clever short story
|
| > Bill returned to Texaco Towers the following afternoon, with a
| big smile on his face. His demo was now drawing rectangles with
| beautifully rounded corners blisteringly fast, almost at the
| speed of plain rectangles.
| WillAdams wrote:
| It works well for the Mac OS, but for all that it's a core part
| of the Mac OS identity, I really hate that Microsoft is using
| round rectangles to the point that device manufacturers are
| painting the underside of laptop and tablet glass screens so as
| to cause a physical rounded effect at the corners, and I'd liefer
| have the crisp square Windows 10 screen appearance than the
| rounded Windows 11 (though the overall increase in consistency is
| nice otherwise).
| LoganDark wrote:
| Painting? As demonstrated by Framework's new display option,
| there are displays that physically do not have pixels there.
| The the actual mask they use for printing is already rounded.
| It's not painted over, it's just not there.
| WillAdams wrote:
| If the displays don't have the pixels, then they should
| discount the price based on them being missing.
| LoganDark wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they do. You get maybe a few cents based on
| the physical area that the rounding leaves out. Of course,
| you can't just pay the few cents for a non-rounded screen
| if they don't already have masks for non-rounded screens.
| That's why Framework decided to compromise on the rounded
| option, as that one had already been commissioned by
| another customer, but if they wanted the same thing but
| without rounding they would have had to pay for brand new
| tooling.
| WillAdams wrote:
| That's even worse --- back in the days of the original
| Mac there were apps which would make use of the dark
| corners for various status notifications.
| LoganDark wrote:
| It's not like you can use the notch for status
| notifications on phones with a screen cutout. To be fair
| though, I've always been hostile towards phones with
| notches or cutouts of any kind. Even my current phone
| (OP7Pro) with its rounded corners is pushing it.
| aj7 wrote:
| Yeah, but how?
| WillAdams wrote:
| See the QuickDraw source at:
|
| https://computerhistory.org/blog/macpaint-and-quickdraw-sour...
|
| https://d1yx3ys82bpsa0.cloudfront.net/102658076_quickdraw_ac...
| behnamoh wrote:
| Not just rounded rectangles, but squircles too. Every icon or
| rectangular element in Apple software and hardware is a squircle.
| yreg wrote:
| Surely a MacBook is a rounded rect and not a squircle.
| behnamoh wrote:
| Nope, it's still squircle.
| roelschroeven wrote:
| https://www.apple.com/v/macbook-
| pro/ak/images/overview/close...
|
| https://www.apple.com/v/macbook-
| pro/ak/images/overview/close...
|
| https://www.apple.com/v/macbook-
| pro/ak/images/overview/close...
|
| Those don't look like squircles to me. If they _are_
| squircles, they 're so close to simple rounded rectangles
| that there's no meaningful difference left.
|
| The keys could, maybe, be squircles, but I'm having a very
| hard time seeing the outline, the touchpad, the outline of
| the keyboard as anything other than rounded rectangles.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| TIL about squircles: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squircle
| abhinavk wrote:
| Apple uses quintic superellipses. Very similar to squircles but
| not quite.
| roelschroeven wrote:
| What does quintic mean in this context? My first thought
| would be something like (x/a)^5 + (y/b)^5 = 1, but that
| doesn't seem to work. I only get meaningful shapes when I use
| even exponents.
|
| Try for yourself here:
| https://www.desmos.com/calculator/bfqku2rcw0
| kragen wrote:
| |x|5, |y|5
| roelschroeven wrote:
| Ah that makes sense, thanks. Obvious, in hindsight.
| roelschroeven wrote:
| How does that work for rectangular elements? As far as I
| understand it, squircles are defined by an equation similar to
| (x/a)^n + (y/b)^n = 1, as in
| https://www.desmos.com/calculator/yllozptlmt.
|
| That works well for squares (a = b), but for rectangles the
| corners aren't round anymore, they become elliptic, as in
| https://www.desmos.com/calculator/bzxyu6ygz3. That doesn't like
| as nice in my eyes, but more importantly I have the impression
| that the rounded corner of Apple's rectangles are circular, not
| elliptic. I don't have any Apple devices, but in screenshots
| like
| https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:4800/format:webp/1*oBI...
| it seems to me the corners of rectangular elements are very
| much not elliptic. Or certainly not nearly as obvious as in my
| second Desmos link.
|
| So I don't understand what's really going on. It doesn't seem
| to me Apple's rectangles really are superellipses.
|
| (And actually the squares in that screenshot look like simple
| rounded squares to me, not squircles/superellipses. The sides
| look too flat for squircles. I could be wrong though.)
| saagarjha wrote:
| They're definitely not superellipses these days, but to
| answer your question in a more interesting manner: you don't
| have to stretch the superellipse. You can just split it so
| that the corners are rounded with a 1:1 aspect ratio and
| cheat by stretching the lines in the middle.
| aj7 wrote:
| In day camp in Brooklyn, we always had woodworking. In successive
| summers, we had an instructor who wanted us to round the corners
| and edges of everything, and another instructor who insisted we
| keep everything as square and sharp as possible.
| chrisjj wrote:
| And lo you learned both! :)
| oneshtein wrote:
| +-----+ | Yep | +-----+
| nickpeterson wrote:
| /;;;((--------//-----------------$$ -- % I never learned
| woodworking \
| mrgoldenbrown wrote:
| Context matters, as usual. Sharp corners in soft wood can
| easily get dented and look bad if they are on the edge of a
| table or cutting board. But if two corners are going to meet
| they'll look better if they are both square.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Rounding edges is also a great way to "intentionally" fix a
| piece that got dinged on the workbench.
| xnx wrote:
| Aren't Apple rounded rectangles now squircles?
| https://medium.com/minimal-notes/rounded-corners-in-the-appl...
| LoganDark wrote:
| Yes, they changed into squircles with iOS 7 I believe.
| hajile wrote:
| I wonder if they were inspired by Meego SwipeUI on the Nokia
| N9? It was visually quite different from everyone else at the
| time.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| No. iOS switched to squircles because their product
| designers use squircles[0]. If you extrude a rounded
| rectangle you get a shape that has harsh breaks in the
| highlights at the point where the rounded part meets the
| rectangle part. To smooth this off you need a curve where
| the tangents are smooth. This is also known as "C2
| continuity", and you get that level of continuity by
| ensuring that the second derivative (acceleration) of the
| curve has no gaps between points.
|
| Absolutely none of these properties matter for icons, of
| course.
|
| [0] Or at least some curve with similar tangency
| properties.
| LoganDark wrote:
| > Absolutely none of these properties matter for icons,
| of course.
|
| To my subjective eye, squircles often do look slightly
| better in cases where the corner radius is large-ish.
| xnx wrote:
| Original(?) older article:
| https://www.figma.com/blog/desperately-seeking-squircles/
| waterhouse wrote:
| Related, fun post:
| https://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/roundy.html
| zX41ZdbW wrote:
| Round rectangles can look not round enough on low-DPI displays,
| and the colors can also be wrong due to incorrect averaging in
| non-linear color space. Example:
| https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/33453#issuecom...
|
| It is similar to how subtle gradients look striped and dirty on
| many websites if displayed with only 24-bit color:
| https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/91316
| crazygringo wrote:
| I don't think that's quite right.
|
| The round rectangles are still perfectly round.
|
| But in the example given, the _outline_ becomes fainter on the
| rounded sections, because gamma isn 't taken into account.
|
| In other words, the shape is perfectly correct, but the
| antialiasing is buggy.
|
| (It also has nothing to do with gradient striping -- that's an
| unavoidable artifact of 24 bit color that has nothing to do
| with gamma. It becomes more noticeable if you don't dither,
| which generally isn't done in 24 bit color, or when compression
| is bad, like low-quality JPEG.)
| MBCook wrote:
| On the 1 bit Macintosh display it wasn't much of an issue.
| semolino wrote:
| Mac OS ROM hack to generate fully circular windows:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20201209143138/https://macgui.co...
| Someone wrote:
| The 'hack' part isn't drawing round windows; that is just using
| the operating system APIs to create a new window look.
|
| The hack is injecting that code in the Finder. A way to do that
| is to store the WDEF inside the desktop file on a floppy disk.
| Then, inserting that floppy would be enough to give new windows
| that look.
|
| The Finder would open the resource fork of that file to get
| info about files on the floppy and keep it open. When you
| opened a window, the Finder would ask the Resource Manager for
| "WDEF #0", and the Resource Manager would find it (or rather, a
| WDEF pretending to be 'it') in the desktop file. Writing a
| Trojan for that OS wasn't very difficult.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| iPhone rounded boxes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxgg_kW3QLU
| noahlt wrote:
| Every time I see this story, I try counting the round vs square
| rectangles, and in practice they seem about even in my life. Door
| frames, picture frames, books, cabinets, and windows are all
| actually squared off.
|
| (And natural things aren't rectangles at all!)
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I had the same thought, but I'm actually currently on a
| passenger VIA train carriage, and almost everything in this
| "fully designed" environment is rounded off-- the windows, the
| seats, the tray tables, the vent holes, even the bodywork
| itself. An airplane would be similar.
| kqr wrote:
| I feel like that is due to physical constraints (are glass
| panes weaker at the corners?) than actual design-to-be-
| pleasing-to-look-at.
| canthonytucci wrote:
| It might also reduce the risk of (some kinds of) injury in
| an event where the people inside bounce around. Same for
| inside cars.
| vasco wrote:
| > And natural things aren't rectangles at all
|
| Pyrite would like a word!
| langcss wrote:
| I wish I knew about this in the microcomputer days. I started off
| with SIN() and COS() for circles which were very slow. I realized
| that you can just scan down a pixel at a time in the Y axis and
| use Pythagoras for the X. Also for a circle that calculation does
| 4 points.
|
| But the way posted here would much much faster than that!
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Round rectangles are everywhere_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28679496 - Sept 2021 (26
| comments)
|
| _History of Rounded Corners_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7062706 - Jan 2014 (1
| comment)
|
| _Steve Jobs and Rounded Corners_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3096927 - Oct 2011 (1
| comment)
|
| _The story of round rectangles_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636358 - Aug 2010 (77
| comments)
| userbinator wrote:
| Windows used rounded corners on its buttons from 1.0 to 3.11,
| then switched to square ones until XP's themed UI, where they
| were slightly rounded again, until 8 went back to square, and now
| with 11 they are again rounded:
|
| https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/7389110/64139289-3...
|
| I still prefer the sharp corners.
| ted_bunny wrote:
| Wonder how it syncopates with the high skirt / short skirt
| fashion cycle
| kragen wrote:
| that ended about the time engelbart first publicly
| demonstrated hypertext (i'd say windowed guis but sketchpad
| and grail had windowed guis)
| msephton wrote:
| They're is no end to a cycle. I'm not suggesting you go and
| check current skirt trends, but I guess it might be useful.
| CrimsonCape wrote:
| it's interesting to see all the windows theming over the years.
| I personally prefer the UI that looks like little chunks of
| titanium and steel rather than the boring flat RGBCMYK-like
| color palette. It was even in the name, glass, to convey the
| materiality.
|
| I just wonder why developers can have design color palettes
| like solarized; yet Microsoft imposes its will and subjugates
| everyone to the same godawful blueness. F** the blueness
| because I know some corporate peon had conversations like
| "Yellow is too cautionary, orange is too obscure, red is too
| angry, purple is too edgy. Blue is safe."
| bityard wrote:
| > (anti-blue rant)
|
| > (looks at username)
|
| Username checks out.
| int_19h wrote:
| The highlight color in Win8+ is customizable, although that
| only applies to apps using the new XAML-based frameworks.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Sharp corners are dangerous, I always feel like those windows
| will draw blood if I touch them with my mouse wrong.
|
| Strangely enough, I stayed in an East Asian hotel (I think with
| Tibetan influences?) and I remember the corners of the room all
| being rounded. It just felt better, more soothing? It would be
| hella expensive to get a craftsman to round all the corners in
| your room here in the west, you could do it with plaster but it
| wouldn't last more than a decade and wouldn't add any resale
| value.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| I know nuclear power stations have no sharp corners to make
| them easier to clean.
| porterde wrote:
| Do you have a source for that fact?
| orthoxerox wrote:
| You know, I remember seeing this on older pictures, but I
| tried to come up with an example and couldn't, all recent
| pictures I could find had regular floor moldings.
| Y-bar wrote:
| I spent two summers as a cleaner at a pharmaceutical
| company in my late teens. The "round corners are easier
| to clean" were a thing there as well, reason I was told
| was that sharp corners will scrape off some residue from
| the cleaning cloths when you drag them over the corner.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Oh, ya, I can see this being really nice for the kitchen
| sink or the stand in shower. Right now, oil build up gets
| trapped in corners that require a brush to work out,
| which is tricky in the shower where it's all calked.
| gopher_space wrote:
| It feels like the more things I use a kitchen sink for
| the more I appreciate corners. Cleaning is a little more
| involved but being able to e.g. set two buckets next to
| each other and have them be level is really really handy.
| heftig wrote:
| I don't know about power stations, but it's a common
| feature in medical devices.
|
| E.g. keyboards have a flat or nearly-flat surface so they
| can be easily cleaned by wiping without leaving any germs
| behind in a groove, or on an edge.
|
| I suppose something similar makes sense in an environment
| that could produce radioactive dust.
| stereo wrote:
| Your fridge has no sharp corners inside.
| bombela wrote:
| Mostly because it is injection molded, and that sharp
| corners on plastics are prone to crack.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| It's definitely true for some hospitals here in the UK.
| acc_297 wrote:
| I was curious and went looking. This is the closest I
| found after a quick google search. It refers only to
| lighting options in the reactor chamber not the hallways
| and such.
|
| https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/analysis/featurehow-to-
| choo...
|
| "There are some obvious considerations: all underwater
| nuclear lights should be crafted from stainless steel
| with rounded and smooth surfaces for easy
| decontamination, and have no sharp or jagged edges to
| reduce the risk of workers tearing safety gloves or
| clothing. "
| philwelch wrote:
| One of the houses I lived in during college had rounded room
| corners, and it was a very old house. I'm not sure how it was
| done.
| bombela wrote:
| With a round trowel and/or a wood template.
|
| I have some experience plastering. Round corners are
| somewhat easier than sharp ones. The plaster/joint compound
| tends to pile up quickly in corners and it is hard to skim
| it thin.
| janci wrote:
| Traditionally it was done here in eastern block with a
| beer bottle. A tool always within reach of a builder.
| Daub wrote:
| Beer bottles to make rounded corners? Brilliant!
| leobg wrote:
| How do you make a round corner with a beer bottle? I mean
| an actual corner (three walls meeting), not an edge (two
| walls).
| flir wrote:
| Hmm. We do it to ceilings (coving). I think you maybe need
| wooden coving, mounted vertically. Then you can make a
| feature of it, skim it, paint it, whatever.
| ChoGGi wrote:
| Bullnosing drywall isn't much more expensive then square
| corners?
| Zelphyr wrote:
| My wife's grandmothers house here in the US, built around
| 1952, has rounded corners in a lot of the ceiling and doors.
| It is quite nice.
| cesaref wrote:
| Here in the UK it was pretty common up to say the 1940s for
| plasterers to curve the corners on outward pointing walls in
| hallways. This usually extends from the skirting up to the
| picture rail. There is a lovely transition from the curve to
| a point just below the picture rail, which is very elegant,
| but a total pain if you are hanging wallpaper, well, that's
| my experience anyway!
|
| I've always felt it was one of those details that a plasterer
| could show off their skill, and you are right, it softens the
| corner in a very pleasing way.
| msephton wrote:
| You should try staying in a yurt. No corners at all, felt
| like I was back in the womb. (I imagine)
| bhauer wrote:
| > _I remember the corners of the room all being rounded. It
| just felt better, more soothing?_
|
| It's funny. Here in the United States, I find houses with
| bull-nosed interior walls discomfiting. Something about all
| the rounded corners causes me mild distress. I find it much
| more comfortable being in houses with sharp-edged meetings of
| walls.
| bsder wrote:
| That image really drives home how much we've lost with flat
| GUIs are and how important drop shadows are to buttons.
|
| And also drives home that I don't give one iota of care about
| rounded vs square.
| nurbl wrote:
| It's also funny how the later examples almost look like they
| could be terminal UIs. Based on this trend, I predict that
| the next version of Windows ("Windows One") will look like
| DOS.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| I really like XP's. I wonder if it's going to be popular
| again.
| xnorswap wrote:
| I still think windows 2000 looks the best out of that bunch, if
| not for the lack of font antialiasing.
|
| Windows 10 does a pretty good job too if not for the mess that
| is finding yourself in a universe of completely different UI
| paradigms that suddenly lurch from one to another, especially
| when navigating settings.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Windows 2003 Server was the pinnacle - it looked and felt
| like Windows 2000, but had XP-era improvements, including
| ClearType (subpixel font antialiasing).
| malermeister wrote:
| I used to run this modded distro of Windows2003 called
| "tiny2003". It was my favorite Windows experience.
| int_19h wrote:
| You could easily switch WinXP to use the classic theme,
| which made it look the same as Win2003.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Win7 with the Classic Theme was the peak of UI/UX, IMO.
| gopher_space wrote:
| On the Mac side OS 10.8.5 felt the same way. Last
| versions of software specifically designed for desktop
| computing, maybe.
| bhauer wrote:
| Even the default out of the box color scheme of WS 2003 was
| fantastic. Indeed the pinnacle of Windows UI design.
| wolpoli wrote:
| Black text on Grey background was nice. I am not sure why
| we switched to dark grey text on white background or
| light grey text on black background.
| Gud wrote:
| What really bothers me is they removed the possibility to set
| the interface to the good old windows nt interface after
| windows 7. Okay, Microsoft wants to implement sim crappy new
| UI. At least give me the option to make it right
| Zelphyr wrote:
| I agree that Windows 2000 looks the best. I inherited a
| system that was running Windows Server 2003 that we have
| since replaced with up-to-date software. We needed to do it,
| of course but, the Windows 2000 UI was way better than what
| we have today. It was simpler but also more consistent.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| Microsoft not being able to make up their mind resulting in a
| cluttered and nearly unusable UI? Who has ever heard of such a
| thing?!
| AlienRobot wrote:
| That's a very nice image. I think XP is the best one. Just the
| fact that it's yellow instead of gray makes all the difference.
|
| I hate how modern widgets don't have shading. They're trying to
| be modern but it just feels very lazy.
|
| Note how buttons suddenly became twice as big and there was
| margin/padding everywhere since Windows Vista/7. It's getting
| ridiculous how much space UI wastes.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Wow. So this is why Apple's campus visitor center literally has
| no corners in it. Even the stairwells have all rounded corners.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Take a closer look at the tables.
| femto wrote:
| The thing I like is that Bill Atkinson didn't spit the dummy when
| he didn't get the expected reception to his ovals. Instead he
| took on the challenge of round rectangles and came up with a
| solution.
| bdahz wrote:
| Related post discussing the rounded shapes (and squircles) in
| design tools:
|
| https://blog.verygoodgraphics.com/posts/rounded-shapes/
| lazy_afternoons wrote:
| Loved it. Will remember this everytime I add "rounded" in
| tailwind. :)
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| I much rather prefer the old UIs that were highly responsive at
| the speed of thought.
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| "No, there's no way to do that. In fact it would be really hard
| to do."
|
| Why would Bill say this? Why would his ellipse optimization not
| be trivially applicable to a quarter-circle?
| sircastor wrote:
| I think as Andy writes, Bill was showing off a very impressive
| demo, and was maybe miffed that Steve wasn't appreciating it.
|
| Also, the question had just been sprung, and literally no one
| had ever done this before.
| n4r9 wrote:
| This was my interpretation as well. Internally I would be
| thinking "Look, I've just worked my ass off and produced
| something incredible. Can't we just put it straight into
| production?"
| int_19h wrote:
| Is it actually true that "no-one had ever done this before?".
| As far as I know, the midpoint circle algorithm, being a
| straightforward extension of Bresenham's line algorithm, was
| already well-known by 1981. Indeed, here's a paper from 1967
| that does basically the same thing:
| https://academic.oup.com/comjnl/article-
| pdf/10/3/282/1333509...
| voiceblue wrote:
| Helps explain why Jobs turned out the way he did, when
| perfectly capable people behaved this way around him.
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| I wonder whether, prior to this conversation, Steve had ever
| communicated to Bill that rounded rects would be nice.
| lukas099 wrote:
| Maybe he didn't realize he wanted it until he saw it
| without it
| bhaak wrote:
| I asked the same question years ago. :)
|
| The probable answer is that he thought about modeling the
| rectangle with rounded rects with a single mathematical
| expression. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15073696
|
| That's probably impossible (as rounded rects are not
| continuous) but also completely unnecessary as you can handle
| the quarter circle segments and line segments separately.
| Someone wrote:
| > as you can handle the quarter circle segments and line
| segments separately.
|
| Possibly, but that is tricky in the presence of blitting
| modes such as XOR; the movement you accidentally draw a pixel
| twice, it would get flipped twice (nowadays, with anti-
| aliasing, it gets really tricky, but they didn't have that
| problem yet)
|
| You may want to draw the four circle segments in one go, too,
| as that allows you to share large parts of the computations
| for what pixels to touch.
| int_19h wrote:
| The algorithm used to draw the ellipse should not have any
| issues with accidentally overdrawing even by a single pixel
| if your arcs are defined in 90-degree increments.
|
| And you can, in fact, draw the four circle segments in one
| go, since they will all be mirror images of each other. If,
| instead of the absolute coordinate of the pixel, you
| compute the offset from the starting point, then you can
| compute it once, negate it as needed, and draw 4 pixels on
| each step.
| rob74 wrote:
| Also, for the most common cases this probably wasn't even
| needed - I bet they just stored the "masks" for rounding the
| corners hardcoded, as that would have been much faster.
| aalvarado wrote:
| Love the story, could have added more in terms of how the round
| corners feature was solved
| ralferoo wrote:
| I wasn't even aware that the Mac existed at the time, but I
| always had a fondness for rounded rectangles because the Amstrad
| CPC character set had 16 characters that represented all possible
| combinations of a central dot with N, E, S, W spokes. They were
| rounded for the 4 cases that represented 90 degrees, and the
| rounded rectangle look was perfect for using as borders around
| things.
|
| This was 1984, so wouldn't have been long after the original Mac
| but was maybe influenced by it. As far as I know, no other 8-bit
| computers have rounded container characters like this. I later
| used PCs, and the CGA text mode had its nice 1/2 line variants,
| which were good for variety, but they were square so I never
| found them as appealing as the rounded ones I knew from the
| Amstrad.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Oooof, so the rounded corners in UIs is just another Jobs-fetish
| by UI designers, got it ;(
| Mikhail_Edoshin wrote:
| One example of rounded rectangles added purely for aesthetic
| purposes was the desktop window of the old Mac. When the display
| turned on during boot, it was naturally square, but then one of
| the first things the software did was to round its corners. Then
| they stayed this way until maybe another software switched into
| full screen. There was nothing like that on Windows and it was
| obviously a "useless" thing to do. I liked that detail.
| dmd wrote:
| This conversation exemplifies every positive interaction I've
| ever had with any of my really good advisors or bosses. It's
| exactly what I want from my boss - to be told "that good, but not
| quite good enough, and _I know you can do better even if you don
| 't know it yet_".
|
| And then I go off and think some more and outdo myself.
| uwagar wrote:
| they are everywhere indeed because sharp corners can hurt people.
| cat_plus_plus wrote:
| Learning how to design models for 3D printing now, and rounded
| corners are a matter of necessity as much as aesthetics. Objects
| with sharp corners are uncomfortable to hold, even risk of injury
| with some materials. They are also unhygienic and pain to clean
| dust out of. On the flipside, math to generate rounded corners on
| arbitrary shapes is messy and printing these out often requires
| supports and postprocessing to remove those and polish the curves
| with sandpaper.
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| Rounded corners is much like semicolons, and rebasing / merging
| something impossible to discuss. Most people either strongly
| dislike the one or the other and are unable to reconcile.
| cantSpellSober wrote:
| Can we add (1981) to the title please
| layer8 wrote:
| > Then he pointed out the window.
|
| ...which hopefully was still a non-rounded rectangle.
| spot1984 wrote:
| "squircles" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squircle
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