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posted by Fnord666 on Friday June 30 2017, @04:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the rethinkpad dept.

Just days after Lenovo Group Chief Yang Yuanqing hinted that Lenovo may be pulling out of the PC and Server markets in favor of focusing on datacenters and mobile devices, long-time Thinkpad designer and Retro Thinkpad Project Manager David Hill has announced his resignation from the company. Mr. Hill, who had been in charge of the original ThinkPad design in the early 90's and rose to the rank of Vice President of Design at Lenovo, states:

"I want to broaden my view and create the opportunity to do more in the field of design, not less."

The 25th Anniversary "Retro ThinkPad" project, which was in development for over two years and received over 13,000 responses from long-time ThinkPad fans, is still, for the time being, scheduled for an October 5th announcement. Could internal pressures to minimize costs have resulted in Mr. Hill deciding to take his name off the Retro ThinkPad project which he spearheaded for two and a half years?


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  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Friday June 30 2017, @06:46PM (10 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Friday June 30 2017, @06:46PM (#533618) Journal

    I haven't upgraded yet from a thinkpad t410, nor I have compelling reasons to. It has those additional buttons over the trackpad which might be nice when you type from strange positions (who doesn't check mail between one kamasutra position and the next one?). Never used the "nipple". It is also ugly as fuck but I think that was result of an explicit request by IBM. MUST LOOK DAMN SERIOUS.

    You know, the difference between IBM and Microsoft... IBM would look great for funerals, while the funeral of Microsoft would look great.

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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday June 30 2017, @07:01PM (9 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Friday June 30 2017, @07:01PM (#533624)

    Was gonna say the same thing: you don't need to use the trackpoint itself to find value in the duplicate mouse buttons under the space bar.

    I hate apple for destroying the idea that high-end laptops should have good keyboards, almost as much as I hate them for causing all that blank flat space all over websites and programs.

    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 30 2017, @07:22PM (8 children)

      by kaszz (4211) on Friday June 30 2017, @07:22PM (#533635) Journal

      Blank fat space? care to explain?

      Apple sucks in some aspects .. YES.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 30 2017, @08:56PM (5 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 30 2017, @08:56PM (#533689)

        Those "clean" "minimal" design cues that waste screen room and that Apple products are known for. Think, Slashdot beta's comment section...

        Designs for illiterate people.

        • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday June 30 2017, @09:04PM (4 children)

          by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday June 30 2017, @09:04PM (#533696)

          The entire web industry jumped on that bandwagon, but I really can't say offhand who started it. Do you have some kind of citation that Apple was the instigator of this horrible flat-UI design trend, rather than just another bandwagon-jumper? I'd be happy to have something else to bash Apple for, but I want to be fair.

          • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday June 30 2017, @09:07PM

            by bob_super (1357) on Friday June 30 2017, @09:07PM (#533698)

            I don't know who Apple ripped it off of, but Apple using it is why the rest of the industry followed.

          • (Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Friday June 30 2017, @09:20PM (1 child)

            by nobu_the_bard (6373) on Friday June 30 2017, @09:20PM (#533703)

            Not 100% sure but - Google started doing this to their main search page around 1999. This was praised because it contrasted the tedious uselessness of their rivals like Yahoo, who crammed every imaginable link on the main page. That Google did not- that emphasized all you had to do was type what you wanted in the search bar.

            Well that's the earliest example of the design philosophy that I recall noticing. I think it trickled down from there, and ended up in places where it didn't really serve as much of a function.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 01 2017, @09:02AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 01 2017, @09:02AM (#533857)

              The reasoning is different. Google only had a search box because their search algorithm was good enough that that was all you needed. The empty page also loaded MASSIVELY faster than every other search engine. Remember, people were using dial-up and web page size really mattered. The other search engines were index/category based. Having as many categories on the front page meant fewer page loads so despite the longer loading time, loading one page was still faster than loading a couple intermediate pages.

              Nowadays things are full of empty space because sites were getting more and more cluttered with buttons and borders surrounding each element. We went too far with borders within borders within borders within borders that we've swung all the way to borderless everything and the only way to manage content without borders is to keep it far away from other content. As an example, this text field has three borders right next to each other: The text field border, the edit comment border, and the post comment border. The Edit Comment border completely matches the Post Comment border and should be removed. The title could be changed to Edit And Post Comment. But no, no one took the time to think about design. Adding tons of whitespace lets you not think about design too.

              There's also the UI studies showing people read columns of text better than wide pages so websites put their real data in a small centered column. Now with phones, sites want one thing displayed at a time so we get huge vertical white space as well.

              No one uses whitespace to reduce page sizes anymore. If anything, the dynamically loading content makes loading far worse as pages skip around as you're trying to read them. Eventually we'll swing back to tons of borders. Everything in the computing industry runs in cycles as the pros and cons of doing something one way are forgotten by the next group who only see the pros of the 'new' thing and the cons of the current thing.

          • (Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday July 01 2017, @06:44AM

            by Bot (3902) on Saturday July 01 2017, @06:44AM (#533836) Journal

            I think it's a degeneration of the so called "material design" that started to appear on android/google. It is closely related to the fact that ugly ass flat icons are quicker to market than the 3d, shaded icons that were especially popular on iphones at the time. Bonus evil points to the designers who made them monochrome.
            I understand, 3D was going rococo, but damn.

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      • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday June 30 2017, @09:04PM (1 child)

        by bob_super (1357) on Friday June 30 2017, @09:04PM (#533697)

        The low-res screens of yesteryear used to be filled with lines indicating boundaries of elements, clickablility, and as much info as one could cram into a 640x480 window.

        Recent Apple-inspired UI designs achieve a "clean" design by hiding all of these and separating everything with a lot of white space. Not only do you have to hover over something to know whether it's a status or a button, making it less intuitive, but the density of information on the screen is lower than before, despite having at least 10 times more pixels.
        Besides the UI, website content has also followed the trend of less density, which unquestionably helps readability, but requires more scrolling to browse the same amount.

        I should re-install an old mouse-tracking program and see how many more pixels I traverse daily to accomplish the same task as before (and most of my input is text-based).

        • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday July 01 2017, @04:25AM

          by kaszz (4211) on Saturday July 01 2017, @04:25AM (#533814) Journal

          Got any screenshot with god vs bad UI design in this regard?

          Btw, Considering the competence here. I'm sure people could make a design without these flaws and ram it down on the public and corporations.