Re: Our self-presentation, not just on our website. (Was: Re: GS based app release: djay by Algoriddim in Beta)

[Daniel Boyd]

> They shall not automatically hide! That's NeXT design - never hide something, 
> deactivate it.

Riccardo—I’ll be the first to agree with you that autohiding scrollbars are 
usually terrible. I say “usually”, because there is a notable exception: touch 
UIs. In a touch UI, scrollbars themselves are terrible. 

So two comments: 1) because there are situations where auto-hiding scrollbars 
are desirable, I believe the theming engine should support it. That way, people 
can design a touch-first theme that delivers a first-class touch UI experience.

And 2) it seems to me that sticking to every NeXT design principle is silly—at 
least at the level of preventing new themes from going in a different 
direction. 

I totally agree that NeXTSTEP was amazing, particularly when you compare it 
against its contemporaries. But 1) the NeXT team was composed of imperfect 
humans and 2) they were designing interfaces quite a long time ago. We should 
allow for the possibility that somebody has had a good idea in the years 
following 1997. 

The wonderful thing about themes is that it is not necessary for us to agree on 
what the perfect UI looks like. But we would make a mistake if we limit the 
capabilities of the theming engine itself based on something NeXT decided 30 
years ago. Some themes can follow NeXT’s conventions and others not.