This is really cool. I never got to play with a proper NeXT machine, but WindowMaker was my window manager of choice for several years in the late 90s/early 2000s. I always wished that GNUStep could have gotten more traction on the desktop.
I love the NeXT aesthetic, I'm ready for the the next UI design trend to go retro.
A company I worked for sent me along with two senior colleagues to a shop which was showing both the NeXT cube and the NeXTStep system ported on x86 hardware, and the experience was totally worth the early morning (late night) wake up plus following 5 hours train trip; it was about 1993 or 1994. The cube was absolutely gorgeous looking, and being then myself an Amiga fan its Motorola CPU to me was something to be proud of.
The demonstration wasn't the usual smoke and mirrors wrapped in corporate speech: the guy wrote some code on the cube and built a small GUI program to show the development system and libraries, then he took the same code, copied it to a x86 machine nearby running the ported OS and built it to obtain the same program. Just wow! Back then running different hardware and CPU architectures meant sort of living on a different planet, and we just saw someone building a space bridge between two distant planets, making software development much easier.
We eventually got back with some promo material and the idea that we were did indeed experience a milestone in the IT development, but the price tag was something a very small company could not invest for research alone, so they abandoned the idea.
About WindowMaker: I loved it and used it extensively both at home and work in the early 2k. In one project I had to build the simplest possible user interface for roughly 50 remote stations hundreds of kilometers away where the users were mostly completely new to computers, therefore the risk of clogging the support seat with panic calls was really high.
Luckily WindowMaker and its kiosk mode came to rescue: I built a really basic desktop screen in which the user could not alter the system in any way, providing buttons for simple tasks like running a browser, fetch or send mail using a client, ask for remote support, print documents we sent through scp or mail attachments, shutdown/reboot etc.
An interesting challenge was easing the support login since all those terminals had dynamic IP, and we simply couldn't ask to the operators to start a reverse ssh from their side, but thanks to some Ruby scripts in the background, each remote machine would obtain and send its public IP and some more information to the local server in which a Ruby+Glade GTK app would add them to a list, so that the support operator would click on a station name and the ssh to that machine would open in seconds.
In the end it worked so well that the support colleague spent most of her time twiddling thumbs.
I used WindowMaker for years and liked it too, but to be fair, pretty much all decent WMs of the 1990s could implement a custom menu in the way you describe. It wasn't unique to wmaker.
These days it seems like people are coming up not realizing that X desktops can be anything else than what Ubuntu gives on a default install, as if a full DE is mandatory. They don't know about launching a simple wm from ~/.xsession or ~/.xinitrc or editing the menus in such a WM.
True but I wanted to avoid menus so that users would have immediately the options at hand, and other WMs, most of them at least, didn't allow fixed buttons on the desktop.
If I recall there was also a kiosk mode on KDE which was more advanced than WindowMaker's but at that time one would have to double the system RAM just to run KDE without swapping, while Wmaker (as AfterStep before, thanks to another commenter for mentioning it) was much faster and less memory hungry. There was also a less known WM, probably Openbox or a similar named one which could be arranged with a kiosk mode, but turned out to be less stable and less udser friendly, so in the end WindowMaker made the best compromise.
The purpose was essentially to give users a panel with buttons, to avoid those errors most of us would never think as possible but non technical users often do, like losing icons by dropping them into windows they then close, or call a software with the wrong argument by dropping an icon onto another icon, delete them accidentally, clogging the desktop with files, etc. A powerful unrestricted desktop environment in the hands of a non technical user can turn into many otherwise unneeded support calls, so it was necessary in that context.
I wonder if it’s possible given the parties at play to have a retro tech UI trend? I agree it’s sorely needed. So much has been taken away and not given a suitable replacement.
It's a matter of perspective. The UI many of us use on our Linux desktops (Xfce) has changed very little from what was current in 1995; the most prominent change has been touch readiness forcing bigger widgets and "header bars" compared to a pure mouse+keyboard UI; and even there the biggest effect has been simply to offset the improvement in screen area (from 640x480 or so to 1366x768).
As someone who used a real NeXT machine, I could never figure out the appeal of window managers like WindowMaker. It's like those Aqua 'themes' for Windows XP. It's superficially similar (more or less) but it's missing the guts. Window managers are an add-on, and consistency isn't something you can get with an add-on.
This is a bit of a nirvana fallacy issue. The Next-like window manager family wasn't sold on purely visual merits, and thus even just having the window managers themselves provided some benefit. I don't see that as much in the Aqua-likes, as the functional changes are pretty minimal (scroll-bar buttons on the same side, back when that still was a thing) or even counter-productive (keeping all the window buttons together).
Back when bowman/afterstep/wmaker came out, pretty much no one who used them was familiar with the NeXt interface, beyond having seen one in a magazine or knowing its look-and-feel via Win95 copying some of it.
As far as I can remember, the popularity rested on a few pillars: For one, it's a pretty sleek look compared to twm or mwm. It also had a rather good resize functionality -- big enough handles to grab at the bottom, while saving a few valuable pixels at the sides.
A lot of people also like(d) the dock apps that came with it. Even other window managers adopted them.
Can't say a lot about general dock/shelf usage, as I never got into that.
Window shading was nice and probably introduced into common usage by that family of WMs.
I used to pair WindowMaker with GNUstep apps, which were written in objc against AppKit APIs and some of them had a nice and consistent feel. The WindowMaker piece was a bit of an odd duck in this though, written in C and essentially being a traditional X WM.
Did you use WindowMaker before or after the redesign? I have a friend who swears by the pre-redesigned version, but the new one seems useless (as it eradicates the global menu).
You might want to take a look at https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace where someone tries to recreate the NeXT experience on top of noth GNUStep & Window Maker, both modified to provide coherent experience.
> This is really cool. I never got to play with a proper NeXT machine, but WindowMaker was my window manager of choice for several years in the late 90s/early 2000s.
Same here, and that's even before I knew about the elegance of the underlying software design. (Which amazes me even more, because a lot of the fundamentals of the software were already in shape back when Windows was 2.x and MacOS was known as System 6.)
I love the NeXT aesthetic, I'm ready for the the next UI design trend to go retro.