I can't tell if we're being punk'd. I'm expected to take that screenshot as an example of a less distracting user interface for creative work? My condolences to anyone using the presumably more distracting previous version.
I found it obvious that the new screenshot was showing off the dark theme. I found it far less obvious whether they expected to it to show a "more clean and functional" interface.
As a person who suffers from black floaters in his eyes the black UI elements are always welcome. The elements by themselves might not be less distracting but they make my floaters a lot less distracting.
That's a debugging view on a really small window. The bottom panes only show up while you're debugging and the left pane is your project browser, which you can show or hide with Ctrl-1 or Cmd-1 depending on your OS.
I use it at 1680x1050 on my rMBP and it's fantastic.
The screenshot shows a debugging session. Both the debugging panel at the bottom and the project panel at the left can be collapsed. So it's not that bad.
But in general, yes, i agree in that Intellij IDEA's interface is quite overloaded. I haven't tried any language-specific version of the IDE, like PhpStorm or PyCharm; maybe those are less loaded, IDK.
Yeah, I use Intellij daily, and the UI is quite poor. Little things like the way tabs work, the way the debugger buttons are inscrutable, the way that the vertical splitting works with opening files using the C-S-n shortcut, etc are quite annoying.
It's redeeming quality is that the only worse UIs are every other IDE. (Expecting perhaps Visual Studio, which is not a viable option for non-MS shops)
You just completely and utterly missed that it's a 950x570 screenshot (so essentially a stamp) during a debugging session with the visual debugger taking the bottom half of the screen.
No, I caught that. I just honestly don't think what's witnessed in that screenshot would be repaired by a screen of any resolution. It's a UI/UX tragedy of a severely high order.
(Above screenshot: http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/d... )
I can't tell if we're being punk'd. I'm expected to take that screenshot as an example of a less distracting user interface for creative work? My condolences to anyone using the presumably more distracting previous version.