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Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

anders.unix.se

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Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#231

Post by nikatwork »

crucini wrote: post #223
mangecoeur wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> clean and neat Really? You miss that special "concrete gray and primary blue" feel? I think I used every MS operating system starting with DOS, and I miss exactly none of the "historic" interfaces. To the extent I get annoyed when institutional IT departments force you to use the "classic" theme on modern windows boxes ("It's faster!" - no, it isn't to any human perceptible degree, and I appreciate not having to st…

Interface design has certainly taken huge strides, but I don't think they're in a good direction. UIs are increasingly trying to be "pretty", which is in the eye of the beholder, but not useful. I think most of the UI on the Mac is really pretty and tasteful with it's low-key grayscale icons, but not very functional. The icons tell you nothing; I'd rather have simple english words. I have to use iTunes to put (lots o…

> The icons tell you nothing; I'd rather have simple english words.

Gmail is also guilty of this crime, although at least you can configure it to use text labels. No, I don't want to learn your particular abstract iconography just so I can read my frickin' mail.

And don't get me started on the unholy abominations that are the new iPhone Music and Podcast interface workflows. Wtf.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#232

Post by crucini »

nikatwork wrote: post #231
crucini wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interface design has certainly taken huge strides, but I don't think they're in a good direction. UIs are increasingly trying to be "pretty", which is in the eye of the beholder, but not useful. I think most of the UI on the Mac is really pretty and tasteful with it's low-key grayscale icons, but not very functional. The icons tell you nothing; I'd rather have simple english words. I have to use iTunes to put (lots o…

> The icons tell you nothing; I'd rather have simple english words. Gmail is also guilty of this crime, although at least you can configure it to use text labels. No, I don't want to learn your particular abstract iconography just so I can read my frickin' mail. And don't get me started on the unholy abominations that are the new iPhone Music and Podcast interface workflows. Wtf.

I think some sort of "Iron Law" is at work here - a company never does better than needed.

Apple has such vast lockin and momentum that they can make bad UI decisions and probably suffer no consequences.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#233

Post by 72deluxe »

krylon wrote: post #213
72deluxe wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddly, there has been a stream of APIs since then too, yet you can get by writing in the old ones no problem!

As a software user, I appreciate that. But having worked on a Win32 application for two years, I am glad I will never again have to touch that pile of poo. At the time it was created, Win32 might have been a nice API, given the underpowered machines it was designed to run on. But compared to building GUIs on a POSIX-ish system using Gtk+, it was an incredible pain. I can understand why many Windows developers were so…

Yes I can understand why .Net was so embraced by developers. Underneath it calls Win32 for you anyway I presume, so it's a nicer wrapper. Kind of like using wxWidgets on Windows is nicer than writing Win32 calls!

I have done some MFC and did not enjoy it, despite similarities in my mind to wxWidgets. I see C++ jobs here in the UK want MFC experience, which saddens me as it means that desktop development for Windows in C++ is either MFC or Borland's rotting VCL. I can really see why C# and .Net took off in the face of that.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#234

Post by [deleted] »

Fkidsthesedays wrote: post #189
longwave wrote: post #18

Amazed that Dennis Ritchie used a non-monospace font, I don't think I have seen any other serious developer use one. Also amused to see the Jerkcity comic open in Jordan Hubbard's screenshot.

If you ask really serious .. I dont think any serious developer gives a shit about font being used . Back in the days people used to be happy even to see a character on screen . These days js script writer using bower and other similar things and calling it automation will never understand that. The rush or high of using sun , bare bone x11 linux , developing without any autocomplete , when your experience was your s…

[deleted]

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#235

Post by shinnok »

I ran a pet project website back in 2010, userdesktops.org, with the sole aim of collecting all desk shots from the top forums back in the day, posted in the infamous and usually pinned threads, titled "Post your desktop" or "Show off".

I compiled a pile of scripts on top of wget, curl, httrack, ImageMagick and customized a Firefox build to allow for easy scraping from the most common bulletin scripts in use at the time. As the project's sole aim was pure nostalgia and server hosting and bandwidth were quite expensive back then I quickly put it to rest after no more than an year I think. Now I'm kinda sorry for not leaving at least the scraping to go on for longer, I'm pretty sure the forums queue was cut short of at least a couple hundred potential targets and god knows how many desktops.

Anyways, I've scoured for my old server backups and lo and behold, here are 2362 pure shots of geeky nostalgia:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0Bz62Jn3RBbYSbVNsdGlq...

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#236

Post by WWLink »

rsync wrote: post #119
mangecoeur wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> clean and neat Really? You miss that special "concrete gray and primary blue" feel? I think I used every MS operating system starting with DOS, and I miss exactly none of the "historic" interfaces. To the extent I get annoyed when institutional IT departments force you to use the "classic" theme on modern windows boxes ("It's faster!" - no, it isn't to any human perceptible degree, and I appreciate not having to st…

"Really? You miss that special "concrete gray and primary blue" feel?" Yes. I also miss being able to do everything with a keyboard shortcut. This is a much-overlooked feature of the Windows UI that I think is not given enough credit. I did it all in Windows - from 3.1 to NT3 to NT4 to XP - and I learned to hate hate the Windows OS and registries and so on ... But I always liked the UI and given the choice between th…

But.. OS X has tons of hotkeys. You have 3 modifier keys, and the apple extended keyboards are symmetric around the space bar, which for some reason nobody else understands.

Admittedly, ctrl+shift+f2 to get into the menu bar is a bit clunky, but you can change that to something simpler.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#237

Post by Symbiote »

Narishma wrote: post #98
jpkeisala wrote: post #3

Reminds me how bad anti-aliasing on the fonts was back then.

More like non-existent than bad.

Anti-aliasing was first introduce to a personal computer in 1989, on the Acorn Archimedes. [1]

My father only used Archimedes machines, so when we first got a Windows PC in ~1996 we both spent ages trying to make the text look nice — we assumed we had to find a setting somewhere.

I couldn't find a good screenshot of an older system, so I made one [2]. The desktop font isn't anti-aliased, only the fonts in applications. I've used the included (in ROM) !Draw to write text, successive lines are offset by one pixel to the right. Also shown is the configuration dialogue, and the interactive help for it.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20131020231733/http://acorn.chris... [2] http://i.imgur.com/bS1u5NF.png

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#238

Post by 72deluxe »

WWLink wrote: post #236
rsync wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Really? You miss that special "concrete gray and primary blue" feel?" Yes. I also miss being able to do everything with a keyboard shortcut. This is a much-overlooked feature of the Windows UI that I think is not given enough credit. I did it all in Windows - from 3.1 to NT3 to NT4 to XP - and I learned to hate hate the Windows OS and registries and so on ... But I always liked the UI and given the choice between th…

But.. OS X has tons of hotkeys. You have 3 modifier keys, and the apple extended keyboards are symmetric around the space bar, which for some reason nobody else understands. Admittedly, ctrl+shift+f2 to get into the menu bar is a bit clunky, but you can change that to something simpler.

It's Ctrl-F2 for the menu bar isn't it? Ctrl-F3 for the dock, something obscure to reshow a hidden window, no idea about restoring a window from maximised state hence after-market ShiftIt installation.

But in Windows you could really do everything with the keyboard, tabbing between controls, pressing shift-tab to go back. Oddly they went overboard in Windows 7 (or Vista?) and made the headers of list views in Explorer tabbable-to, which greatly slowed down Windows-E, tab tab tab tab to get to the pane on the right. F4 for the address bar, F2 to rename etc. etc. all good fun

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#239

Post by 72deluxe »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #169
mangecoeur wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> clean and neat Really? You miss that special "concrete gray and primary blue" feel? I think I used every MS operating system starting with DOS, and I miss exactly none of the "historic" interfaces. To the extent I get annoyed when institutional IT departments force you to use the "classic" theme on modern windows boxes ("It's faster!" - no, it isn't to any human perceptible degree, and I appreciate not having to st…

> interface design has moved foward in huge strides in the last decades, learning from mistakes Windows's UI has changed little in two decades, and some of the changes have actually made things worse. Windows 95 was the first and the last Windows version where Microsoft poured millions into making a super-accessible, usable and intuitive user interface based on actual user studies , and it showed. Windows 98 brought…

And in Windows 10 there is still different tab styles, even on the same page (go to Explorer's options/preferences dialog and note how the first tab is themed and the second tab page IS NOT themed).

MMC has different icons to Windows Explorer. Different parts of the tree view in Windows Explorer have different icons for other parts of it.

Nothing matches. It's a mess.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#240

Post by weland »

apricot wrote: post #161
weland wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This makes me feel old. I look at those desktops (particularly the Windows 95 one) and think they look clean and neat, with few distractions. They also look like someone tried to come up with their own ideas. Everything today is flat, sketchy, inexpressive and boring. > How I miss Netscape, the feeling of discovering something new in computers that made you go "wow" (IE4 and DHTML), or the feeling of "this is reall…

> the joy of getting X to run I think you mean "the joy of having X finally running". The actual "getting it to run" part was pretty much the polar opposite of joy.

Yeah, "the joy of getting X to run" part didn't really resonate with me, either :-)
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