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Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

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Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#91

Post by PhasmaFelis »

russellbeattie wrote: post #26

It's hard to remember, but even though Windows 3.11 was extremely dominant at the time, it was by no means assured that Windows 95 would be the success that it was. The very first version missed wildly in some big ways (MSN was a folder integrated into the desktop, for example, and no TCP/IP support [*Edit: yes there was - I misremembered.]), but the core, underlying redesign of the GUI was so profoundly good it prop…

> The very first version missed wildly in some big ways (MSN was a folder integrated into the desktop, for example

That would not have been my first pick for an example of Win95's failures. Perhaps the daily system crashes.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#92

Post by always_good »

chrisper wrote: post #79
williamdclt wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use several windows at a time (around 5 in average), but they are all maximized. I just alt-tab and switch workspaces?

But when it is full screen then you can't alt tab, right? You would have to use the shortcut to switch workspaces. Maybe I just remember wrong.

They're talking about a window sized to the maximum space as if you click and dragged its edges out as far as they can go or just used a tool like Divvy.

You're talking about the "fullscreen" feature which I always found very weird. For example, ever forget your video was "fullscreen"ed as you try to alt-tab to it only to realize it's a 4-finger swipe to pull it back up. Making the user have to differentiate will always be bizarre to me.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#93

Post by PhasmaFelis »

michaelmrose wrote: post #6
wiradikusuma wrote: post #4

"not understanding how folders could exist inside of other folders" -- My mom is 70 years old now, and I easily get frustrated whenever she's stuck with seemingly simple tasks with her computer. I usually scold her and yell at her, "This is so obvious, how come you don't know?" -- I always regret doing that afterwards. After I'm calm, I ask her why, trying to understand it from her perspective. Every time I do this,…

How do you manage files in windows at all without drag and drop? Do you just never reorganize anything? Further what is the chance that anyone who can't drag and drop would be able to find the setting to turn off drag and drop?

> How do you manage files in windows at all without drag and drop? Do you just never reorganize anything?

Ctrl-X, Ctrl-V.

Are you a Mac user? Apple disabled Cut in Finder ages ago, basically for aesthetic reasons. It's a constant irritation with my Mac that I have to manually change the folder view just to move a file up one level; on Windows you can do it in less than a second with Ctrl-X, Backspace, Ctrl-V.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#94

Post by herbst »

NoGravitas wrote: post #77
herbst wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally i love it but it took me way more than 10 minutes to realize why :) IMO it is highly underestimated, mostly because you need to change your workflow which takes time, but when you did it feels super productive. You wouldnt judge i3 or other completely different approaches after only a few minutes.

I feel absolutely the same about Gnome 3. One of the biggest things, I think, is that it puts workspaces absolutely in your face, so using them is a much more natural part of the workflow than in Gnome 2. It's also more keyboard-friendly than Gnome 2 (though it still could use some work in this area). Despite being rather large (gnome-shell on Wayland is typically the second-biggest RAM user on my laptop), it feels m…

> it feels minimalistic, and is almost always fast, and stays out of the way of whatever I'm working on.

absolutely :)

What i like the most is you are just a super key tab away from basically everything so focus on a single thing feels natural and right. There is no way to lose anything either, its all there. Always.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#95

Post by chrisper »

always_good wrote: post #92
chrisper wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But when it is full screen then you can't alt tab, right? You would have to use the shortcut to switch workspaces. Maybe I just remember wrong.

They're talking about a window sized to the maximum space as if you click and dragged its edges out as far as they can go or just used a tool like Divvy. You're talking about the "fullscreen" feature which I always found very weird. For example, ever forget your video was "fullscreen"ed as you try to alt-tab to it only to realize it's a 4-finger swipe to pull it back up. Making the user have to differentiate will alw…

Ah thanks. Then my iOS analogy didn't work.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#96

Post by jakecopp »

sodapopcan wrote: post #90
russellbeattie wrote: post #26

It's hard to remember, but even though Windows 3.11 was extremely dominant at the time, it was by no means assured that Windows 95 would be the success that it was. The very first version missed wildly in some big ways (MSN was a folder integrated into the desktop, for example, and no TCP/IP support [*Edit: yes there was - I misremembered.]), but the core, underlying redesign of the GUI was so profoundly good it prop…

The one thing I don't understand that Mac has never adopted is being able to use open and save dialogues as mini file explorers (move stuff around and rename, specifically). Having to switch to Finder to move or rename a file that has the same name as the file I'm trying to save is ridiculous. Of course I never need to do this anymore since I only work on text files under revision control, but it still seems odd to m…

I believe this has been possible for some time on macOS.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#97

Post by ivanhoe »

netsharc wrote: post #14
wiradikusuma wrote: post #4

"not understanding how folders could exist inside of other folders" -- My mom is 70 years old now, and I easily get frustrated whenever she's stuck with seemingly simple tasks with her computer. I usually scold her and yell at her, "This is so obvious, how come you don't know?" -- I always regret doing that afterwards. After I'm calm, I ask her why, trying to understand it from her perspective. Every time I do this,…

The term "folder" already annoys me. It's a (filesystem) directory...

And indeed I remember that as one of the more confusing things when I've got my first win95 PC as a kid. I used amiga and some DOS before, and I knew what a directory was, but now all of the sudden there's something called a folder that seem sort of similar?! To add to the confusion the computer manuals that were written in my mother tongue used in parallel both word 'folder' and the literal translation of it. Took me a while to understand that it all means the same thing.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#98

Post by DougWebb »

chkuendig wrote: post #10
michaelmrose wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you manage files in windows at all without drag and drop? Do you just never reorganize anything? Further what is the chance that anyone who can't drag and drop would be able to find the setting to turn off drag and drop?

Cut & Paste for when you really need to reorganize? But usually it would probably be enough to just list the most recent files somewhere and provide full text search for everything else.

There's something different about cut & paste vs drag & drop, though it won't impact most people.

If you're using RDP and copying files from the host computer to the remote computer, it's natural to cut/copy the file on the host and paste it on the remote. Drag/Drop isn't as natural because you have to mess around with the RDP window size and scroll position to be able to see Explorer on both machines.

The file copy occurs very slowly, and requires a lot of memory. Copy/Paste uses the clipboard, so the entire file gets read into memory before it can be written to the remote filesystem. It goes slowly because there is apparently an un-optimized loop copying bytes.

Instead, on the remote system you should open two Explorer windows, one for the destination and one for your local filesystem, which RDP adds for you. Then you can drag & drop the file you want to copy. This skips the clipboard and also seems to use a much better optimized byte-copying loop. The speed difference is very noticeable.

Pro-tip: if you're copying lots of files, zip them first and copy the zipped file. That can reduce a multi-hour copy operation into a couple of minutes, even if the compression ratio is awful. Windows is really, really bad at multi-file copy operations.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#99

Post by Angostura »

vadimberman wrote: post #36
russellbeattie wrote: post #26

It's hard to remember, but even though Windows 3.11 was extremely dominant at the time, it was by no means assured that Windows 95 would be the success that it was. The very first version missed wildly in some big ways (MSN was a folder integrated into the desktop, for example, and no TCP/IP support [*Edit: yes there was - I misremembered.]), but the core, underlying redesign of the GUI was so profoundly good it prop…

> I still get frustrated on OSX when I minimize a window and have to hunt around for it Windows user here. Honest curiosity: does anyone know why the minimize / maximize works on the Mac the way it does? I mean, what's the rationale to design it like this?

The old maximise system was simply designed to make the window as large as it needed to be to optimally fit content.

It wasn't designed to 'make this window fit the screen'. It was designed to 'make this window fit this A4 document.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#100

Post by ivanhoe »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #93
michaelmrose wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you manage files in windows at all without drag and drop? Do you just never reorganize anything? Further what is the chance that anyone who can't drag and drop would be able to find the setting to turn off drag and drop?

> How do you manage files in windows at all without drag and drop? Do you just never reorganize anything? Ctrl-X, Ctrl-V. Are you a Mac user? Apple disabled Cut in Finder ages ago, basically for aesthetic reasons. It's a constant irritation with my Mac that I have to manually change the folder view just to move a file up one level; on Windows you can do it in less than a second with Ctrl-X, Backspace, Ctrl-V.

There are Finder extensions like XtraFinder that add cut&paste to it (and a lot of other goodies)
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