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Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

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Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#121

Post by rahoulb »

williamdclt wrote: post #67
chrisper wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sure you are not confusing it with iOS? That's where you always have strictly only one app in fullscreen! (Yes, yes. It is a lame joke. But who uses only one Window at a time? What is the point of that? Though I remember when I used OS X you could swipe left (or right) to switch back to all other apps. So I think that was good enough.)

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

That's a very un-Classic-Mac-like way of using windows.

In the olden days, Mac users would tend to have lots of overlapping windows. Dragging anywhere on the window edges would move the window, so it was easy to arrange them as you wanted - almost like shuffling bits of paper on your desktop (strangely enough) and if you wanted to move something out of the way, you could fold it up (window shade). There was no need for maximising or minimising and "zooming" just meant "make this as large as makes sense for this particular document", not "expand to take up all the space on my desktop"

As OSX/macOS has developed, all that document/desktop-style behaviour has been lost.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#122

Post by epicide »

hunvreus wrote: post #86
vadimberman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It drove me nuts when they updated the maximize button behavior to full screen. I use ShiftIt, a neat little Open Source tool that help me manage windows sizes and positions (including minimizing and maximizing): https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt I've recommend it to pretty much any Mac user I've met.

Haven't used ShiftIt, but I've been using Spectacle to accomplish the same thing. They seem pretty similar, overall. Works pretty well and I've had no issues.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#123

Post by epicide »

ndespres wrote: post #112
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,…

I used to get frustrated explaining what I thought were simple computer tasks to my mother, but as I've gotten slightly older I am getting just as stuck as she was with some basic computer tasks! I totally get it now. She also reminds me that she used to work at Digital (DEC), on the cutting edge of tech, in the 80's, but left her job to raise me- so I'm the reason she's so far behind, technically!

I like that "she's so far behind technically" can be interpreted two ways here.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#125

Post by fredsted »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #68
frou_dh wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

macOS has Hide & HideOthers in addition to Minimize. I go weeks at a time without using minimize because of those. IMO there's a whole generation of people who did their early computing on MS Windows (including myself) and so internalised that that is how GUIs are "supposed to work". When moving to something else later in life there's a feeling that it is "wrong", but it (e.g macOS)'s way of doing things is also corr…

And this hidden setting makes working with Hide/Hide Others much more intuitive: http://osxdaily.com/2010/06/22/make-hidden-application-icons...

Doesn't seem to work on High Sierra.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#126

Post by fredsted »

Angostura wrote: post #101
hunvreus wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It drove me nuts when they updated the maximize button behavior to full screen. I use ShiftIt, a neat little Open Source tool that help me manage windows sizes and positions (including minimizing and maximizing): https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt I've recommend it to pretty much any Mac user I've met.

Alternatively, use opt-click to just invoke the old-style maximise. No add-on needed.

Double-clicking on empty window chrome also works.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#127

Post by ebbv »

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…

> still get frustrated on OSX when I minimize a window and have to hunt around for it.

Learn to use the dock? The taskbar on Win 95 was evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and the Dock from NeXT was one of the influences. Which is the same dock was have today in macOS.

You can still have personal preference, of course. But if you have trouble using macOS to find minimized windows, that's because you haven't learned to use it not because it's not possible.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#128

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

It's impressive how long the "Desktop" paradigm of Windows 95 has stuck around, particularly if you're in the Linux Desktop world. Most of the popular desktop environments--Xfce, Mate, and Cinnamon come to mind--still follow that pattern. The last major one to go in a different direction was GNOME 3, and the backlash against it was so fierce that several other major DE's forked an earlier version in order to keep consistency.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#129

Post by jcadam »

Ah, remembering Win95 makes me yearn for a simple, clean GUI again. All of the major operating systems have been in a downward slide in terms of UI/UX since the early 2000s.

As far as UI/UX is concerned:

Windows peaked with Windows 2000.

MacOS with OS9 (Why didn't they just throw the classic GUI on top of Darwin)?

At least with *nix you have choices and can go with one of the several variants of Gnome 2 (Xfce, et al).

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#130

Post by sigzero »

blattimwind wrote: post #120
sodapopcan wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To be fair, Windows' file open/save dialogues are so far ahead of everything else that the competition seems like unusable garbage to me. I'm glad KDE/Qt chose to emulate these very closely on Linux. Wouldn't want a desktop where my only choice is Gnome's take at this. (On the flip side, Windows' select-a-directory dialogue of the same vintage is such an utter piece of garbage that I can't imagine there being any ove…

Because that is extremely non-intuitive. It's an "Open" and "Save" dialog. That is what it should do. Joe Public is not going to know it does anything else, yet it does.
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