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Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

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Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#131

Post by _jal »

mmphosis wrote: post #117
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?

Different ways of working, mostly stuck in our own ways of doing things. I rarely, if ever, use Minimize on the Mac. Minimize comes from Windows (and other windowing systems) where the window minimizes to an icon or button on the task bar. "Maximize" also comes from Windows (and other windowing systems.) As others have noted, in newer macos (which I don't use,) I think it oddly makes the window go full screen. Full s…

All correct. In daily use, I almost never use those buttons - I end up manually sizing/placing windows.

The the MacOS scheme of doing this leads a sort of organic, emergent window layout - I always end up with windows staggered to display relevant bits. With Windows (and with most window managers, X), things always end up either strict tiled or stacked.

I'm very used to the Mac way and prefer it, but that could just be the result of long use. It doesn't waste space (Windows apps always seem to have lots of dead space to me and makes me work to be able to see parts of other windows) and forces me to switch windows far less. But it is a fiarly subtle thing.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#132

Post by kk_cz »

mmphosis wrote: post #117
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?

Different ways of working, mostly stuck in our own ways of doing things. I rarely, if ever, use Minimize on the Mac. Minimize comes from Windows (and other windowing systems) where the window minimizes to an icon or button on the task bar. "Maximize" also comes from Windows (and other windowing systems.) As others have noted, in newer macos (which I don't use,) I think it oddly makes the window go full screen. Full s…

maximized window ≠ full screen

in Maximized state the window is set to maximal available size (so you are not wasting any part of the screen) while you are still provided with fast and easy access to relevant OS UI elements

in full screen you explicitly tell the system that you don't want to be distracted by OS UI elemtents (typically in situation when you know that you won't need them for extended period of time, or if you REALLY need every single pixel of the screen)

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#133

Post by [deleted] »

rvanmil wrote: post #82
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…

You’re using macOS wrong ;) I remember Windows 95 as a complete disaster of crashes, data loss, failing installations, incompatible applications, missing drivers and countless other problems which were only fixed with the release of Windows 98 (maybe even SE), which was much much better. I have memories of people sticking with DOS and 3.x, only having 95 as a nondefault boot option in case they wanted to watch the Bu…

[deleted]

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#134

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

sigzero wrote: post #130
blattimwind wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Joe Public" is a strawman people who make crap software prop up as the reason their software has to be crap.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#135

Post by JustSomeNobody »

Klathmon wrote: post #71
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,…

>So, whenever I design UI/UX for an app, I ask my mom to test. I have an informal rule that I will try to get someone at my job that has never seen or used the application to be the one to test out new features or UI changes. Generally just asking when they have some time, handing them a phone or laptop, and asking them to do a task in the app (with a small amount of background about the task if needed). There has ne…

Because you can't "formalize" humbleness. In fact, a lot of the tech culture, today, is anti-humble.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#136

Post by kk_cz »

Angostura wrote: post #99
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?

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.

Thanks, this is the first answer to this question that sort of makes sense from a Windows user point of view. I mean I still prefer the "Windows way", but this is at least viable reasoning for the "Mac way".

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#137

Post by astrocat »

fredsted wrote: post #118
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?

Depending on how you've configured your Dock, Minimize is pretty simple. Either the window just moves to the Dock, or it minimizes into the application icon (then you can right-click on the Dock icon to view a list of the windows that are minimized, or click to open the last minimized window) Maximize on Mac was NOT designed for the window to fill the whole screen, but rather to resize the window to optimally display…

> Maximize on Mac was NOT designed for the window to fill the whole screen, but rather to resize the window to optimally display its contents.

The problem with this approach is I definitely do not need someone else making the decision of what is "optimal" for me. I've been using macOS for about as long as I used to use Windows now, and at this point, macOS seems to have largely abandoned the concept, which is great. Applications get either a full screen in their own isolated context, or option-click for a full-screen in a regular windowed context. The options now are a very windows-95/98 like: "either go completely full screen, or resize to whatever you like," which gives me full control of what I find optimal for any given application.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#138

Post by kk_cz »

jcadam wrote: post #129

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)…

Just curious: why Windows 2000 and not Windows 7?

Win7 was still internally consistent (as opposed to the newer tablet / mobile / pc / washing machine UIs of later versions) and provided few additional UI enhancements over 2k.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#139

Post by ubermonkey »

rahoulb wrote: post #115
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…

OSX Finder is horrible. Classic MacOS Finder was far better - but still had open/save dialogs. RiscOS had it right - the Open dialog didn't exist - you would open the folder and double-click the file. And the Save dialog didn't exist - the document would reduce to an icon which you would then place into the correct folder. (You can sort of do this on the various versions of macOS by dragging the icon from the title b…

What do you find horrible? I prefer it by a wide margin over Windows Explorer.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#140

Post by marrs »

sigzero wrote: post #130
blattimwind wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the excuse that's always used, but I rarely see it play out in practice. Many people don't notice advanced features that are present, that's true. But they don't notice them so it does matter. For the people who do, they can easily discover advanced features through exploring the interface.

Apple have a tradition of being really bad at this. Many of the (slightly more) advanced features are completely hidden behind undiscoverable key combinations or very hidden features. The slide-to-reveal pattern on iOS (now mostly fixed with augmentations) is a good example. Middle clicking the titlebar in Finder to reveal the directory parents is another.

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