I still miss the dual window "Explorer" from Win 3.1 every time I move or copy files. The old File Manager had this by default. Installing Midnight Commander etc. on client computers is not possible, so I have to open two Explorers and get them to a convenient size.
Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
161–170 of 402 posts
Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
#162Earlier 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…
It may be a new behavior (I'm not sure), but you can Alt+Tab to and from full screen apps in High Sierra.
Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> still internally consistent The most internally consistent design was that of NT 3.1 - it was a true classic in many respects. As far as general usefulness, performance, and versatility nothing can compare with Windows 10 (except Linux, of course).
I am not arguing about NT 3.1, but what inconsistencies were there in Win7 UI?
Starting with Win8 you have basically a random choice if some setting is set in "classic style" or new fancy "settings" dialogs. You can have all the performance in the world if your users spend most of the time just looking for the right place to do something.
Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
#164It'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'm predominately a Linux user and I switched away from Mac OSX specifically because of the underlying file system. I'll admit that it was annoying finding windows sometimes but the case-preserving, case-insensitive file system made no sense.
Case-preserving,case-insensitive is good for less sophisticated users: prevents accidentally misplacing or duplicating files with capitalization; and simplifies through this constraint media listing and sorting — no worrying about jpg vs JPG.
What are the use cases that bother you?
Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
#165Actually the original article by Kent (NOT Kevin) Sullivan is still available here: http://prior.sigchi.org/chi96/proceedings/desbrief/Sullivan/...
Thanks for finding this. Saved. I still have a soft spot for vanilla HTML. When I can hit view source and read the whole article (minus images) without much difficulty, I'm glad.
I know it's not exactly the same but the developer tools on all modern browsers will display the current state of the DOM in the "inspect" tab. It's true that SPAs will have a lot more clutter in the form of JavaScript hooks and hidden elements but it's all there in glorious . :)
Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Know what you're talking about. Since I've switched back to Linux I can't imagine working without workspaces - each one dedicated for specific task/app - and every time staying with specific order so e.g. 1 workspace: Browser, 2nd: Code editor, 3rd: Terminal, 4th: File explorers etc. I used to it so much that I automatically use shortcuts to access it immediately - switching between minimized windows using alt + tab…
You can accomplish (mostly) the same thing with Spaces on Mac. Granted, I don't believe you can really script any of it. All manual, but it still works pretty well for me. Some days I still really miss dwm, but having Photoshop, Ableton, and several other things Just Work™ makes it worth it.
The problem with spaces is that any time you cmd-tab between spaces, those spaces will be repositioned relative to each other to be adjacent. This also happens whenever a window opens a dialogue that forces you to switch to it. This means that you can't reliably keep spaces in a strict order.
Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Even though I've used a Mac daily for the past decade or so, I still miss the task bar, and window-oriented GUI of Windows. I still get frustrated on OSX when I minimize a window and have to hunt around for it. I wouldn't switch back because of the underlying crap that is the Windows OS and file system, but I still miss the interface. OT but have you tried Witch[1] as a task switcher? It switches between windows, wh…
I find Contexts ( https://contexts.co/ ) a better application to do exactly that
Looks neat, I'll take a look - thanks
Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
#168It'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…
> Compare it to other GUIs at the time, like CDE, IBM's Presentation Manager, or even Mac OS 8 and there's no comparison. Well, I agree that there was no comparison with System 8, but not in the sense you mean. I think that the Mac back then was head-and-shoulders a better system than Windows. It might still be, but they're both so painful to use now that it's very difficult to pick a winner. The Macintosh system was…
I was using Macs back in the late '90s, and none of the things you say ring true.
Extensions could easily bring down the entire system because there was no memory protection. Full OS crashes (what modern macOS calls kernel panics) were a daily occurrence for the typical Mac-using professional who ran complex software.
The window system was often difficult to understand because apps tended to use a plethora of little panel windows that could overlap even from different apps. Windows preferred large windows that contained the entire app UI, and users typically maximized them. The Windows 95 Task Bar was much better for actually keeping track of your tasks than whatever the MacOS 8 thing was.
File extensions were always a hack, but one that Apple adopted too for Mac OS X. The days of Mac's file-specific associations were numbered when the Internet happened, because Unix servers wouldn't keep track of that metadata, so you needed file extensions anyway.
Besides, the file-specific associations were often super annoying because they were created by the editor app even for exported files. You saved a JPEG file from Photoshop, and it forever insisted on launching the full Photoshop when you double-clicked on it, instead of your preferred lightweight image viewer. This would happen even when you copied the file to someone else because the association was in the file metadata.
Windows NT 4 and its next version Windows 2000 were just heads and shoulders above MacOS 8 and 9 in terms of performance, stability and usability.
(And programming in Mac OS 8... Ugh. No memory protection, no multitasking, APIs originally designed in Pascal.)
Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
#169Earlier 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?
Classic Mac OS (System 7 was contemporary to Windows 95) didn't really have any concept of minimisation or even maximization as such. There was no task bar or dock or anything else really to minimise to. IIRC there were addons for 7.1 that added "window shading": a button on the window title bar that reduces the window to just the title bar.[1] The closest thing to a maximise button in classic Mac OS was more like a…
> Having a single window fill the entire screen wasn't as common as it was on Windows.
Yup! For the longest time I liked to work with a half-width browser window to match my half-width editor & word processor windows. It drove me crazy the number of websites which set their body text to some fraction of the window width, which looked good with a fullscreen window but terrible with a halfscreen one.
Eventually I just gave up. The whole point of the web was device-independent information transfer, but somehow we allowed device-dependence to sneak it.
Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Know what you're talking about. Since I've switched back to Linux I can't imagine working without workspaces - each one dedicated for specific task/app - and every time staying with specific order so e.g. 1 workspace: Browser, 2nd: Code editor, 3rd: Terminal, 4th: File explorers etc. I used to it so much that I automatically use shortcuts to access it immediately - switching between minimized windows using alt + tab…
Windows 10 actually supports this feature, still can't get used to it though... win+tab -> switch between virtual desktops, or ctrl+win+left/right arrows. and if you have many windows open (in win 10 at least) you don't have to press alt+tab 10 times in a row to choose your desired program, you can hold alt+tab and use arrows.
Yep. Curiously, though, you cannot share running programs or windows across "desktops" in Windows, although you can share them across Spaces in macOS.