Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

socket3.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 402 posts

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#181

Post by rocky1138 »

cesarb wrote: post #58
thanatropism wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 3.1 had window minimization. Confusingly, programs became icons in your "desktop" (which you could only see when minimizing everything).

Even better, on Windows 3.1 a minimized program could draw to its "icon" (it's actually a tiny window). For instance, a minimized clock could still show the current time. That was one of the things lost with the Windows 95 UI changes. And don't forget MDI, best shown by the Windows 3.1 Program Manager: a MDI program would have several inner windows within it, and each of these inner windows could be resized, moved, m…

I know it's not popular, but I actually like MDI apps.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#182

Post by krylon »

cesarb wrote: post #103
krylon wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remember "Winblows" &c? There were many, many things wrong with Windows 95 (and its successors). But the design of the Shell was solid. (Also, considering how hardware requirements have skyrocketed, it might seem remarkable to some that it could run on a computer with 8 MiB of RAM and a CPU that makes today's low-end mobile phones look like supercomputers and still feel snappy.) I know people used to joke about usi…

> I know people used to joke about using the "Start" button to shutdown the computer, but I never understood what is so funny about that. If you think of shutdown as a "stop" command to the computer, you see the contradiction: to stop your computer, press start.

I get that, I just never thought it was very funny. Start might not have been the best name for that button, but the idea of having a single a menu to access all OS functionality and applications was good. Still is good, in fact, which why so many people got upset when they removed it in Windows 8.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#183

Post by nine_k »

_jal wrote: post #131
mmphosis wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The amount of tedious manual work required to resize and arrange several windows on MacOS (6+ to latest OSX) bothered me all the time I had a misfortune to have to use it. It does not even have something like edge snapping.

My WM of choice is now Xfwm, which allows to rearrange windows easily without gaps, make windows fill available space (vertical and horizontal separately), or tile them by dragging to corners.

On OSX, things like Spectacle and Magnet sort of help.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#184

Post by mikerg87 »

UweSchmidt wrote: post #161

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.

I keep hoping for a windows explorer with tabs with each release and each time I am dissapointed.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#185

Post by jgroszko »

usea wrote: post #76
cesarb wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you manage files in windows at all without drag and drop? Most people I've seen use Ctrl-X/Ctrl-V, or right-click-Cut/right-click-Paste. It has the advantage that you don't need both the source and destination visible at the same time.

You can actually drag a file from one window to the other without having both showing (such as between two maximized windows). While dragging a file, you can still manipulate windows around using the keyboard, like with alt-tab. For example, you can begin dragging a file, then alt-tab to another window or tab or even open a new program or whatever using the keyboard, and then finally release the file into the destina…

You can also drag the file over the taskbar and whatever program you hover over will come to the foreground

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#186

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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…

> Windows' select-a-directory dialogue of the same vintage

It's not the same vintage. It's a carry over from Win 3.0.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#187

Post by mardukiz »

UweSchmidt wrote: post #161

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.

Aye, need to go win + e, win + left_arrow, win + e, win + right_arrow.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#188

Post by torstenvl »

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…

Windows (Word) workflow:

- Click the FILE tab

- Wait two full seconds while it replaces my screen with something else

- Click Save As

- Click Computer (because Microsoft wants you to do everything in the cloud)

- Click Browse

- Finally proceed to saving your document like you would be able to do immediately on any other system

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#189

Post by itomato »

I've often thought Windows 95 borrowed ideas from Nextstep.

Looking at this retrospective, I can see how it could be possible, especially if they started design in 1992. NeXT had been winning praise for their UI for years by that point, and Microsoft were consulting with Susan Kare (an Apple alum and NeXT employee).

If you compare Nextstep 3.3 and Windows 95 or NT, you can see startling similarities in title bar size and format (to the pixel), window borders, 'rectangularity', tabbed elements and more. "Great artists steal" and all that..

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#190

Post by epicide »

syrrim wrote: post #166
epicide wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have never seen either of those things happen. I even just tested the first one.

Perhaps it's a setting or was the behavior in an older version of macOS?

Post reply on HN