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Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

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Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#211

Post by Momquist »

jandrese wrote: post #198
eadmund wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Windows 95 was no paragon of stability when you started loading it up with tray apps and running big nasty applications or trying to use the damn printer with its piece of shit driver. We are spoiled these days by how stable our computers are. I agree with you that keeping the file metadata in a separate fork is far superior to keeping the file metadata in a three character extension, but sadly the world zagged on th…

> I agree with you that keeping the file metadata in a separate fork is far superior to keeping the file metadata in a three character extension

Since we're talking about Win95, then the 3 characters limit doesn't apply (long filenames was a major new feature of this OS after all). .jpeg and .html were relatively common for example at the time, and worked fine.

I find the extension system still kludgy, but arguing than it was worse in part because of the limited pool, is incorrect starting from Win95.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#212

Post by richardboegli »

torstenvl wrote: post #188
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…

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

Press F12 for Save As in Word and Excel.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#213

Post by pavlov »

notriddle wrote: post #210
pavlov wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We were talking about 95, which is a completely different universe from NT (though current versions of NT have a GUI that's based on 95).

Windows NT 4.0 had the same GUI as Windows 95 and was released in 1996. That's the version of Windows that sealed the deal for professional applications.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#214

Post by mwaitjmp »

k__ wrote: post #42
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?

I have no idea... I'm came from ~18 of Windows & Linux usage and everyone always told me macOS is THE OS with the best usability. But I can't confirm this. Minimization of windows is shitty and maximization even more. When I maximize, often just the height is changed, when I go back to "normal" the height and the width is changed, so I always have to adjust the width manually. When I minimize a few windows, it's impo…

What's strange on a mac is somehow having the ability to completely lose windows.

Another frustration is trying to view two apps together on the screen at the same time, if one of the apps itself contains multiple windows. I'm not at my desk to try this but let's say you have multiple chrome windows open, all with their own tabs, and you want to view your current chrome window overlayed on a window from another app. To do this you have to manually minimise all of your chrome windows one by one so they will all move of the way, to allow you to switch between apps and view them both at the same time.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#215

Post by notriddle »

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.

In Windows's save dialog, right-clicking on a file gives me the same list it does in Explorer. In Mac's save dialog, right-clicking on a file does nothing.

It's not like the Mac way saves screen real estate or anything. It's like the way Firefox lets me close a tab by middle-clicking on it. Most users don't know it's possible, but it doesn't actively harm them to have the feature there.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#216

Post by nine_k »

_jal wrote: post #205
nine_k wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The lack of window and edge snapping are exactly the reason I prefer MacOS behavior. If it did that, partly revealing lower windows would be far more tedious/impossible. For me, the goal is not to maximize available space to the frontmost windows; it is to maximize the use of the monitor to display what's currently relevant. It allows me to do things like keep a Finder window open with just a bit peeking through to d…

Edge snapping does not prevent the behavior you describe; sometimes it even makes it easier to do. You can still rearrange and resize the windows manually as you wish. But when you want two edges to fit snugly, it's easy to do.

Also, you can maximize a window for a moment, look at it, and then unmaximize it back to its previous size.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#217

Post by krylon »

kobrad wrote: post #28
krylon wrote: post #9

The fact that the basic elements of Windows 95's GUI have survived for so long shows, I think, how well designed it was. For its time it was a great design that was intuitive to understand, relatively lightweight and did not get in my way. About the only changes I think improved things notably were the search field in the Start menu and Aero Snap.

Search got the google bug, so that it will change the results in the xx milliseconds while you are pressing enter or clicking. This is the new boundary for all interfaces, and I know it's just being stupid - sometimes it really makes me angry. But snap works just fine, yeah

> Search got the google bug, so that it will change the results in the xx milliseconds while you are pressing enter or clicking.

I only use Windows at work, and my work computer is sufficiently slow that I have not had a problem with that. Maybe it is the version, too, my work laptop runs Windows 7 - and will hopefully continue to do so until Microsoft stops supporting it; as far as Windows goes, Microsoft really nailed it with Windows 7. (I have to admit, though, I have only very little experience with Windows 10; I really disliked Windows 8/8.1 and the corresponding server versions because Microsoft butchered the UI.)

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#218

Post by jpindar »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #134
sigzero wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It beats using "your mother" or "your grandmother" as the term for a stupid person.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#219

Post by jaredcwhite »

Windows 95 and its immediate successors had a lot of problems regarding stability, memory usage, performance in certain cases, etc. That and the comparison with the NT OS line is a separate discussion however. What is important about Windows 95 was the design of the GUI. At the time, it was a huge leap forward in desktop computing.

Even though I jumped on the Mac OS X bandwagon from the very first moment in 2001 and was happy to leave the Windows world behind, the fact remains that for a few years time in the mid 90s, Microsoft showed a strong ability to design GUIs that were easy to use, relatively consistent, and flexible enough to suit a large array of first and third-party application designs. It's a shame that, IMHO, Windows XP took things in a highly negative direction after that, and Microsoft never fully recovered. With the possible exception of Windows 7, every OS release since XP has been a mishmash of competing ideas and confusing discrepancies, and macOS has continually outpaced Windows in usability.

I still hold out hope that there's a solid future for Windows when it comes to UX/UI design, if only because I want macOS to have real competition on that front.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#220

Post by beamatronic »

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 am glad you mentioned right click. I remember being really pleased with the orthogonality aspect of being able to right click any object.
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