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Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

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Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#221

Post by interfixus »

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)…

Nitpick: Xfce most definitly is not a variant of any Gnome. It's a lightweight (and in my personal opinion far superior) alternative to the heavyweights Gnome and KDE, which just happens to share the underlying Gtk toolkit with Gnome.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#222

Post by dahauns »

astrocat wrote: post #137
fredsted wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

>The problem with this approach is I definitely do not need someone else making the decision of what is "optimal" for me.

And that's the crux. The whole feature (in its original incarnation) rested on the false assumption that there's a singular "optimal" state at any given time.

The Apple Human Interface Guidelines have been a state-of-the-art reference for good UI for a long time, but the part about the zoom button always baffled me, as it directly contradicted several Core Principles laid out in Part I of the book.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#223

Post by romaniv »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #128

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 con…

Desktop paradigm isn't a Windows 95 thing. It's Xerox Alto thing.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#224

Post by bunderbunder »

pavlov wrote: post #213
notriddle wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The late '90s I remember had a mishmash of NT, NetWare, and some (or maybe several) variant(s) of Unix on the bits that lived in the room with all the air conditioners.

Windows 9x and maybe OS/2 were far and away the dominant OSes on actual workstations. Macs and even aging Amigas at some creative shops, some more Unix workstations at places where most people could recognize and identify the purpose of (if not actually use) a slide rule. But what I essentially never saw on any desktops was Windows NT. Lack of driver support and inability to run many business applications kept it out of that space.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#225

Post by makecheck »

sodapopcan wrote: post #90
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…

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…

While a fair point, it’s important that feature-rich OS components be designed correctly (including security) and this wasn’t the case with Windows.

How many exploits were just a matter of tricking an extra-fancy OS dialog into popping open something it’s not supposed to, escalating permissions alongside it?

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#226

Post by romaniv »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #219

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…

> At the time, it was a huge leap forward in desktop computing.

After seeing some old demos of Xerox Star, I'd question that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#227

Post by ghostcluster »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #219

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…

The Task Bar and Start Menu metaphors have held up well. At the time on the Mac, it was harder to see an overview of running Applications and windows at a glance.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#228

Post by pbhjpbhj »

saint_fiasco wrote: post #88
krapp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Apart from all UNIX tools using this terminology, it also more accurately reflects what it actually is - not a physical container for information, but a list of references to it - an association of names to addresses. Yes, but "directory" doesn't describe the way the UI appears to behave in a way that's more intuitive to the average non-technical end user than "folder." A "directory" could also describe a map or a p…

Check the comment four levels above. Apparently it is not at all intuitive that folders can be inside other folders.

I don't understand that, the folder was picked for the filing cabinet metaphor.

But in a filing cabinet system you have different cabinets, different drawers, different hanging files and various lower level arrangements - non-hanging folders (or drawer dividers), paper clips, staples.

Perhaps they never saw a filing cabinet? Or never put something in a box, then in another box?

When they put food in a cupboard do they empty it out of the current container first?

>

I've come across it, just assumed that no-one explained the metaphor to them.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#229

Post by notriddle »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #149
unicornporn wrote: post #40

I think it's beautiful. And, compared to Windows 10, Windows 95 was at least somewhat consistent design wise. After 12 years of macOS I recently got a Windows 10 machine. There's plenty of Windows 10 bling on top of the OS, but you don't have to dig deep before you encounter the embarrassing remnants from very early versions of Windows. Running the latest version of 10 it still feels very unfinished which I hope Micr…

There are things from earlier Windows I wish they'd kept. Like the perfectly functional (actually more functional than their replacements) settings panels. But I think the biggest thing I miss is the start menu being just a view of a folder hierarchy. The Windows 10 Start Menu is tied into the appstore and uses some kind of database that can easily get corrupted and cause it to stop working seemingly randomly. Someti…

Except for three, humongous improvements that the Windows 10 start menu has over 95:

* It is flush bottom right with the screen, making it a true "mile button". In 95, there was a tiny non-clickable border around it, so if you just slammed your mouse into the corner, it would not work; someone who worked on Mac OS described MSFT as "narrowly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory" compared to the mac's menu bar, which was perfectly flush to the top of the screen and thus a "mile high bar". I think this was actually done with XP?

* After clicking it, you can immediately type the name of the program you want to run, instead of having to click the "Run" entry. I switched off of Gnome onto Windows after learning that this aspect of my workflow wouldn't need to change. I think this was actually done with Vista?

* Subfolders are opened by clicking instead of hovering. Nothing makes me more frustrated than accidentally mousing over the wrong part of the menu and closing a sub-sub-folder. [hyperbole]Whoever invented mouse-over menus should be shot.[/hyperbole]

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#230

Post by pbhjpbhj »

pjmlp wrote: post #41
netsharc wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term "folder" already annoys me. It's a (filesystem) directory...

The term folder was already common in other systems, before being adopted on Windows 95. Directory is a UNIX thing. On AS/400 (now IBM i) there are no directories or folders, rather catalogs. Similarly other systems also had other denominations for group of files.

Directory was a DOS thing too, if you used cmd in Win95 you'd use dir.
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