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Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

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Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#241

Post by fredsted »

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.…

I get it, it's your computer, etc., etc.

The reason this is done is of course that most applications don't have content that fill the entire screen, so maximizing, in most cases, is meaningless - and hinders the usability of the system.

It makes more sense to leave some space over for other apps than have a big empty area on both sides of the screen.

Interestingly, I noticed that it's only Windows-switchers who complain about this. People who've used Mac for a long time don't give this any thought.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#242

Post by samstave »

pavlov wrote: post #168
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…

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…

The funny thing I have always thought about mac vs win is that mac was so set on doing it “their way(think different)” that they ignored UX that really was intuitive and “just worked”

Mac was so set on being different, that they aschewed UX tropes that were natural.. and had to spend ridiculous amounts of resources trying to convince people that their way was the right way, but clearly it was not.

This, IMO, is where the “fanboi” concept evolved.

Brainwashing.

Who cares - in the long term - where the UX and UI elements came from, the point is to make machines immediately accessible to humans creative desires, not to mold workflows to a corporate ego...

So, Apple figured out how to develop products that were managed through the extension of the desire of the user, but they are still struggling with the requirement from Jobs to be “different” - and Ives’ perception of a common user is skewed toward “Ives’ has stated that this is how it should be done” type design, which I find completely ironic given the whole “think different, so long as it’s exactly how I am designing you to think” campaign is a hypocracy that goes up to an 11

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#243

Post by hota_mazi »

eadmund wrote: post #152
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…

> 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 think that the Mac back then was head-and-shoulders a better system than Windows.

I completely disagree.

First of all, Windows 95 had preemptive multitasking (the Amiga was the only computer that had this at the time), Mac OS was single task and used a terrible scheduling and it would be years before Mac OS gained preemptive multitasking because of terrible architecture choices that made this extremely challenging.

From a GUI standpoint, Windows 95 was a total revolution and made Mac OS look completely antiquated: rendering, scrolling speed, font types, menu items and dialogs, etc...

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#244

Post by samstave »

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.

I’m trying to suss up some old memories...

But NT was the first winOS which supported multi-proc, correct?

NT4 was the first OS I could have my dual 266 intel procs run softimage IIRC

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#245

Post by k__ »

mwaitjmp wrote: post #214
k__ wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Always have this issue with Xcode.

Somehow it is able to open up the device manager and THEN give the window in the background focus when I switch to my editor and back to Xcode with cmd+tab.

So I have to move the Xcode window down, to grab that backgrund thing what seems to be part of Xcode.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#246

Post by joeframbach »

mwaitjmp wrote: post #214
k__ wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Here's my workflow for this situation.

Four fingers up, expose. Drag the windows you need up top into a new desktop. Command (or control? Or option? Or a combination?) Plus the right arrow to switch desktops. Try all the combinations until I get to the right desktop or throw the damn thing out a window.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#247

Post by pavlov »

bunderbunder wrote: post #224
pavlov wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actual…

I suppose it depends a lot on geography and business. I remember Windows NT/2000 rapidly displacing Macs in the creative fields, and being widely used as developer workstations.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#248

Post by saratogacx »

morsch wrote: post #75
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?

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…

MacOS System 7 did have a function like minimize for Apps (not individual windows). In the finder menu on the upper right, you could "hide" or "show" a program and use the same menu to switch apps, similar to the task bar in Win95.

You can play around with it on archive.org. https://archive.org/details/mac_MacOS_7.0.1_compilation

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#249

Post by Osiris »

nine_k wrote: post #183
_jal wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Here are two window managers for macOS I use:

Tiling window manager: https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

Programmable window manager: https://github.com/kasper/phoenix

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#250

Post by Momquist »

petercooper wrote: post #104
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…

it was by no means assured that Windows 95 would be the success that it was I remember these times well. It was considered a huge break. People were whining about how stupid the Start menu was compared to just seeing your apps in front of you all the time :-D I love that we eventually came full circle to a Windows 3.1 Program Manager-esque approach with iOS nowadays!

Note that progman.exe was still shipped with the OS (it disappeared for good with Vista), and you could even set it as the default shell at boot.

I don't remember anyone using this setup ever though. Maybe this was too obscure and technical for the users complaining.

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