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Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

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Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#251

Post by mmphosis »

nine_k wrote: post #216
_jal wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Different ways of working, mostly stuck in our own ways of doing things.

I use xfwm4, and turn all of the window snapping off -- unlike Mac and Windows we can customize. ;)

You will pry the Command-key from my cold dead hands:

  /usr/bin/setxkbmap -option ctrl:swap_lalt_lctl
For now, the one pixel resize box is remedied with Ctrl+right mouse button to resize.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#252

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

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…

A trick is that if you hold option while resizing, it resizes the opposite edge at the same time.

Also, if you hit the up arrow in the command-tab switcher, you can use the arrow keys to select a minimized window and hit enter to restore it.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#253

Post by tomca32 »

ashleyn wrote: post #238
ndespres wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to get frustrated explaining what I thought were simple computer tasks to my mother, but as I've gotten slightly older I am getting just as stuck as she was with some basic computer tasks! I totally get it now. She also reminds me that she used to work at Digital (DEC), on the cutting edge of tech, in the 80's, but left her job to raise me- so I'm the reason she's so far behind, technically!

There's a world of a difference between VAX and today's modern operating systems. Twenty years in the future, I predict user interaction will largely be predicated on artificial intelligence. I can certainly see an older version of myself, frustrated at trying to figure out what sentences will trick the machine into doing what I want it to do rather than simply speaking to it.

We are pretty close to that already, in some areas. Google Search is a good example; autocorrect on the Android keyboard is another.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#254

Post by jaclaz »

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…

>Classic Mac OS (System 7 was contemporary to Windows 95)...

System 7 was WAY earlier than Windows 95, it was 1991, a little more than 4 years earler (like an eternity):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7

"It was introduced on May 13, 1991 ..."

And even 7.1 was almost exactly 3 years earlier: System 7.1

"In August 1992, the 7.1 update was released."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95

"It was released on August 24, 1995"

Not even Windows 3.1 had been released at the time System 7 came out, it's competitor on MS side was DOS (version 5.00):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_DOS_operating_syst...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1x

or some of the various semi-graphical third party shells for DOS.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#255

Post by NegativeLatency »

sysbell wrote: post #178
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…

> The window system itself was better-thought-out and less-confusing than Windows's was I miss window shades so much.

There used to be some good haxies that would let you do this on OSX, not sure what their current state of support/brokenness is.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#256

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

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.

You can disable this behavior in

System Preferences > Mission Control > Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#257

Post by NegativeLatency »

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…

Coming from the other direction, it kills me when I'm using windows and have a save dialog open, then drag the file I want to open into it from the explorer. On windows it moves the file to a possibly new location, while on OSX the save dialog selects the file you dropped on it (without moving it).

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#258

Post by richard_todd »

It was great to read about the early iterations that didn't pan out, and it reminds me of how far the average person has come in terms of computer knowledge (even though I know several people that _still_ have trouble double-clicking).

I would love to see a similar Windows 8 document, because I have no idea how they convinced themselves that non-tablet users would like it. Things like charms and even the freaking start button were hard to discover.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#260

Post by stevenwoo »

scandox wrote: post #5

24 People. If you'd asked me to guess I would have said 240.

From my reading, twelve designers and twelve programmers without a lot of overlap, and a significant investment in iterative useability studies. Interestingly they dropped the design documentation as too much trouble to update versus letting the design live in the latest implementation.
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