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Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

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Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#281

Post by dfox »

jandrese wrote: post #236
Momquist wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

Yet for the same compatibility reasons most people stuck with .jpg and .htm, at least in the Windows world. Even now it's very unusual to see a .jpeg extension on a filename. The metadata that Macs kept in the resource fork go way beyond file type and creator too. It included things like the file's Icon, creation/modification information (so it would survive a trip over the Internet!), loads of stuff for applications…

NTFS does not have resource fork in the MacOS sense nor extended attributes in the unix sense. Instead it allows for file to have multiple named contents that are accessible by same file IO API (in essence the file can behave like a simplified directory). There is no distinction between data and metadata stored this way. In the late 90s MS even intended to not use OLE compound storage fileformat (ie. what office 97/2000 formats are built on) on NTFS drives and instead write the objects into separate streams (reportedly it was not implemented because then windows would have to somehow transparently reconstruct the compound storage when you copy such file to non-NTFS drive or upload it to the internet). Today apart from malvare hidding only major usage multiple streams have are the "this file was downloaded from internet, are you sure you want to open it?" prompts which store the internet-ness of file in secondary stream.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#282

Post by jhasse »

digi_owl wrote: post #272
lou1306 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do have multiple workspaces on Windows 10... Though if you mean "automatically assign application X to workspace Y", which many Linux WMs are able to do, you're out of luck.

Sadly the workspaces are very much mouse oriented (want to switch between workspaces? Thats win+ctrl+number!). And there is no proper UI element for checking if you have anything open in a different workspace without opening the switcher.

You can switch with Ctrl+Win+Left/Right, too.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#283

Post by michrassena »

notriddle wrote: post #215
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.

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.

I have similar problems with the Finder. Right-click a file on the Desktop and you have the option to compress a file. Open the Finder to the desktop folder, that option isn't present -- it's grayed out on the Finder file menu as well.

I really like the fact that the Windows save dialog is basically Windows Explorer, and I really miss those features when an application uses the older file save API (which gives a more Windows 95 / 3.11 interface).

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#284

Post by burfog »

hota_mazi wrote: post #243
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 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 challengin…

From 1991, Linux had preemptive multitasking.

The Amiga was exotic hardware, like the BeBox. If you want to include those, you might as well include SGI and Sun hardware. Preemptive multitasking was common on non-PC hardware.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#285

Post by dredmorbius »

samstave wrote: post #242
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…

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…

What Apple have done with both first and second generations of the Macintosh -- System 1 and OSX -- is pick a basic GUI metaphor and stick with it for at least fifteen years.

The original Mac released in 1984 and was produced through 2000, sixteen years. OSX released in 2000 and is now in its eighteenth year. Whilst each system has seen some evolution over time, the general metaphores and interfaces have remained consistent.

Apple have realised and internalised a core concept of GUIs: change is bad. There is a far higher cost to changing interfaces than can be gained through efficiency, and the retraining and unlearning costs are exceedingly high relative to benefits.

This is a message apparently lost on Microsoft and most of the leading Linux desktops.

Mind: I write this as someone who whilst using a Mac presently doesn't much care for the interface. My preferred desktop remains WindowMaker (itself based on Aqua's predecessor, NextStep), which has a key advantage of having changed almost not at all in the 20+ years that I've been using it. It's also configurable in ways I find useful, and I schlep around a configuration directory to new systems as needed.

That and a terminal window.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#286

Post by dredmorbius »

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…

As of at least 10.13 (High Sierra), there does appear to be a very modest edge-resistance when placing windows next to each other.

Either that or I've gotten very much better at doing this.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#287

Post by dredmorbius »

epicide wrote: post #119
_mrmnmly wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Know what you're talking about. Since I've switched back to Linux I can't imagine working without workspaces - each one dedicated for specific task/app - and every time staying with specific order so e.g. 1 workspace: Browser, 2nd: Code editor, 3rd: Terminal, 4th: File explorers etc. I used to it so much that I automatically use shortcuts to access it immediately - switching between minimized windows using alt + tab…

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.

If I alt-tab between apps, or open a new window in an app from a particular space, I'm warped to wherever OSX very wrongly thinks I ought to be.

Motherfucking maddening as hell.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#288

Post by dredmorbius »

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…

What was GNOME 3's metaphor?

(I've been so GNOME-averse I appear to have entirely missed that.)

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#289

Post by MBCook »

kllrnohj wrote: post #265
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 wouldn't switch back because of the underlying crap that is the Windows [...] file system You lost me. HFS+ is arguably one of the worst file systems around (yes I know that Apple finally switched to APFS but that was fairly recent). I'm really curious what you actually liked about Mac's file system vs. Windows?

Agreed. NTFS is one of the few things I missed.

I’m still annoyed that APFS doesn’t have file level checksums.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#290

Post by IronWolve »

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…

And Win95b with opengl, proper win32 support, and a tcp-ip stack was much better compared to the addon for win31.

I remember when unified USB support came out in Win95 2.5, it was big damn news at the time.

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