Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking at this NeXTSTEP seems ridiculously ahead of its time.
I forgot how good Steve Jobs was at demoing.
Had he grown up anywhere else, with any other friends, he would have been one hell of a car salesman...
Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
341–350 of 402 posts
Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, you completely missed my point. The Windows dialogue is not only superior, because it allows power users to do what they need, but also because it's actually usable for regular users. For example: I literally can't know how I can save a file using Gnome's dialogue in the general case, e.g. if the dialogue opens at /foo, and I navigate to /foo/bar using the dialogue, but then go back to /foo ("bar wasn't the…
As a long-time Gnome user, I've only realized how bad it is after reading this comment ;) (No irony here, I agree it's truly horrible now.) But, I only realized it now because almost none of the apps I regularly use make use of Gnome's default file open/save dialog. Linux's extreme inconsistency has some benefits ;) Oh, and talking about Gnome, the only reason anyone uses it is that after configuring a few basic stuf…
And watch them take that as cudos...
Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 co…
Seem to me that Apple and MS focus on different kinds of change.
While Apple may retain the UI across time, they are more than willing to change APIs etc on a whim.
MS on the other hand may change the UI (though outside of 8.x, the core layout and behavior has remained much the same, and even 8.x could to a large degree behave like the older UI) but they bend over backwards to maintain APIs across time.
Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 co…
Microsoft hasn't been too different in that regard. In terms of interfaces with any real userbase to speak of, the only real Microsoft UI systems I can come up with could be characterized as * MS-DOS/Windows 3.1-like * Windows 95-like * Windows 8-like Windows 8 basically was born and died in a couple of years, to be replaced with Windows 10, which is very much the same basic set of metaphors as Windows 95. There's a…
And already with 8.1 the "start screen" could behave like a very large start menu.
Hell, you can today configure Windows 10 to behave much like 8.1. The one thing i see some people miss with the 8.1 to 10 transition is the charm bar. In particular that it gave easy access to printing and such.
Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cut & Paste for when you really need to reorganize? But usually it would probably be enough to just list the most recent files somewhere and provide full text search for everything else.
Cut & Paste is (was?) dangerous btw. Windows could lose your files: 1. Cut a file. 2. Paste it somewhere. 3. Hit control Z. 4. Cry because your file is gone. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows8_1... But it seems I cannot reproduce that in the current build of Windows anymore. So I think they finally fixed it.
Yup, I ran into this issue enough as a kid that I stopped using cut/paste/undo in explorer. If I needed to copy or move files around, I’d use the command line—which also had the effect of making files copy much faster (seconds instead of minutes) for some reason.
Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
#346Ah yes, the introduction of the start menu. A widget that even 20 years later, when Microsoft dared to change it even a bit, people absolutely lost their minds.
Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
#347To be fair to Windows 95 it was as much a copy of NeXT as it was of MacOS.
Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
#348Windows 95 (and later) always seemed to just miss the mark: they added new things but were just so close to having something that would work much better. It was as if they saw useful features to add from other systems but only copied what they could see without really understanding the behaviors that needed to be copied too.
Examples...
The original Start menu was in a corner of the screen but without the crucial zero pixels of separation from the physical corner, turning what could have been a massive target into a tiny one. (Fixed in XP though.)
Menus were sluggish as hell to open, and they lacked hysteresis to make diagonal traversal a lot easier. Also, there was no consideration for how to handle a task that might take awhile, such as locating the names and icons of dozens of items; the menu would not show anything, you’d just wait. Sadly they were experts at efficiently making menus go away so one accidental mouse movement and you start all over.
The ordering of frame buttons, “minimize, maximize, close”, on Windows does not clearly separate the most-dangerous action from the least-dangerous action, nor are the actions ordered by similarity. Instead, a very common action on Windows (“Maximize”) is right next to the most dangerous and polar opposite action (“Blow This Away Forever”), with zero pixels of separation. On the Mac, the order is “close, minimize, maximize”: if you mis-hit Minimize on a Mac while moving toward Close, the window will still go away (more or less what you wanted) instead of becoming gigantic and still visible (polar opposite). Also, on a Mac there is significant pixel space between the distinct options so it is harder to mis-click.
The ordering of dialog buttons, such as “OK, Cancel”, meant that it was not possible for memory to take over. In some dialogs “OK” was in the position that Cancel would be in, in others it wasn’t. Also, Windows tended to have very generic names (Yes, No, Cancel), probably because entire APIs for opening messages had only those options; this required reading every word of a long-winded message to understand the options, rather than just clicking something obvious like Save.
Windows 95+ tend to add hierarchy in lots of places that don’t benefit at all from hierarchy. I hate having to remember some obscure vendor’s name so I can find “Unnecessary Company Name, Inc. >> Unnecessary Product Suite Name >> App Name” in a menu for example, when “App Name” in a flat list is the only sensible option. (Fortunately, Search was a reasonable way to avoid this. Until it became slow and couldn’t actually find things that clearly exist.)
Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
maximized window ≠ full screen in Maximized state the window is set to maximal available size (so you are not wasting any part of the screen) while you are still provided with fast and easy access to relevant OS UI elements in full screen you explicitly tell the system that you don't want to be distracted by OS UI elemtents (typically in situation when you know that you won't need them for extended period of time, or…
I feel your pain. I was using BetterTouchTool to remap the default behavior of that green +, but eventually decided it was silly to use an add-on for something I should be able to change via `defaults`, so I just trained myself to hit Option when I wanted to maximize.
It's also possible to double click anywhere on the top bar of a window to "maximize."
Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
#350Earlier 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.
Actually, you completely missed my point. The Windows dialogue is not only superior, because it allows power users to do what they need, but also because it's actually usable for regular users. For example: I literally can't know how I can save a file using Gnome's dialogue in the general case, e.g. if the dialogue opens at /foo, and I navigate to /foo/bar using the dialogue, but then go back to /foo ("bar wasn't the…
> Clicking "Save" while a directory is selected will not save, but navigate instead.
That's one of the most absurd and glaring usability bugs I've ever heard.