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Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

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Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#361

Post by dredmorbius »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #329
dredmorbius wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was GNOME 3's metaphor? (I've been so GNOME-averse I appear to have entirely missed that.)

It's difficult to explain succinctly. I will say that it's unique , insofar as it's not trying to copy past paradigms or macOS. But it can be a bit confusing. Minimize/Maximize buttons, for instance, aren't even included by default. Honestly, this is probably the best I can provide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB7pBRi9Bbk

Interesting, though that strikes me as maddeningly annoying as hell to actually use.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#362

Post by Ascetik »

austinjp wrote: post #352
ptx wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> immediately type the name of the program you want to run, instead of having to click the "Run" entry Why click anything at all if you're going to be typing anyway? Pressing Win + R has worked since the beginning, taking you directly to the "Run" dialog. > mousing over the wrong part of the menu and closing a sub-sub-folder The classic start menu (since Windows 98, or Windows 95 with IE 4) allows you to easily rearr…

> Why click anything at all if you're going to be typing anyway? Pressing Win + R has worked since the beginning, taking you directly to the "Run" dialog. Even fewer keystrokes, and less typing with Win 10: hit Win key, start typing Word (or settings, or mouse, or whatever), hit enter. The Start menu pops up, and is searched/filtered as you type. Compare this with the previous option (which still continues to work as…

I found that Windows 10 search is not quite as good as 8.1. I know the problem you're talking about, and it never seemed to happen to me on 8.1, only 10. They jacked the program search indexing somewhat in 10, it was perfect in 8.1.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#363

Post by ogdoad »

boomlinde wrote: post #49
ogdoad wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have we actually reached the point where we idolize something that was equally mainstream to bash when it came out? Remember "Winblows" &c? Suddenly, faced with hyper-spy mega-corps, the dumb simplicity of the evil-yet-cute Windows 95 is desirable. Like the lesser of two evils, or the evil you know. Any day now, a post will come up extolling the illumined joys of mainframe COBOL programming.

There was even a parody song about how much Windows 95 sucked, but the criticism seemed more popularly aimed at its resource requirements than the UI design.

The requirements were practically negligible for its era, and the leap it represented. I have installed and used it at length on 386 with 8MB on a 210MB disk. It wasn't pretty, but it wasn't pretty bad either. Perhaps (on appropriate hardware) it wasn't as solid as NT 4, but before XP (which is 2000 which is NT, even if simplifying it) there weren't many "polished enough" _and_ "affordable enough" windowing systems for the masses. Classic Mac OS was very polished but not very affordable, and it didn't even have pre-emptive multiprocessing. UNIX had either a high cost of entry if you're talking workstations (Suns and SGIs were polished but expensive) or man-hours to acclimatize (try running X11 in 1995, then compare to Windows 95).

Eh.

In any case, to bring it back. It was good enough. Nowadays, I often hope for a minimal Windows 10 that will be out of the way enough to approach Windows 95.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#364

Post by lloydde »

Retra wrote: post #357
lloydde wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Case-preserving,case-insensitive is good for less sophisticated users: prevents accidentally misplacing or duplicating files with capitalization; and simplifies through this constraint media listing and sorting — no worrying about jpg vs JPG. What are the use cases that bother you?

When a file refuses to rename because the OS thinks it is the same name. When you have multiple files that differ in case, but they overwrite each other because the OS thinks they are the same. Really, the only place case-insensitive filenames makes sense is when you are searching . It makes no sense for any other reason.

Files don't overwrite each other the operation is forced. All of the OSs I've used will prompt you before overwriting.

I also like when an IDE detects and provides a warning when I have two variables with the same letters better different capitalization.

Different case is often a bug.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#365

Post by lloydde »

M_Bakhtiari wrote: post #64
smoyer wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm predominately a Linux user and I switched away from Mac OSX specifically because of the underlying file system. I'll admit that it was annoying finding windows sometimes but the case-preserving, case-insensitive file system made no sense.

Why not just use it with a case-sensitive file system? Did it break some application you were relying on?

I wondered the same thing, but then acknowledged that adds a first step of formatting the disk / re-installing.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#366

Post by jjoonathan »

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…

From someone traveling in the opposite direction at the moment: the Windows folder selection dialog is the crustiest open/save relic of them all and "open files are locked even to administrators" is a UX catastrophe. Lesser pains: it hurts to have missing consistent "jump to enclosing folder" semantics everywhere (command-click on mac -- only get an equivalent context menu 30% of the time) and to not have the ability to snap open/save dialogs to a particular file or folder with drag and drop.

The door swings in both directions, in other words :)

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#367

Post by vurpo »

gsich wrote: post #306
blattimwind wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Windows' file open/save dialogues are so far ahead of everything else that the competition seems like unusable garbage to me. I'm glad KDE/Qt chose to emulate these very closely on Linux. Wouldn't want a desktop where my only choice is Gnome's take at this. (On the flip side, Windows' select-a-directory dialogue of the same vintage is such an utter piece of garbage that I can't imagine there being any ove…

Absolutely true. I use a MATE desktop too, I can't even rename files in the save dialog. And I don't want to look it up either because it is so inconsistent all the time... I would extend your argument to Windows Explorer in general.

Gnome's save dialog allows you to rename or delete files. Maybe MATE should take some inspiration from the newer version of their desktop environment...

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#368

Post by wruza »

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…

Windows Explorer, on the other hand, still has no “expand folder” functionality on the right pane. I have to go back and forth to sort garbage trees, opening multiple windows or temporary pinning all folders into favorites. Given that their names may intersect, problem gets worse. In Finder you just expand interesting folders and DnD until it’s done.

What really is a joke is a left pane that combines favorites, libraries (die, die, DIE) and disk trees. It was never usable, except for favorites.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#369

Post by adrianratnapala »

jjoonathan wrote: post #366
sodapopcan wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

From someone traveling in the opposite direction at the moment: the Windows folder selection dialog is the crustiest open/save relic of them all and "open files are locked even to administrators" is a UX catastrophe. Lesser pains: it hurts to have missing consistent "jump to enclosing folder" semantics everywhere (command-click on mac -- only get an equivalent context menu 30% of the time) and to not have the ability…

> "open files are locked even to administrators" is a UX catastrophe.

This can't be blamed on UX people. It's an ancient difference between Unix and VMS and not easy to fix.

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