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Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

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Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#381

Post by nsriv »

hungerstrike wrote: post #203
nsriv wrote: post #194

I really just wish Windows had a Miller Columns view in Explorer like OSX. All the apps on Windows that promise this are utter garbage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns

Sorry to wish against you but I hope Explorer never gets them, not even as an option, because I think they are a garbage idea for browsing files or anything else since they're too busy and constantly make you change your focus.

They're bad for browsing, I agree. I do a lot of file management and reorganization across network drives, and it would benefit me by immediately exposing one or two directory levels above a file location for drag and drop simplicity. Multiple windows or tiling tabs in Windows explorer could accomplish this as well, of course.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#382

Post by hota_mazi »

burfog wrote: post #284
hota_mazi wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well yes and Minix had preemptive multitasking a decade before.

We're talking about consumer facing computers, and at the time, the market was pretty much only Windows, Mac, OS/2, Amiga and Atari.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#383

Post by digi_owl »

dredmorbius wrote: post #359
digi_owl wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Very interesting point, and one that may play in subtle ways to each platform's audience and scale. Microsoft was always more vendor / ISV / VAR oriented, and stable APIs matter there.

I get the feel that stable APIs are undervalued as a user retention element.

Being able to get a new computer but install from the same software library (i can hear the _sec people getting hissy already) as was used on the old one makes people more likely to pick the same "platform" over time.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#385

Post by collinmanderson »

Amazing to see all of this design work happening starting in 1992.

I always thought of iterative design and development as becoming popular staring around 2001, and usability studies only becoming popular around that time too.

> the design documented in the spec was suddenly out of date. The team faced a major decision: spend weeks changing the spec to reflect the new ideas and lose valuable time for iterating or stop updating the spec and let the prototypes and code serve as a “living” spec.

> After some debate, the team decided to take the latter approach. While this change made it somewhat more difficult for outside groups to keep track of what we were doing, it allowed us to iterate at top speed. The change also had an unexpected effect: it brought the whole team closer together because much of the spec existed in conversations and on white boards in people’s offices. Many “hallway” conversations ensued and continued for the duration of the project.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#386

Post by digi_owl »

watersb wrote: post #376
ptx wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another good approach might be to do it the other way around: Get rid of the pseudo-file-manager dialogs entirely and let applications integrate with the regular file manager. I think RISC OS (?) did this. Open documents in applications had icons representing them which you could drag to the file manager to save. (And perhaps to other applications to open?) Mac OS also has (or had?) this to some extent – many documen…

Windows Explorer can be extended; the example I remember is browsing a folder of email message files, both the metadata attributes displayed in list view, and a functional content pane for viewing the message itself. Be OS did this, too; I got the impression that Windows was inspired by that, both for BeFS (NTFS) and the desktop filesystem UX.

NTFS was introduced a few years before BEOS.

More likely that they were both inspired by a common source.

Never mind that MS have been working on a fully database driven FS (WinFS?) for ages.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#387

Post by digi_owl »

dredmorbius wrote: post #380
deong wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm largely familiar with the DOS -> Win2K period, and have made little use of Microsoft operating systems since. Windows 3, 95, NT, and 2K each saw significant changes in where and how major system functionality was presented. During the same period I was using numerous Unix and Linux platforms (and still do). Those have largely seen far less substantive change at the shell and system level , with a few notable exce…

I fear though that command level compatibility is under attack these days, as fewer and fewer see shell scripting as something positive (never mind trying to do more and more via dbus rather than pipes and such).

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#388

Post by gurkendoktor »

fredsted wrote: post #125
gurkendoktor wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this hidden setting makes working with Hide/Hide Others much more intuitive: http://osxdaily.com/2010/06/22/make-hidden-application-icons...

Doesn't seem to work on High Sierra.

I'm on High Sierra and it works, maybe just needs a `killall Dock` to have an effect.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#389

Post by Shikadi »

torstenvl wrote: post #188
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…

Windows (Word) workflow: - Click the FILE tab - Wait two full seconds while it replaces my screen with something else - Click Save As - Click Computer (because Microsoft wants you to do everything in the cloud) - Click Browse - Finally proceed to saving your document like you would be able to do immediately on any other system

Reasons like this I still use office 2010 and will probably cling to it as long as I possibly can.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#390

Post by brokenmachine »

blattimwind wrote: post #160
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.

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…

> I go back to /foo and try to click something else, say a file. This changes the to-be-saved-file's name to the selection.

That is the most annoying part to me. Windows does this as well. It's such a rare thing to want to overwrite a file for me, I find it so irritating that if I accidentally click on a file name instead of a folder, suddenly I lose the file name that I wanted to save as. Usually I just cancel and start again. So stupid.

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