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Windows 95 UI Design

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Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#51

Post by goatlover »

k__ wrote: post #29
est wrote: post #22

I used to play with VB5 and VB6, the RAD process was better than any of today's separated backend/frontend antd CSS-layout scaffolding data binding frameworks bullshit. The best part of the unified UI controls is you can use tools like Spy++ to discover programs on the fly. Today's Internet there are thousands of web frameworks and you need thousands of source mapping or else it's an ocean of minified gibberish.

Serious question: if it was so much better, why is it gone now?

By the time the web caught up, a new generation of developers took over who had little to no exposure to RAD tools from the 90s.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#52

Post by magicalhippo »

k__ wrote: post #29
est wrote: post #22

I used to play with VB5 and VB6, the RAD process was better than any of today's separated backend/frontend antd CSS-layout scaffolding data binding frameworks bullshit. The best part of the unified UI controls is you can use tools like Spy++ to discover programs on the fly. Today's Internet there are thousands of web frameworks and you need thousands of source mapping or else it's an ocean of minified gibberish.

Serious question: if it was so much better, why is it gone now?

I think it's two things:

- Very few use the desktop as their primary computer interface now compared to back then.

- We keep abstracting. The web browser has almost entirely abstracted away the OS. You run Windows 7, or OS X? Who cares, just log into this web page and do your thing there.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#53

Post by zapzupnz »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #35
ordinaryperson wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compounding this frustration (on iOS at least) is stuff like "force touch" and hidden toolbars. Depending on how hard you press a button you might get a totally different UI interaction. Are others good at knowing exactly how many newtons of force it takes to follow a hyperlink instead of triggering this horrid mini-preview window? Maybe that's why Jonny Ive made millions of dollars while I work like a stiff for a li…

Force touch is the best evidence we have that designers have lost their power at Apple. The best thing Steve Jobs did was hire serious designers and defend their ideas against the rest of the organization. That’s clearly not happening anymore. My guess is that “Designer at Apple” became such a desirable title that the design roles have been taken over by wannabees.

Force Touch is on its way out. Has been for about two generations of iPhone. There's now Haptic Touch which is nothing but a long-press with better feedback.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#54

Post by userbinator »

_def wrote: post #46
userbinator wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's funny when some new app announces "now we have dark mode!" with much fanfare and commotion, when the ability to adjust the colours and appearance of individual UI elements across the whole OS was the norm back in Windows 3. https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/wi...

If the apps celebrating their new dark mode feature would use the OS GUI toolkit they wouldn't have to worry about that. Many "modern" desktop apps rely on web based technology which throws them back ages in terms of UI and UX

Many "modern" desktop apps rely on web based technology which throws them back ages in terms of UI and UX

For an even more WTF experience, look at how CSS had defined how web apps could use the system-defined colours for UI elements, but then it was deprecated due to a very thin "insufficient" and "security/privacy" argument:

https://www.w3.org/TR/css-color-4/#deprecated-system-colors

Obviously they could be made sufficient (imagine if JS was deprecated because it was deemed "insufficient" for making applications behave natively...), and things like Electron could use them without worrying about "security" since it's not in pages served over the network.

(That "security/privacy" argument is really thin, especially when considering how much less customisable the colours have become in newer OSs!)

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#55

Post by FpUser »

It looks a bit ugly but it is very functional and straight to the point. Needed just a little visual touch to account for modern monitors. Instead we have fucking light gray text on white background, window borders/title area that are indistinguishable from the rest accompanied by great hunting game of: find an interactive element on on a screen

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#56

Post by stickfigure »

k__ wrote: post #29
est wrote: post #22

I used to play with VB5 and VB6, the RAD process was better than any of today's separated backend/frontend antd CSS-layout scaffolding data binding frameworks bullshit. The best part of the unified UI controls is you can use tools like Spy++ to discover programs on the fly. Today's Internet there are thousands of web frameworks and you need thousands of source mapping or else it's an ocean of minified gibberish.

Serious question: if it was so much better, why is it gone now?

I started my professional programming career in the Windows 3.x days. Some things that come to mind:

* The web solved the software distribution problem. There were some pretty good tools for building GUI apps in the 90s but the tools for getting software to the customer sucked. Complex installers, no autoupdates, "DLL hell" incompatibilities.

* There never really were any great tools for building cross-platform GUIs. You built for Windows on x86, that was it. Widgets were shipped as binary COM components. Now you need to be on multiple OSes, multiple hardware architectures, and multiple form factors. VB wasn't going to give you that.

* Formatting text sucked. Actually, formatting in general sucked - the RAD GUI builders built awesome fixed-size dialogs, but now screens vary from watch-sized to wall-sized. Embedded HTML components really made layout easier... and once you start putting things in HTML, it tends to take over.

* All those pretty 3d effects in Win 95 UIs? Those were a bitch to get right. Hours of trial and error drawing extra lines of black and white and grey pixels. It looked good but it was a lot of effort that would have been better spent building real features.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#57

Post by xcv321 »

spectramax wrote: post #48
soheil wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is only natural that they would come to think of computers as inherently ordered, understandable devices. until you get a blue screen of death... Don't get me wrong, I completely agree that modern UI is complete garbage.

Come on, UI design and the OS crashing down are two separate orthogonal issues. Yes, they culminate at the end as “User experience”, but the OP is clearly talking about UI elements and how their functional design is eroding away. What’s that to do with BSOD!!??

Sounds like you probably weren't using computers back in the Win 9x days. For us who remember it, Windows 95 is synonymous with BSOD.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#58

Post by pvg »

jplayer01 wrote: post #39
pvg wrote: post #12

UI is different on the web and mobile devices but if you fire up the Win 10 file explorer, almost all of the items shown are still there or arguably better. Maybe resize (which you can now do from any window edge) is a little more finicky.

The most annoying thing about Windows 10 is how it makes clear improvements in some areas, but then decides to be utterly brain dead in other areas. The task manager is hugely improved. The file explorer is better. The copy/move file dialog is far more useful. But then they abandon the Control Panel and give us this flat UI abomination that doesn’t even support one of the original ideas that made Windows 95 such a hi…

I'm mostly pushing back against the idea of some lost golden age of UI design. The file explorer used in this example is almost the same a quarter of a century later. And some of its deficiencies have lasted a long time - it took a couple of decades for explorer to learn to show a unified list of files and directories sorted by modification time. And it still doesn't have an inlined tree view making the basic task of moving files between adjacent directories clunky.

At the same time, for all of its fashions and foibles, the one-app-a-time, direct-manipulating touchscreen UI has made computers more accessible to all sorts of people to whom 'the desktop metaphor' was and remains confusing and unintuitive.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#59

Post by Stratoscope »

> The ellipsis hints that this button opens a dialog, instead of immediately executing an action.

That's not exactly what the ellipsis is intended to communicate.

Have you ever wondered why File/Open... has the ellipsis, but in a properly designed app, Help/About does not have it? Even though Help/About opens a dialog too?

The distinction is that the ellipsis indicates that a command will take some action after further user input. The user input may be anything like text entry, selecting from a list, or just a Yes/No or OK/Cancel confirmation. But the key point is that the command will do something after that user input (unless the user cancels).

An About box should not take any action or cause any change to the state of your document or system. It's just information displayed that the user can dismiss with the OK button or close icon. So it doesn't get the ellipsis.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#60

Post by thom »

zapzupnz wrote: post #53
erikpukinskis wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Force touch is the best evidence we have that designers have lost their power at Apple. The best thing Steve Jobs did was hire serious designers and defend their ideas against the rest of the organization. That’s clearly not happening anymore. My guess is that “Designer at Apple” became such a desirable title that the design roles have been taken over by wannabees.

Force Touch is on its way out. Has been for about two generations of iPhone. There's now Haptic Touch which is nothing but a long-press with better feedback.

All this means is that instead of people accidentally discovering the obscure behaviour as they do now (and then working out how to carefully tap out of it), they'll just never find it. That's certainly less annoying to me, who has never used any of these weird popup menus, but doesn't seem a massive improvement overall.
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