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Windows 95 UI Design

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Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#61

Post by chii »

pcurve wrote: post #10
twotwotwo wrote: post #6

The old desktop approach had some cool things. List views tended to support common operations, e.g. sorting, drag-and-drop, multiselection, common ways to do renames and type-ahead-find. Tree views had some standardization, too. Crowded menus/toolbars could be ugly, but you could discover a lot of functionality going through them. Right-click tended to expose a set of verbs. These things often exist now or have an an…

25 years later, we still don't have good, standardized, robust Ui controls for browsers. Why is there no HTML tag for creating menu bar and nested dropdown menu? Instead we have to search through thousands of libraries or plugins with mixed bag of accessibility. Just that control alone will probably save companies globally billions of dollars in wasted labor searching, building, and maintaining.

> Why is there no HTML tag for creating menu bar and nested dropdown menu?

because HTML was never designed to be a application interface, and I don't see a menu-bar nor dropdown as necessary for a document display.

What's needed for the web is a common and standarized (i.e., browser provided) library for application UI that's distinct from the existing HTML markup. They should not mix, and if you have a document (rather than a web-app), you use HTML, but if you intend to write an application UI, you would use that library.

I forsee something like WASM compiled QT or some such to be the beginnings of such an api.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#62

Post by spectramax »

xcv321 wrote: post #57
spectramax wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I did. I get that computers back in the day crashed a lot. BSOD while playing C&C was my childhood.

But my point, again, is that computers crashing and UI design are two orthagonal issues.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#63

Post by mixmastamyk »

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?

The cheaper no-install/remote feature, regular subscription revenue model, and Agile dev cycle took precedence.

Even before all this happened I remember articles about software companies yearning/pleading for subscription revenue, but customers were not interested. The web allowed them to turn the tables on expectations.

A few advancements, such as excellent UI consistency were left behind though.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#64

Post by thom »

statictype wrote: post #24
petilon wrote: post #20

The Windows 95 UI was inspired by NextStep. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_... Before Windows 95 was released there was CTL3D.DLL which gave a NextStep-like look & feel to Windows 3.1. See this image for the improvement made by CTL3D.DLL: http://www.win3x.org/screens/15nvtbm.gif

Wow - does this bring back some memories. I remember when CTL3D.dll was all the rage. Good times. To think we used to worry about VB programs needing a separate runtime to distribute them and Delphi programs, while stand-alone, took up almost 200KB for a minimal app!

Ah, THREED.VBX, good times indeed.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#65

Post by xcv321 »

spectramax wrote: post #62
xcv321 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I did. I get that computers back in the day crashed a lot. BSOD while playing C&C was my childhood. But my point, again, is that computers crashing and UI design are two orthagonal issues.

Yeah, we already know that. He was talking about computers in general, not just the UI design.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#66

Post by spectramax »

terandle wrote: post #42
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…

Apple has killed off 3D Touch first with the XR and now the entire iPhone 11 line

They've still kept the functionality AFAIK - you could just long-touch for force touch menu. Instead of pressing hard, you're now pressing longer to invoke the 3D touch menu.

I know why Apple got rid of force touch - BOM cost. Not that I condone the concept of Force Touch, but some wizbang designer pitched to the management that hey "We could solve this using just the UI with long press, and save $$$ in LCD costs to put a force sensitive layer". That's exactly how this happened.

Edit: Just checked on iPhone 11 Pro - yup, just long touch an icon to popup a contextual menu which used to require pressing with force.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#67

Post by spectramax »

egdod wrote: post #44
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 at least seems to be on its way out. I hope. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/05/29/3d-touch-2019-i...

It is out in hardware, but not entirely in the UI. The UI for force-touch is replaced by long press on the icon or widget.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#69

Post by zapzupnz »

thom wrote: post #60
zapzupnz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> they'll just never find it

Why not? People always complained about accidentally activating Force Touch when trying to long press. Long press has a precedent in iOS; 3D/Force Touch never did.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#70

Post by est »

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?

For the developing perspective it's so much better, but consumers needs fancy login buttons and infinite scrolling instead of UI consistency and accessibility.

Also deliver binary executables has a huge attack surface of virus. Web is considered "safer"

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