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Windows 95 UI Design

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Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#151

Post by PunksATawnyFill »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #105
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...

Windows 3 themes never worked that well though. Dark mode is a single Boolean flag, which is much easier for application developers to follow.

App developers didn't even have to set colors.

You could tell the ones who didn't know what they were doing by the invisible text littering their UIs under some color schemes. This continued into the Web era. There were tons of defective sites that overrode your system background color with a hard-coded white background, but didn't bother setting the text color to black.

The result was invisible text on any system with a "dark" (non-inverse) color scheme. DUHHHH

There are probably still millions of such sites today, but now UIs are so gimped that they hide the defect.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#152

Post by hatsunearu »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #4

A generation was raised on usable designs which clearly communicated interactability with a consistent visual language. It is only natural that they would come to think of computers as inherently ordered, understandable devices. Machines had always been this way. It was obvious to this new generation that the affordances of youth were purely redundant. Clutter. Overhead. Junk! Widget by widget, pixel by pixel, bevels…

The stereotypical "old people with tech" shtick is that they don't know how to do things we contemporaries seem trivial.

Considering the trend maybe that isn't too unexpected, and I'm also worried that when I get old I'll feel left out and abandoned by this growing tend towards oversimplification

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#153

Post by Mikhail_Edoshin »

akho wrote: post #144
divbzero wrote: post #94

I forgot how nice it was to have underlined alt keyboard shortcuts. We got so much right so early in the age of personal computing. Goodbye to all that, hello Ribbon and flatness everywhere. It’s as if we’re in the Middle Ages now looking back at the great ruins of ancient Athens.

The ribbon has Alt shortcuts with clear hints. It’s an all-around improvement on menus. Not on the Mac though. But Macs also don’t have alt shortcuts in menus.

Ribbon buttons are smaller than menu items and have no text until you hover over them. They're both harder to find and harder to press even if you know where they are. And somehow there seems to be less space in ribbon than in menus, because some commands are tucked away in second-level palettes. E.g. you need to open the "Reveal formatting" palette in MS Word:

1. Switch to Home pane. 2. Click the tiny icon at the bottom right corner of the styles section. It will open the "Styles" palette. The icon is unlabeled, of course. 3. At the bottom of the "Styles" palette there are three icons. One of them opens "Style Inspector" palette. It's hard to tell which one until you hover it to read the tooltip as they're pretty similar. 4. At the bottom of the "Style Inspector" we have two more icons. Again, hover over them to see which one opens the "Reveal Formatting" palette. 5. There you are. I don't know if there's a shorter route.

A good menu would be much more discoverable.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#154

Post by TeMPOraL »

ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #92
_trampeltier wrote: post #7

Back then you also could create your own theme. You could set the colors for text, backround, buttons etc. and every App did respect and use it. Today you can choose dark or light mode and almost no App does respect it, instead they bring there own colors and options.

I've been a theme creator for a few decades now, and modifying how programs looked is what got me into development in the first place 30 years ago. The constant stripping of user definable visuals in modern computing is a legitimately depressing thing for me to see happen. It's just another step along the "you don't own the device or the software, we're just letting you borrow it" path. The constant push with SAAS an…

FWIW, one redeeming characteristic of SaaS web apps is that most of the time, you can fix up their crap UIs with liberal application of CSS (via e.g. Stylus extension). It's something I find myself doing increasingly often - usually not to make things look different, but to undo some dumb design decisions like low density, whitespace-rich presentation, or hidden video controls.

Unfortunately, this does not give the ability to do system-wide restyling of the kind _trampeltier mentioned. Despite professions to the contrary, almost nothing whatsoever on the web is in any way semantic. Each website is its own assortment of CSS hacks hooked up to a tree of randomly nested, randomly named divs. You can't just write one style that says "please stop with the whitespace around media boxes", you have to unbreak each site individually, because a "media box" isn't really a website-independent thing, and neither is a button.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#155

Post by Gravityloss »

grawprog wrote: post #104
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.

To be fair, the Bsod does try to make crashes ordered and understandable. It's a terrifying blue screen that communicates fairly clearly that 'something done gone and fucked up' on your computer. The ui served its purpose so well it literally became a meme.

It sounds so obvious once said aloud!

(Sarcasm: someone can make a thousand word blog post about it and it can be voted to the top.)

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#156

Post by TeMPOraL »

ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #128
HNthrow22 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agreed man, have fond memories of tweaking themes for daily drivers like irc client, winamp foobar2000, compared to like spotify or discord now feels so neutered and limited in terms of customizing appearance.

Yeah and everything now is so disjointed. It shits me. Eg not only can’t you customise Spotify or Discord visually, but they don’t even respect the OS controls. You can’t resize them properly to fit windows 10 tiling, the menus are a broken mess, etc. They insist on doing everything themselves and ignoring all standards which just ends up looking ugly and broken. One of my main passions in theming is making your enti…

Same here. And it's not just theming. Windows has always had a lot of small, lesser-known conventions around UI elements, some accessibility features, and a way for additional software to hook up to the UI. None of that is respected when an application decides to draw its own UI on a canvas.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#157

Post by gerdesj »

perl4ever wrote: post #74
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…

This made me think, how long did it take for cars to acquire basically their modern standard interface, and have personal computers been around that long? Apparently, the Austin 7 popularized what are now standard controls for cars in 1922 (although it wasn't the very first example), and the IC auto was patented in 1886, which means it was about 36 years before people mostly settled on one interface. By comparison, m…

Me and the wife have a car each. The reverse gear is in a different position in each. On mine the headlights are controlled with a rotary switch at lower right of the steering wheel, in hers you twist part of the left stalk. If you accidentally press the centre of my headlight control you raise or lower the lights - hilarious. Some cars have the handbrake on a stick behind the steering wheel, some have it as a lever in the central console. Some have a small paddle.

Then there is the which side of the road do you drive thing ...

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#158

Post by ddingus »

ahartmetz wrote: post #141
ddingus wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 3 year old rules any tablet. Can get to the movies and pictures quick. Will even make phone calls when they get hold of a phone. The right phone calls. It is an advance.

I often hear this argument. It could be used to argue that comics are better than novels and overalls are better than regular clothes. Three year olds are three year olds - what is best for them is not necessarily best for adults.

Never said it was best. I agree with you.

Still, it is an advance. More work overall remains to reach more optimal for more people more of the time.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#159

Post by TeMPOraL »

userbinator wrote: post #54
_def wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 suf…

Unfortunately, "because security!" is currently a trump card that wins all arguments. On the one hand I get it, security has been pretty neglected in the industry over the past decades, but I think we also really ought to have a conversation about the costs of security.

The ultimate state of perfect security for a system is a dead rock. Everything that's interesting and useful can only happen in the state of some lack of security.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#160

Post by viraptor »

terandle wrote: post #77
spectramax wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The main reason they got rid of it because it was a gimmick that never really panned out and having two different ways of invoking a context menu based on force was a UX disaster for the novice user. I'm glad Apple was able to swallow their pride and drop their "breakthrough innovative pressure sensitive screen" - reducing BOM costs was the icing on the cake, although it seems like they have just replaced that space…

> was a UX disaster for the novice user.

I suspect it was also a disaster for older people. The delicate touch just seems to go away at some point. My mom for example can't do a half-press-to-focus on a camera. She just doesn't feel the extra step. I've seen older people doing force-touch gesture by accident and get confused why it happens.

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