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Windows 95 UI Design

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Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#171

Post by Cougher »

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 was. I remember. I've had the BSOD. But Win95 is not synonymous with it for me.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#173

Post by thrower123 »

m_mueller wrote: post #125
jclulow wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think right click is in the same category. For one thing, the right mouse button is prominent and next to the left one. For another, there was a pretty well established language that right clicking either did nothing (was harmless) or brought up a contextual menu of advanced actions you could then read.

And Apple UI designers (IMO rightfully) were against exactly these hidden context menus. You can see in the older versions of Pages/Keynote/Numbers how UI was meant to work: Instead of right-click menus there was the Info button (promimently found in the shortcut list), which opened a non-modal context menu that could be placed anywhere on screen in a persistent way. This then allowed manipulating all the detail obje…

> I'd say the one thing that MS Office always did really well in comparison is the format paster. Cmd-alt-c/v just isn't as intuitive and discoverable

Office products have the worst copy/paste of any software I use. Somehow their rich-format copying never does what I want it to do, despite fussing with setting default paste options and learning the advanced keystrokes.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#174

Post by afandian »

jclulow wrote: post #114
ta999999171 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's meant to be reserved for advanced features that you only want to offer to users that know how to find them. See: right click.

I don't think right click is in the same category. For one thing, the right mouse button is prominent and next to the left one. For another, there was a pretty well established language that right clicking either did nothing (was harmless) or brought up a contextual menu of advanced actions you could then read.

I forget when right-click was introduced (9? 10?) but there was only one mouse button at the time.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#175

Post by asjw »

flippyhead wrote: post #99
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…

Idk, my mom found windows 95 etc very hard to use but has no trouble with her iPhone, iPad or even a Mac (let alone the TV or can-speak-to appliance). Maybe part of is it is that a lot of problems that required UI solutions before just work magically now. Like file sharing, networking or dealing with different document formats. You don't need nearly as many controls for the most part so the UI can be simpler.

Windows 95 came out 25 years ago and many jumped directly from DOS or typewriters to it

She has +25 years of experience in using computing devices now, and computers are hundreds of times more powerful, of course things are easier for her

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#176

Post by Kwpolska »

Mikhail_Edoshin wrote: post #149
Stratoscope wrote: post #59

> 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 furth…

According to Apple HIG plain confirmations did not require an ellipsis: "Don’t use an ellipsis character if the command displays an alert box to warn the user of a potentially dangerous action, especially if the command displays an alert box only sometimes. In this case you are simply giving the user an opportunity to cancel a potentially dangerous action (such as causing a loss of data), not asking for more informat…

Modern Finder has this:

    Empty Trash…         [shift][cmd][del]
but when you hold the Option key, this changes to:

    Empty Trash     [opt][shift][cmd][del]

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#177

Post by csomar »

Here is something else: The interface was "responsive". And I don't mean the responsive designs we have today for HTML but that when you click a button, you get a "response" very fast from the monitor.

Now, with these new interfaces and stuff, most of them are so lag-y that you can notice them with your eyes. It's very frustrating.

I tried Bisq a couple days ago. The application was apparently made with Electron and HTML/JS. First, it used around 4.1Gb of memory. The interface was not responsive and then it crushed.

I'm using a 16Gb/i7 2018 MacBook Pro and there is lags for most of the buttons in the Finder application.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#178

Post by thrower123 »

hu3 wrote: post #43
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.

I remember being able to edit the code on the fly during debugging in Visual Basic 6. It was mind blowing then and 2 decades later still is.

Edit-and-Continue support is still not anywhere near that good now...

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#179

Post by zozbot234 »

csomar wrote: post #177

Here is something else: The interface was "responsive". And I don't mean the responsive designs we have today for HTML but that when you click a button, you get a "response" very fast from the monitor. Now, with these new interfaces and stuff, most of them are so lag-y that you can notice them with your eyes. It's very frustrating. I tried Bisq a couple days ago. The application was apparently made with Electron and…

> but that when you click a button, you get a "response" very fast from the monitor.

This was important enough back then that some of the UI was implemented in kernel mode on NT-class operating systems, specifically in order to preserve that responsiveness. AIUI, Win9x did not have a complete user-mode/supervisor-mode distinction, but the UI code was written on a very low level and tightly coupled with the OS itself, for similar reasons.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#180

Post by TuringTest »

thrower123 wrote: post #173
m_mueller wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Apple UI designers (IMO rightfully) were against exactly these hidden context menus. You can see in the older versions of Pages/Keynote/Numbers how UI was meant to work: Instead of right-click menus there was the Info button (promimently found in the shortcut list), which opened a non-modal context menu that could be placed anywhere on screen in a persistent way. This then allowed manipulating all the detail obje…

> I'd say the one thing that MS Office always did really well in comparison is the format paster. Cmd-alt-c/v just isn't as intuitive and discoverable Office products have the worst copy/paste of any software I use. Somehow their rich-format copying never does what I want it to do, despite fussing with setting default paste options and learning the advanced keystrokes.

> Somehow their rich-format copying never does what I want it to do, despite fussing with setting default paste options and learning the advanced keystrokes.

I was like you, until I learned what each of the pasting modes are meant to do, and in particular that it works different if you copy/paste within the same document or from an external source.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2012/02/1...

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/control-the-formatt...

Now I still consider it shitty, but at least I'm moderately in control.

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