41–50 of 333 posts
Generally I agree with the article, but it would be nice for the author to enable dark mode of the website for dark mode users :) (it's possible in CSS to detect if the user is using dark mode, and adjust the colors automatically)
That's not a commonly known or used trick.
On the Windows side, isn't it a side-effect of the shift from standardized common controls to WPF that happened around the vista time-frame? It's much harder to provide consistent user theming against non-standard controls. Similarly, on the early web you could theme sites easily with your browser settings, but as theming power shifted to web developers with CSS, that capability melted away.
Not directly. If you code in Win32 on modern Windows, you pretty much have to enable themed widgets. Once you've enabled themed widgets, you give up the ability for the user to control the appearance.
I don't believe there was any technical reason for the change; it was the desire to have themed widgets (or in plain English: branded widgets) which made them uncustomisable.
I wish there were real high-quality Linux and Windows themes imitating Windows 3.x, 98 and XP (and some other old OSes perhaps) realistically, not just "kind of like that". I would even pay money for such if I were satisfied. Ideally, they should also be easy to combine in different ways. E.g. I want Win3.11 pixel art icons, Win98 window&panel styles and WinXP non-antialiased fonts - these 3 things make me feel orgas…
Have you tried Chicago 95? https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
There will always be tinkerers and people who want to customize their stuff to their personality, but I think the majority of people don't want to tinker, they want to "get shit done" and the standard wallpaper and theming of stuff now days is visually pleasing enough to not mess with it.
More importantly: this isn't hard. They did it in Windows 3, an OS that had an 8MB install size and required a mere 2MB of RAM. That we can't provide this functionality in 2021 with all these supposedly highly skilled software "engineers" who consider themselves so ridiculously productive because of all the complicated abstractions they use, on hardware that is several orders of magnitude more powerful than was available to Win 3... well it's completely ridiculous and we, as an industry, should be ashamed.
I think what UI customization shows us is that software vendors providing customize-ability correlates with a lack of confidence in the defaults they ship. When someone creating software has a strong opinion about the "right" way, they can't see the possibility that anyone would ever have legit disagreement with their brilliance so they take away control. And when they can't figure out the right solution to something…
Allowing customization is considerate to the user, like saying "I made this and I think this default configuration works best, but you can change this if it doesn't work best for you." There is not necessarily a "right solution" for 100% of the users.
The best user experience comes from strong defaults that don't need to be changed, but can be if the user requires it.
> Remember changing colours on the computer? You can do that in Windows 10. It can also change automatically based on your current wallpaper. Similarly to installing Nova Launcher, perhaps the author need to use GNU/Linux or Windows instead of a Mac.
No. you cannot change colors in windows 10. You can only change 1 color which only Microsoft know on what exactly is used.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/style/co...
More configuration options come with an increased risk of inadvertently pointing one of the gun's barrels at ones own foot without noticing and then pulling the trigger. To stay with the theming example: it's nice and dandy have control over theme colors. But what happems when you set button background, window background and text color to white by accident? How do you recover from that? Back in the 90s you'd have bee…
Also, I'm not sure I buy the claim that "things like that are tolerated a lot less". Are they? Or has it just been so long since we've had anything like that, that we just assume people would hate it even more?
It's interesting that the most slick and stylish desktops are now on Linux (of course there's 99% trash, but the remaining 1% are a lot more aesthetically pleasing than both the current Win10 and macOS themes).
On the Windows side, isn't it a side-effect of the shift from standardized common controls to WPF that happened around the vista time-frame? It's much harder to provide consistent user theming against non-standard controls. Similarly, on the early web you could theme sites easily with your browser settings, but as theming power shifted to web developers with CSS, that capability melted away.
Products who do theming well tend to be popular among their users — eg IntelliJ and VSCode of course, but tbh Emacs and vim are no slouches in this regard.
(Similarly, I'm so glad there's a hint of colour in the sidebar in the Finder again; I hate when Apple says, "We've got two indistinguishable shades of grey; one for available, and one for inactive. You can take it, or you can take it.")
As to the point about setting a desktop background, though, I hardly ever see my desktop background, so changing it doesn't seem very important.