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Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

hisham.hm

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Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#61

Post by helmholtz »

armagon wrote: post #50

I'll agree, this is one of the things I don't like about macOS. It looks like in the past there were hacks to do this, but Apple broke them. (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 b…

I used to change my desktop background approximately once per afternoon. It was a disease. Modifying Gnome themes. Downloading custom launchers for Android. Tweaking the colors representing my calendars. All with good intentions, mind you. "This green mountain background will calm me down in the morning" etc.

At some point, I realised that if I just take a deep breath, slow down, and accept that I can modify myself to align with my tool rather than the other way around, a lot of friction is removed.

I set my background on every device to a solid black, and it's now three years since I changed them. My trello boards are still blue background. My calendars are whatever the default theme is. It's sometimes nice to tweak the tool for your need, but it's also sometimes nice to understand that everything doesn't need to be a huge annoyance. One can just adapt and move on.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#62

Post by swiftcoder »

bovermyer wrote: post #7
_a1_ wrote: post #4

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.

It's becoming pretty widely used these days. ~25% of websites I visit flip dark mode correctly.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#64

Post by lotsofpulp »

armagon wrote: post #50

I'll agree, this is one of the things I don't like about macOS. It looks like in the past there were hacks to do this, but Apple broke them. (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 b…

> We've got two indistinguishable shades of grey; one for available, and one for inactive. You can take it, or you can take it.")

What is up with this design choice to make the selection non obvious?

On Apple TV, it’s damn near impossible to see which app or show you have selected. The selected item is slightly enlarged, or slightly shaded, and I as a young tech literate person have to move around a bunch to figure out where I am.

Why not highlight the border of the damn thing? It’s like no one that works at Apple has older, non tech literate parents that use Apple TV.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#65

Post by FreeFull »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #16
speedgoose wrote: post #5

> 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.

Not quite. You can set an Accent color and either a light or dark background - that’s it. You can’t specify each component color or named system color - such as separately specifying the colors of the scrollbar’ track and thumb - or icon text - or button shadows - and so on. The old “Desktop Themes” feature for Windows 95 Plus! and Windows 98 let the user radically change the appearance of Windows - for better or for…

Supposedly Hot Dog Stand looked really good on monochrome monitors, at least.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#67

Post by 1970-01-01 »

Today customization is effectively a big hassle for everyone involved. We no longer have "PCs" in the workplace, just "assets". User customization becomes a security threat on top of a broken feature. The popular "app" that gets your daily cat wallpaper should be rejected by your security team. The OS "theme" that enables dark mode will effectively break some legacy UI you need to do your job.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#68

Post by wott »

grishka wrote: post #30

Themeability doesn't rule out consistency. As long as all UIs use the system theme, they look consistent, no matter what that theme is. A good example of that was Windows XP and all the funny and atrocious themes you could put on it with WindowBlinds.

> Themeability doesn't rule out consistency. As long as all UIs use the system theme, they look consistent, no matter what that theme is.

Agreed. That's why the GUI toolkit must provide as exhaustive as possible a set of widgets, and those widgets must be versatile; so that applications developers can build basically everything from those widgets and not feel the need to build their own from a raw canvas or something like that.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#69

Post by bitwize »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #36

Unpopular opinion: optimising for "branding" is what killed theming. Everyone wants to have their own custom colour theme, brand-associated font or button style, which clashes with uniformity of system controls. If everyone renders buttons in a custom way, they bypass the native, theming-capable, accessible-by-default system controls. As long as product managers are happy, it doesn't matter that users aren't.

This was true in the 90s as well, or have you never used Kai's Power Tools?

What's more recent is that the OS vendor now considers UI font and color choices part of their brand, and thus fixed them immutably for "consistency" i.e., to advertise the Apple-ness of the Apple UI even in screen shots of the OS in action.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#70

Post by signal11 »

tinus_hn wrote: post #66

On Windows most applications don’t even use the normal title bars and controls. What’s the use in allowing people to customize their colors?

You can use nonstandard controls and still allow people to customise colours. There are APIs (GetSysColor for instance) which’ll let you query and honour user settings, assuming you care to and don’t put your branding / Look & Feel preferences ahead of the user’s.
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