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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

#71

Post by zepto »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #44
joshmanders wrote: post #14

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.

Personally I couldn't care less about things being "visually pleasing", to me this is an accessibility feature. People with sight issues or dyslexia might want to use different fonts and weights, they might want high contrast colors, etc. The aesthetic personalization opportunities are second to that. More importantly: this isn't hard . They did it in Windows 3, an OS that had an 8MB install size and required a mere…

I’m curious - have you experimented with the range of accessibility options in Mac OS?

Are there particular ones that are missing when it comes to dyslexia?

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#72

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#73

Post by acquacow »

There was a free/shareware app for Apple's OS 6/7/8 called Kaleidoscope. It was a resource editor that would let you change pretty much any aspect of the desktop interface. Apple folks definitely had customization before OSX, but not sure if OSX killed that entirely or not.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#74

Post by freetonik »

Shameless plug: I started documenting and collecting screenshots and screencasts recordings of old software at UI museum[1]. There is a great intro tutorial from Windows 3.11[2] and extensive collection of screenshots as well.

The level of consistency and overall caring is very high by today’s standards. The tutorial explains core GUI concepts like mouse movements and windows. This is something I’d gladly show to my parents, for example.

1. https://ui.codexpanse.com/ 2. https://ui.codexpanse.com/windows-311-intro-tutorial-video.h...

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#75

Post by mrob »

hashkb wrote: post #59

> In the old days of Windows 3.1, it was common to walk into an office and see each person’s desktop colors, fonts and wallpapers tuned to their personalities, just like their physical desk, with one’s family portrait or plants. Author (and many commenters here) take as a given that this is a good thing, but I'm not so sure. Starting with the physical desk metaphor - you probably have trinkets and photos and whatnot,…

>you're almost certainly better off using the consensus interface; and if it has problems, contributing the fixes for those problems back to everyone

This is usually impossible, because UI designers' goals are not your goals. Designers optimize for distinctiveness ("branding") and good first impressions from inexperienced users. This results in anti-features like low contrast text, excessive whitespace, and mandatory animations. There's no point complaining because it's working as intended. The only option is to switch to one of the few remaining systems that still respects the users.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#76

Post by zepto »

tacticaldev wrote: post #63

this idea was probably one of the first points that drew me into the Linux community when I was young (so many decades ago). The idea of customizing and even modifying my own Window Manager was intriguing!

I have been playing with Linux desktops recently after only using it as a server or embedded OS for years.

It seems a lot harder to make serious changes than it used to be because of the rise of desktop environments.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#77

Post by ryandrake »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #55
city41 wrote: post #54

Allowing customization also increases the feature area of your product, thus increasing need for support, dev time, qa time, increased chance of regressions, etc.

The OS handled this, and it was just changing some colors and font settings. It's not like today where there's a whole Turing machine handling your needlessly complicated custom interface rendering. I'll say it again: people did this in the 90s, with orders of magnitude less computing power, significantly more constrained development tools, and fewer developers. That we think this is something we can't do today is ev…

There are a lot of things developers were doing in the 80s and 90s that developers of today will insist simply can’t be done.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#78

Post by dfxm12 »

joshmanders wrote: post #14

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.

Additionally, vendors just want to ship software. I guess that's their version of getting shit done. For better or worse, functionality sells most software. The stock UI is an afterthought, let alone possible customizations to it. Spending time on features that at best don't sell, and, at worst, can introduce bugs, is a non-starter for most shops.

Maybe Microsoft/Apple are big enough that they can (and should) handle it, but I wouldn't generally expect this type of gold plating.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#79

Post by acquacow »

whichdan wrote: post #11

I used to love experimenting with LiteStep and Winamp themes and browser themes when I was younger, but honestly user interfaces are Good Enough now that I'm relatively happy with the out-of-the-box experience. But it's still disappointing that a generation of potential computer nerds won't have the same experience of being able to treat their primary computer as a blank slate for personal expression.

I spent years making litestep themes and moderating theme submission on litestep.net I still have a mirror up of the old owns.com minimalism site as well.

http://dave.oc7.org/minimalism/themes.shtml

Some folks still run litestep, but it's definitely not the community it was. We still have a small chat presence on discord and that is about it.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#80

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

zepto wrote: post #71
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I couldn't care less about things being "visually pleasing", to me this is an accessibility feature. People with sight issues or dyslexia might want to use different fonts and weights, they might want high contrast colors, etc. The aesthetic personalization opportunities are second to that. More importantly: this isn't hard . They did it in Windows 3, an OS that had an 8MB install size and required a mere…

I’m curious - have you experimented with the range of accessibility options in Mac OS? Are there particular ones that are missing when it comes to dyslexia?

I don't run MacOS on any of the PCs I own, so no. Neither do I have any of the disabilities mentioned. I just feel that being able to change colors and fonts is a significantly broader and more simple solution than bespoke accessibility features tuned for specific disabilities.
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