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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

#81

Post by II2II »

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.

I suspect there is more to it than branding. You can still establish a brand through the design and texture of controls, while letting the end user have limited control over colour. That is evident in the classic Mac OS as well as modern Windows.

What we are most likely seeing is push-back over some of the excesses of themes. Branding is likely part of that, but the astounding number of controls likely played a negative role in the user experience as well.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#82

Post by encom »

bitwize wrote: post #69
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.

>Kai's Power Tools

Page curls. Page curls everywhere!

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#83

Post by wongarsu »

richard_todd wrote: post #32

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.

Using the configured system colors is still trivial even with custom WPF controls. CSS2 also exposes system color settings, even though the selection is a bit limited ("inactivecaption", "threedhighlight" and friends).

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#84

Post by gambiting »

It's truly shocking to me how few people even change their wallpaper. I work in a video games studio and like 90% of people have the default windows logo on blue background wallpaper. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice wallpaper, but people have their custom figurines and personal trinkets on the desks, but won't bother to change the wallpaper on their desktop.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#85

Post by forgetfulness »

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.

Theming was HUGE in Linux back in 2005-2010, consistency was paramount, adherence to toolkit was extremely important just like Apple claimed.

For Apple it was about delivering a consistent branded experience, for the GNOME and KDE communities it was about being able to consistently customize the experience.

In Windows? Always a free-for-all of such heavy customization on the side of the third-party applications that a Windows look and feel was never really a thing, nor was theming because of the same thing.

Then GNOME 3.0 came and they went for the consistently branded experience approach, and you were left with a black and gray desktop environment that at best tolerated customization.

And it works alright, but Desktop Linux at most you'll get to work alright, the third party app ecosystem is small, without the feeling of ownership and freedom that an end-user can have with their system, customizing not the kernel but the things they're actually interacting with, what's left? An unremarkable desktop environment with few applications, that you'll want to replace with macOS as soon as you have the money.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#86

Post by ryandrake »

gmueckl wrote: post #40

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…

Someone did this to me as a prank back in the 90s, and I could easily undo it using keyboard commands. This was back in the day where companies were serious about making every mouse-invoked function also available via the keyboard, which is also sadly going out of style.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#87

Post by joshspankit »

acquacow wrote: post #73

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.

If by “folks” you mean users: yes. And yes: OSX killed that entirely (not just did they kill it, but as users found ways to crowbar in and do customizations, Apple changed the UI code to block each crowbar hole.)

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#88

Post by joshspankit »

I remember the explosion of artistic creativity that lived all over the web. I could go to deviantart and see beautiful, new, and innovative designs every day (which some being all 3!). In Windows XP I could install most of them easily. On OSX there were less places for customization, but the icon sets! chef’s kiss

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#89

Post by zepto »

The article is misguided at best.

The amount of desktop customization on MacOS vastly exceeds anything that was possible on Windows 3.1 by an order of magnitude.

Yes, tweaking the individual colors of desktop elements is more limited.

However, look at the accessibility features, and you’ll find many ways of customizing the desktop that make read differences in people’s lives.

This whole idea that disabling tweaking colors on the desktop theme is part of a slippery slope towards a computer ‘you don’t own’ makes no sense.

Windows 3.1 was not open source. Mac OS is vastly more extensible and programmable than any desktop environment from that era.

That said...

I do agree that we live in a world where people who create OS’s have vast power over the experiences of those who use them, and this is not where we should be.

The real step down this path came when both Apple and Microsoft copied the desktop metaphor superficially from Xerox but left behind the end user programmability of the Smalltalk and Mesa environments.

Their goal was to create an environment for the delivery of shrink wrapped software. That is what Windows and the Mac were about.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#90

Post by wongarsu »

wott wrote: post #68
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…

Having just one widely used GUI toolkit would also help, something both Linux and Windows are struggling with (Windows especially, with Win32-style WPF vs Fluent-style UWP)
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