Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment • Hacker News Board

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#91

Post by city41 » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 4:00 PM UTC

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…

Sure, and OSes are written by developers and cost money to make. Companies have to make decisions on where to put their resources. Customization and configuration almost always gets the ax today, and cost is often a leading factor.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#92

Post by Narishma » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 4:03 PM UTC

freetonik wrote: post #74

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…

That tutorial dates back to Windows 3.1 at least, if not earlier.

Edit: I also suggest you scale those Windows 2 screenshots to the correct aspect ratio. They currently look very stretched.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#93

Post by forgetfulness » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 4:05 PM UTC

flohofwoe wrote: post #48

I want Linux-like anarchy^H^H^Hthemability on Windows and macOS. I'm not keen on tweaking the appearance of every little button, but I want to go 'theme-shopping' from time to time and change the appearance of my desktop. Just to make it look a bit different now and then. 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 aesthe…

The themeability ran on anarchy but on the community-organized kind. Users expected apps to use the Desktop's toolkit and having their custom widgets respond well to theme engines.

But that's only for KDE nowadays, there was a period where GNOME was breaking theming with new releases and its maintainers argued for why they just supported the standard Adwaita theme and not anything else. KDE comes with a historic sloppiness at the individual application level, you'll quickly notice that padding, margins, lines, orientation are all over the place and it's just how KDE application developers roll.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#94

Post by Joker_vD » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 4:05 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #84

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.

For how long, approximately, can you see your desktop's wallpaper during a day? I see mine for about 5 seconds during the boot, after that Chrome auto-launches, and I never see the desktop until the next reboot (all the non-browser apps I use are pinned on my taskbar).

So what's the point to change it? Instead, I always change my mouse cursors to the Garfield theme from defunct Microsoft Plus! -- they are of pretty nice orange color.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#95

Post by tacotacotacos » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 4:06 PM UTC

Improved usability killed theming. When you are no longer bogged down in a tool, you’re less concerned with how it looks. You’re more focused on accomplishing your task.

Theming is alive and well in code editors like VS Code and Sublime — because we stare at them for 6-10 hours a day.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#96

Post by wott » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 4:08 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #77

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're too busy dropping platforms support, dropping backends support, dropping 32-bit support... in the name of the burden of 'maintaining' code that works, is proven (on the field) and basically hasn't moved in 10 years.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#97

Post by city41 » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 4:09 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #77

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not really sure the developers are making these decisions. It's usually a project manager or someone in the role of deciding where to put money.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#98

Post by bsdubernerd » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 4:12 PM UTC

forgetfulness wrote: post #85

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…

I agree that theming was much more consistent a decade ago in linux-land. GTK2 + QT with GTK2-style would get you an almost seamless experience.

The "dark or light" theme we have today is an absolute joke by comparison.

Many Gtk-engines were also much faster in terms of pure rendering speed.

Another issue as mentioned is that per-control CSS skinning breaks easily with custom themes. Instead of using system colors devs often hard-code a custom look.

Finally, some programs go for a fully custom theme that doesn't even work properly without. Darktable is one example. Darktable looks cool, but a long time I had a hard time reading it's controls since it didn't respect system's font sizes nor it allowed to change it. The contrast was poor. It now comes with several themes, but nothing matches my system theme, which is more accessible.

As much as I love darktable, I'd skip the custom UI any day.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#99

Post by MayeulC » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 4:16 PM UTC

flohofwoe wrote: post #48

I want Linux-like anarchy^H^H^Hthemability on Windows and macOS. I'm not keen on tweaking the appearance of every little button, but I want to go 'theme-shopping' from time to time and change the appearance of my desktop. Just to make it look a bit different now and then. 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 aesthe…

> of course there's 99% trash

I'm offended. 99% of the number of desktop environments, or the installation, or the stylized installations?

As with everything artistic, the last is a matter of taste, and the more opinionated a visual design is, the more you are likely to disagree with it.

For the rest, please give names.. I've seen magnificients {i3, sway, KDE, GNOME, XFCE, cinnamon, etc}. ricing is a popular sport.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#100

Post by JohnBooty » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 4:17 PM UTC

    empowerment

Customizing themes and such -- was it really empowerment in any meaningful sense, though?

It was more like a really banal illusion of empowerment. Your Windows PC was locked down with all kinds of proprietary file formats and restrictive licenses, and wide open to malware. But hey, you could change the colors of your title bars and stuff. Was that really "empowerment?"

I mean, yes, changing your window colors is orthogonal to licenses and security and such. But despite fond memories, I can't see Windows 3.1 as "the good old days" no matter how hard I try.