141–150 of 333 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sure, it's not an effect of themes, for sure. It's everything from, code for all my personal projects are in a git repo somewhere online, important personal media are backed up in the cloud or external drives, text chat history are backed up in some app or in the cloud, music is listened to on some app, etc. So much so that if a laptop of mine is bricked randomly one day, I don't suffer much of a loss (other than spending the money to get a new one).
Back in the 90s or early 00s, it would've been catastrophic to lose a computer. I would have had so many personal files of all kinds, customizations of all kinds, that would be lost. Nowadays, a machine is mostly disposable. If one is lost, I simply get a new one, and all my stuff is online or accessible somewhere. I no longer think of my computer as a prized possession I can't lose, but rather just another tool.
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.
As a Technical PM, I fought against a former boss when they wanted to forego native controls because they wanted their app to be branded, because without a custom look they felt that their app would not be unique and memorable. If an app can't survive on its usefulness alone, it probably shouldn't exist. As a user, if an app doesn't have a native UI, I disregard it unless I need it for a specific and mandatory use.
On the flip side I want me email client, my desktop authoring tools and admin tools to all look and act the same.
You renner the times where in a browser one picked colors and font for background, text and links and many sites followed those choices? Now one has to spent time to tweak the Userstyle By finding the right CSS classes and things to change ...
Still has settings in firefox. Right on the first page of options too.
Here's one counterpoint, that doesn't necessarily argue against the author (I love Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 theming btw!) -- diminishing ownership of the computer experience over the years gave me one great benefit, that is I'm much less reliant/tethered to everything on my computer. Sure, it's not an effect of themes, for sure. It's everything from, code for all my personal projects are in a git repo somewhere onl…
The diminishing ownership of ones's computer only makes your data more linked into your device and the device's manufacturer. We are lucky in that desktops are still free enough that this isn't a problem, but there is severe loss of data when one loses mobile devices, for example.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a Technical PM, I fought against a former boss when they wanted to forego native controls because they wanted their app to be branded, because without a custom look they felt that their app would not be unique and memorable. If an app can't survive on its usefulness alone, it probably shouldn't exist. As a user, if an app doesn't have a native UI, I disregard it unless I need it for a specific and mandatory use.
I believe Winamp became so popular because it had such a unique UI, that was also incredibly customizable. Compare that to Windows media player at the time... On the flip side I want me email client, my desktop authoring tools and admin tools to all look and act the same.
(The blue/grey theme that came later was far less performant; I mean the original dark green/black theme.)
And WinAmp would open & play literally any format under the sun. WMP was limited to something like MP3 and WMA. (And maybe WAV.)
IMO "theming" and customizing visual appearance is alive and well. But it's moved to higher layers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't get where you think that I am claiming these operating systems lack accessibility features. That's an invention of yours. Because you're ranting about operating systems not being accessible, there's only 3 possible options, Windows, Linux or macOS.
No, that is not what I'm saying. I'm saying that this kind of configurability acts as an additional accessibility feature, and further could probably serve as a replacement for bespoke accessibility features these operating systems do have (like "dark mode" vs "light mode").
However nobody has explained how they offer an accessibility benefit for any actual condition that isn’t covered by the existing accessibility features.
It would be good if someone could actually point to an example of this. Otherwise it really is just speculation.
General configurability of themes is definitely not a substitute for bespoke accessibility features, even though it might be a workaround in some cases.