Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment • Hacker News Board

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#151

Post by mschaef » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 6:14 PM UTC

afandian wrote: post #28

RISC OS 3.11 (which was approximately contemporaneous) went a step further and allowed users to define the system palette LUT arbitrarily using the !Palette utility. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/riscos311#appearanc...

> RISC OS ... allowed users to define the system palette LUT arbitrarily

For 8-bpp LUT graphics, Windows 3.x had a palette negotiation mechanism in the API that reserved 20 color entries to the OS and let the focused app control the remaining 236. Applications that weren't focused got a combination of whatever was left over and dithering to fill in the gaps. (In 4-bpp modes, the palette was entirely fixed.)

This wasn't necessarily a bad solution to limited hardware, but non-LUT modes with 16 bits of depth were a huge, huge improvement once they were available.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#152

Post by mschaef » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 6:16 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.

> won't bother to change the wallpaper on their desktop.

I use OSX and enjoy the fact that the wallpapers are dynamic with the time of day. Any photos I'd use myself don't do that, and I don't see much of the background anyway.

(This is a far cry from the days when I remember skipping wallpaper to save on memory, etc.)

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#153

Post by cutitout » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

godot wrote: post #142

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…

I use FreeFileSync to synchronize my Thunderbird and Firefox Profiles, KeepassXC files, web server stuff etc. I also prefer portable applications that keep their preferences in their own folders. So I also don't mind if a machine randomly dies, but I still have all my stuff locally, plus backups, and what I upload is always a copy. Other than stuff that lives on chat servers or social media, of course, Soundcloud and YouTube playlists -- but that stuff, but that stuff will go away sooner than the files I have locally. Stuff that lives elsewhere is just a way to interact with others and show them things, not the keeper of anything that matters to me.

The downside is that I can't just change machines nilly-willy, I need to sync first, at least if things overlap. For example, I can use one Firefox profile on one machine, another on a second machine, and use Thunderbird on a third, but I can't use the same profile on several machines without getting a merge conflict, so to speak. That was confusing and annoying for like a week, since then it's not been a problem, and by now I'm so pampered by it, I simply avoid stuff that doesn't play nicely with my workflow. Smartphone apps, for example, or programs that doesn't allow me to configure the paths it uses, and so on.

Since I use applications and work on data, the OS doesn't that matter much. I mind changing Windows from the ass-backwards defaults much less than sticking with the defaults, and I do that as I go along, i.e. when I use a feature or get annoyed by the default, I just change it. That doesn't require any thought and very little time, so the configuration I would have to repeat on a new system isn't something I consider valuable, I'm pretty sure it takes much less time in total than working with the default config, in the long run. If I had to do it more often than every once in a blue moon, I'd find ways to automate it.

I am just not interested in something that could go away based on the decision of some pointy-haired boss, which is tends to be inferior software in the first place, anyway. Like, compare Directory Opus with Windows Explorer, one is a serious application, the other is a toy that constantly gets in your way.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#154

Post by recursive » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 6:24 PM UTC

johannes1234321 wrote: post #144

recursive wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still has settings in firefox. Right on the first page of options too.

Which are mostly useless, since "everybody" has CSS on their site ...

I sometimes use it to detect when someone sets foreground/background without setting them both.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#155

Post by mixedCase » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 6:27 PM UTC

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,…

People customize their physical working space and tools as a way to help maintain a sense of ownership to the work they do. It helps with morale.

It's fine if you think of work as a soul-sucking activity, but not everyone feels they have to hate their work or that it's not a part of their identity. Even for those who do dislike/hate their work, these small things can help them cope with the toil.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#156

Post by kitsunesoba » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 6:30 PM UTC

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.

Kaleidoscope is by far the best implementation of system theming I've used. A single file was responsible for the appearance of window chrome, window controls, control and text colors, fonts, desktop icons, cursor, text selection color, etc.

Furthermore, the schemes were free to rearrange and reshape window chrome as the artist pleased, meaning it was possible to do things like have a titlebar on the bottom of the window or to make the titlebar into a vertical tab that hung off the left or right edges of the window. Heck, it was even possible to make windows take on odd, non-square shapes. The results weren't always practical, but it was a great enabler of creativity, and made for probably the most true-to-the original OS themes on any platform.

The only thing that even comes close is probably WinXP/Win7 msstyles, but even those have significant limitations compared to Kaleidoscope. Some arrangements of Linux desktops come close from a technical perspective, but suffer from the customizability being divided into 500 small pieces, making it a bit arduous to get everything to match up.

EDIT: One other thing — Kaleidoscope had something unique that I have yet to see replicated elsewhere: there was no installation process for schemes. You could keep your schemes wherever you pleased, and switching them was as simple as navigating to the desired scheme in Finder and double-clicking it. Boom, done. No obscure and/or hidden directories to copy things to, no incantations to make them show up in a control panel. More things could use that classic Mac flavor of simplicity.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#157

Post by Koshkin » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 6:31 PM UTC

HeckFeck wrote: post #139

I recently set out to try a simpler window manager and custom desktop on Linux. This led me to discover Fluxbox. The sheer variety of themes for that WM is unfathomable. Enough to suit anyone for a lifetime. The go-to source for Fluxbox themes: https://tenr.de/styles/ (currently down, hopefully not permanently) Mirror: http://web.archive.org/web/20201019233308/https://tenr.de/st... Nothing has this same variety today…

There's also FVWM with its Windows 95 theme:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FVWM95

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#158

Post by tomcam » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 6:32 PM UTC

petepete wrote: post #35

qwerty456127 wrote: post #25

I wish there were real high-quality Linux and Windows themes imitating Windows 3.x, 98 and XP (and some other old OSes perhaps) realistically, not just "kind of like that". I would even pay money for such if I were satisfied. Ideally, they should also be easy to combine in different ways. E.g. I want Win3.11 pixel art icons, Win98 window&panel styles and WinXP non-antialiased fonts - these 3 things make me feel orgas…

Have you tried Chicago 95? https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

That’s dope AF, thanks

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#159

Post by tomcam » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 6:33 PM UTC

thisisauserid wrote: post #114

I fun prank used to be setting someone's color scheme to black on black with black highlights. It didn't work as well on later versions of windows because the button highlights were always visible. In 3.1 you'd have to guess where the buttons even were.

How did you restore it, you monster?

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#160

Post by nitrogen » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 6:33 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #111

bsdubernerd wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

> 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. Ironically, you used to be able to use system colors via CSS. Like it usually happens on the web, that feature was also removed because of security reasons - apparently it made it easier for scammers to render fake system popups.

Some UI toolkits use CSS or CSS-like styles for native widgets, hopefully those can still access system colors.