Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment • Hacker News Board

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#191

Post by RedShift1 » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 8:12 PM UTC

deathanatos wrote: post #147

CodeGlitch wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps partly, but the UI was also useful compared to WMP. WMP was slow, bulky, and took up lots of screen real estate. WinAmp, while it was themed, was slim , but also packed far more control into a tinier space than WMP. (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 somet…

WMP plays anything the system has a codec for.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#192

Post by tsukikage » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 8:12 PM UTC

jart wrote: post #185

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #175

Good Lord, just give me control over the appearance of scrollbars again. Was there some international UI/UX meeting where they declared a holy war on scrollbars? Seems like everyone is trying to make them disappear like they're an embarrassing and unwelcome distant relative they're passive aggressively trying to make go away.

What is the use case for scroll bars, now that we have mouse wheels? Progress indication? My view is that content is king and any UI element that needlessly takes away space from the content needs to be destroyed.

Being able to click to go directly some porportion of the way through then fine tune, instead of having to scroll through all the intervening space.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#193

Post by ChuckNorris89 » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 8:13 PM UTC

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #175

Good Lord, just give me control over the appearance of scrollbars again. Was there some international UI/UX meeting where they declared a holy war on scrollbars? Seems like everyone is trying to make them disappear like they're an embarrassing and unwelcome distant relative they're passive aggressively trying to make go away.

Scroolbars are useful for making large coarse leaps within a page in an instant, while scroll wheels are good for accurate positioning over short distances.

But please. just stop making everything flat ffs. On the GUIs of old, you knew straight away what you could interact with, while now, everything is so flat or hidden away that everything blends together, I have no idea what I can click on and what's static unless I used the app before.

Best example, compare Windows 95/2000/XP to 8/10.

Also, please stop with the auto-hiding bs. Sometimes I have to do a brute force sweep of the GUI with the cursor to trigger some elements to pop up from where they were hiding. WTF?! This would have made more sense 20-30 years ago when displays were running at 640x480 so real estate was precious, but now FullHD is the entry level norm.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#194

Post by Swenrekcah » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 8:13 PM UTC

jart wrote: post #185

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #175

Good Lord, just give me control over the appearance of scrollbars again. Was there some international UI/UX meeting where they declared a holy war on scrollbars? Seems like everyone is trying to make them disappear like they're an embarrassing and unwelcome distant relative they're passive aggressively trying to make go away.

What is the use case for scroll bars, now that we have mouse wheels? Progress indication? My view is that content is king and any UI element that needlessly takes away space from the content needs to be destroyed.

I can’t figure out if this is parody or not.

In case it isn’t, scroll bars are for quickly figuring out the scope, for quick positioning and for remembering where in the article things are.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#195

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 8:14 PM UTC

core-questions wrote: post #188

jart wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the use case for scroll bars, now that we have mouse wheels? Progress indication? My view is that content is king and any UI element that needlessly takes away space from the content needs to be destroyed.

> now that we have mouse wheels? * Horizontal scrolling * Scrolling when using pen/touch input on non-touch UIs * Making it obvious that a content area is scrollable * Providing context into how much content is visible vs. hidden, and where you are in the document * Making it easy to scroll to a precise location without sitting there twiddling the wheel for minutes to go through something long > My view is that conte…

[deleted]

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#196

Post by zbrozek » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 8:18 PM UTC

jart wrote: post #185

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #175

Good Lord, just give me control over the appearance of scrollbars again. Was there some international UI/UX meeting where they declared a holy war on scrollbars? Seems like everyone is trying to make them disappear like they're an embarrassing and unwelcome distant relative they're passive aggressively trying to make go away.

What is the use case for scroll bars, now that we have mouse wheels? Progress indication? My view is that content is king and any UI element that needlessly takes away space from the content needs to be destroyed.

Progress indication and scrollability indication. I'd actually like to see scrollbars enhanced rather than diminished. So for example I would love to see indicators of headings or breaks or page bookmarks. The latter could even be clickable.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#197

Post by schwartzworld » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 8:21 PM UTC

at_a_remove wrote: post #186

I am torn on this. On one hand, these kinds of choices made MySpace very popular. At the same time, they could make particular pages almost unreadable. And certainly in the Windows 3.1 days I was occasionally called to "fix" when someone had made a near contrastless color scheme and couldn't figure how to get out of it. Aside from issues of taste -- and Christmas season is the perfect time to look around at people's…

> At the same time, they could make particular pages almost unreadable.

That's part of the fun of having your own page. Your aesthetic can be whatever you want, including "borderline unreadable".

https://www.reddit.com/r/Ooer/ is a great example of prioritizing form over function ad absurdum.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#198

Post by kube-system » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 8:24 PM UTC

nickjj wrote: post #101

Back in Windows 98 you could set your title bar to be a gradient between 2 colors. That used to be a fun way to customize your look. How did we get into a world where 20 years later with Windows 10 you can't even set a dark title bar color because Windows will say "that color is not supported". There's a cut off when picking a custom color where if you go below a certain shade of darkness it denies you.

Text visibility? IIRC, Windows 9x would allow you set text and the background to the same color.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#199

Post by mssdvd » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 8:25 PM UTC

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #175

Good Lord, just give me control over the appearance of scrollbars again. Was there some international UI/UX meeting where they declared a holy war on scrollbars? Seems like everyone is trying to make them disappear like they're an embarrassing and unwelcome distant relative they're passive aggressively trying to make go away.

And at the same time modern ui have much bigger element to accommodate touchscreens.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#200

Post by deckard1 » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 8:30 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…

> Theming was HUGE in Linux back in 2005-2010

Eh? Theming was fizzling out by 2005, which starts to correspond to the rise of OS X and Macbooks.

Enlightenment came out in 1997 and was all about theming. But theming predated E by a few years already. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_(software)

This is what I would call the "golden years" for Linux theming. Late '90s to early 2000s.

> Windows look and feel was never really a thing, nor was theming because of the same thing.

I mean. Did you even read the article you're commenting on? Windows 3.11 had themes. Windows 95 had Microsoft Plus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Plus!

> Then GNOME 3.0 came and they went for the consistently branded experience approach

This happened way before GNOME 3 was a thing. GNOME 2, Xfce, and others stopped their obsession with Windows and started thinking about OS X, which was eating the desktop UNIX lunch.