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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

#211

Post by dingaling »

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 really irks me are the autohiding scrollbars, especially when working over a VNC connection and I have to wait for them to fade-in over a 3000km link

Give me scrollbars and keep them visible please.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#212

Post by deckard1 »

jonpurdy wrote: post #121
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.

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.

> As a user, if an app doesn't have a native UI, I disregard it

I disagree rather strongly with this. You should use the UI elements that make sense. It doesn't make sense for Maya or Blender or Photoshop to constrain themselves to whatever Microsoft picked out for them to use. The palette of native widgets and native UX methods is woeful across all systems. It's constrained to the set of generic elements which are applicable to some theoretical business application, like Word or Excel (which, I must point out, could neither be implemented fully in terms of native UI widgets alone).

> If an app can't survive on its usefulness alone, it probably shouldn't exist.

Form follows function. And I would argue the opposite of the point you're making: if an app can exist purely in terms of native UI widgets, does it even need to exist? I can think of almost no useful apps outside of basic utility apps (file copying, patching, app installers, etc.) that are useful and fully native UI.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#213

Post by masswerk »

tambourine_man wrote: post #126

The epitome of theming was on with Kaleidoscope. You could not only change colors, but the complete shape of every widget. And there were a few very tasteful themes, among the ocean of crazyness one would expect. This Twitter handle shows what was possible on early OS X: https://twitter.com/osxthemes Web Archive's page: https://web.archive.org/web/20050216050114/http://www.kaleid...

Kaleidoscope 2 was really great. Technically, it was a more accessible frontend to the built-in Theme Manager of OS8 and OS9, and it facilitate some radical theming.

Here are some of my own Kaleidoscope schemes (still available as free downloads): https://www.masswerk.at/schemes

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#214

Post by ryanjshaw »

indymike wrote: post #202
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.

1. Position of elevator (the little thumb you traditionally drag up or down) shows where I'm at relative to the beginning and end of the content. 2. Size of elevator in relation to the scrollbar tells me what percentage of the content is viewable (except when the size of the elevator becomes so small it makes it unusable). 3. Up and down buttons allow a simple way to bring the next or previous item into view. A lot o…

Don't forget the near religious debate that is scrollbar snapback: skim a document backwards to review an earlier point, or forwards to determine if it's worth further time investment, and then release the mouse button outside the scroll area so that you can snapback and continue where you left off.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#215

Post by wtallis »

indymike wrote: post #202
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.

1. Position of elevator (the little thumb you traditionally drag up or down) shows where I'm at relative to the beginning and end of the content. 2. Size of elevator in relation to the scrollbar tells me what percentage of the content is viewable (except when the size of the elevator becomes so small it makes it unusable). 3. Up and down buttons allow a simple way to bring the next or previous item into view. A lot o…

Your list is missing an entry:

0. The existence of a scrollbar tells you there's something to be scrolled.

Flat UIs are pretty good at accidentally hiding the fact that not all of the content fits on screen on in whatever borderless frame.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#216

Post by alexvoda »

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 among others. But this is actually the only one retained by current simplified, slimmed and autohiding scrollbars.

Here are others:

-Discoverability: Is there more content? (Scrollbar enabled/disabled) How much? (Size of scrollbar)

-Jumping to a location in the content

-Skimming by hyperfast scrolling

-Coasting by holding a scroll button pressed (this one is forever lost because the buttons have been abolished

-Providing a space for bookmark indicators/in-page search result indicators

There are probably other use cases too.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#217

Post by forgetfulness »

deckard1 wrote: post #200
forgetfulness wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

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

I don't know man, it's what I saw as more and more people came to Ubuntu with Windows Vista flopping, and they came with expectations of a flashy UX and a dynamic growth of the platform. Lots of theming, lots of hopeful mockups and GTK+ struggling to support transparency as theming engines hacked it in, the race to incorporate compositing and having everyone's graphics cards actually work.

I get it that there was a lull during the transition between GNOME 2 and GNOME 1, many of the myriad themes you found on repos in 2005 were ports of GTK 1.X themes, no more. But the influx of Windows users injected a lot of vitality into the theming scene.

> 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!

Precisely, long-since retired technology. The Windows XP era lasted 8 long years, as people for the most part skipped Vista. It just wasn't very prominent and crazy custom UIs were rampant.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#218

Post by anigbrowl »

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.

My time is valuable. How much more of this do I have to read? That's the question scrollbars answer.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#219

Post by Lopiolis »

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.

Scrollbars are all about physicality. We are creatures fundamentally rooted in a physical world and we think in ways that are deeply connected to spatial properties of the things we interact with. Scrollbars reflect many of these properties in a natural way on a limited 2D plane (as demonstrated by all the other comments). Mouse wheels aren't able to replace that function in any way. It's not their purpose.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#220

Post by function_seven »

wtallis wrote: post #215
indymike wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Position of elevator (the little thumb you traditionally drag up or down) shows where I'm at relative to the beginning and end of the content. 2. Size of elevator in relation to the scrollbar tells me what percentage of the content is viewable (except when the size of the elevator becomes so small it makes it unusable). 3. Up and down buttons allow a simple way to bring the next or previous item into view. A lot o…

Your list is missing an entry: 0. The existence of a scrollbar tells you there's something to be scrolled. Flat UIs are pretty good at accidentally hiding the fact that not all of the content fits on screen on in whatever borderless frame.

It's always fun when the content layout naturally fits into the viewport in such a way to make it look like there's nothing down below.

Also fun when websites that are waging their holy war against the bars don't anticipate that I'm zoomed in a bit. Having to delve into devtools to disable "overflow: hidden" is a delight.

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