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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

#221

Post by anigbrowl »

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.

Agreed. CSS is the worst thing to happen the web because it privileged advertising and designers over content and writers, and designers make more by going from client to client. Instead of the web being the world's library, it has ended up like an endless magazine stand, optimizing for sensationalist crap.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#222

Post by jug »

I think this is clouded by nostalgia in case it's implying greater customizability than today. It's little more customizable than Windows 10 which has both light and dark modes for even more than the chrome, it has colorizable title bars, and of course it has wallpapers. The accent colors can be customized to take effect on the start menu background, the task bar, and the title bars. This is how my desktop looks right now with merely two additions: TaskbarX for a centered task bar and Rainmeter for some "widgets": https://i.imgur.com/4qoxSkM.png

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#223

Post by sp332 »

dingaling wrote: post #211
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.

Windows: Disable "Automatically hide scrollbars in Windows".

Mac: General Preferences has an option "Show scroll bars" which you can set to "Always".

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#224

Post by chungy »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #23
HelloNurse wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that Windows 10 themes are a severe security/malware hazard, not a customization of harmless graphical elements.

Eh? Windows 10 themes are just wallpaper packs and a defined accent color. I assume you’re referring to UxStyle etc as used since Windows XP? That doesn’t involve loading any executable code (unless there’s an RCE vulnerability in the theme resource loader, I suppose) - patching the signature checks in UxTheme.dll isn’t that big a deal, imo.

Windows XP themes are PE binaries. They totally run executable code.

This might even be the main reason that the operating system as-is only allowed themes signed by Microsoft.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#225

Post by anigbrowl »

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…

This has been bugging me for years. I was having a much better user experience ~20 years ago with Enlightenment desktop on top of Gnome or a lightweight window manager.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#226

Post by kiawe_fire »

cycloptic wrote: post #201
kiawe_fire wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. After years of using MacOS, I made a commitment this year to use, support, and develop for Linux on a regular basis. Starting off with little knowledge of GTK, I progressed from "hello world" to working on my first app, but end user customization has always…

For whatever reason this is not well documented, but all the theme's colors are available with a special syntax in the CSS: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/blob/master/gtk/theme/A... So for example you should be using this to use the user's foreground and background color: color: @theme_fg_color; background-color: @theme_bg_color; You can use some modifier functions on those colors too to compute additional colo…

Thanks for the pointers, this is very helpful!

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#227

Post by crysin »

inetknght wrote: post #203
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. That's funny. I use them in the exact opposite way. When I want exact positioning then I will use the scrollbar. When I want to scroll past pages and pages, I will just fling the scrollwheel.

I think it's dependent on your mouse too. Personally I only use mice that have a click wheel, I absolutely hate free-spinning scroll wheels.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#228

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

sp332 wrote: post #223
dingaling wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Windows: Disable "Automatically hide scrollbars in Windows". Mac: General Preferences has an option "Show scroll bars" which you can set to "Always".

The Mac setting does not seem to work for all applications.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#229

Post by crysin »

function_seven wrote: post #220
wtallis wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whats worse is when a website has a footer but they have a never-ending scroll div between the header and footer so as you approach the footer more content loads pushing the footer even further down.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#230

Post by sp332 »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #228
sp332 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows: Disable "Automatically hide scrollbars in Windows". Mac: General Preferences has an option "Show scroll bars" which you can set to "Always".

The Mac setting does not seem to work for all applications.

Right, anything that's just mimicking the default without checking this setting is going to be stuck. Also anything more custom, like websites that override scroll behavior.
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