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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

#291

Post by J-Kuhn »

smilekzs wrote: post #266
ant6n wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Late-appearing elements are really annoying as well. They like appear under your mouse the moment you want to click on something.

Can second this. UI elements should not suddenly shift in place, unless interacted with or clearly communicated in advance (think a traffic light going yellow then red).

In the old days, the solution was simple - block the UI.

But nowadays - a background thread will search for the stuff that should appear in the UI, and adds that directly when it found something.

You can solve the problem by changing the mouse icon to the hourglass, blocking the UI for just enough time to not get any accidental clicks, and update it.

As side effect, every update now takes some time - so you have to minimize the number of updates.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#292

Post by myself248 »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #278
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…

> 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. Your vision probably is correct in most of the cases as people just misuse this,…

> the more elements you see the harder tha is to digest for your brain (attention).

If there were fewer elements _total_, okay I'd agree with you. But all the elements are there, just some of them are hidden, so they take _more_ time to remember how to reveal each one.

When they're all visible, you can use simple 2-D memory, and "reach for" the area that a given control is in, even before you've found it, because you know it's in that general area. Get the mouse moving there, find it, zero in on it.

When some of them are hidden, you have to remember which hiding place they're in (object permanence), then wiggle the mouse over in that area, wait for them to reveal themselves, then find the one you want, and start another motion to hit it.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#293

Post by saagarjha »

derefr wrote: post #253
inetknght wrote: post #203

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. 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.

Sounds like you aren't scrolling in large-enough documents. Scrollbars are pretty useless for exact positioning in a 5000-page PDF; and scrollwheels won't get you very far, either, unless you're willing to scroll for literal minutes.

Have you tried momentum scrolling?

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#294

Post by saagarjha »

drewzero1 wrote: post #27

When I first started playing around with OS X the appearance section of the control panel seemed unfinished, and I naively hoped they would add more color options in a future update. Nope, just aqua or grey! At the time I'd been using Internet Explorer for Mac and really wanted to see the color-configurable interface happen system-wide. I thought it made sense to let people set their interface colors to match the fru…

Intriguingly, this is one of the things Apple has recently made customizable…

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#295

Post by recursive »

shard wrote: post #282
ryanjshaw wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where is this feature available or implemented? I just tried in Chrome and Powerpoint, neither has this feature.

I've never seen an app that didn't have that feature. Chrome included. I don't have powerpoint around to test at the moment. I've been using this feature since the 90s, and I'd miss it sorely if it were to be disappeared.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#296

Post by saagarjha »

robin_reala wrote: post #15

This seems to fly directly against recently articles about the massive uptick in iOS customisation after 14 launched. The #ios14homescreen hashtag on Twitter seems extremely popular: https://twitter.com/hashtag/ios14homescreen

> massive uptick in iOS customization

Take a look at r/jailbreak.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#297

Post by saagarjha »

helmholtz wrote: post #61
armagon wrote: post #50

I'll agree, this is one of the things I don't like about macOS. It looks like in the past there were hacks to do this, but Apple broke them. (Similarly, I'm so glad there's a hint of colour in the sidebar in the Finder again; I hate when Apple says, "We've got two indistinguishable shades of grey; one for available, and one for inactive. You can take it, or you can take it.") As to the point about setting a desktop b…

I used to change my desktop background approximately once per afternoon. It was a disease. Modifying Gnome themes. Downloading custom launchers for Android. Tweaking the colors representing my calendars. All with good intentions, mind you. "This green mountain background will calm me down in the morning" etc. At some point, I realised that if I just take a deep breath, slow down, and accept that I can modify myself t…

You can adapt and move on. There's no need for everyone else to go with that, though.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#298

Post by saagarjha »

schwartzworld wrote: post #197
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.

The true Ooer experience is at https://old.reddit.com/r/Ooer/.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#299

Post by darkwinx »

shard wrote: post #282
ryanjshaw wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where is this feature available or implemented? I just tried in Chrome and Powerpoint, neither has this feature.

I try it just now and it works on Firefox & Window's File Explorer.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#300

Post by recursive »

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…

When Winamp first came out, everything was single core. Decoding mp3 took a significant bite out available CPU. Winamp was relatively efficient in CPU in RAM, especially compared to WMP.
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