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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

#311

Post by jefftk »

ant6n wrote: post #251
userbinator wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Auto-hiding elements are one of the worst trends in "modern" UIs. I've had countless times where I had to waste a lot of effort trying to find controls that were hidden and only appeared if you hovered for long enough in the right place. It reminds me of this amusing comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965293

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

I'm hoping that with websites having cumulative layout shift (https://web.dev/cls/) metrics considered in Google search ranking this will become less common?

(Discloseure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself)

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#312

Post by jefftk »

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…

> consistency was paramount, adherence to toolkit was extremely important just like Apple claimed.

That is not my memory. If you were careful to use just programs from KDE/Qt or GNOME/GTK, then this was about right, but every graphics toolkit had its own way of handling theming, and if you combined programs built with multiple graphics toolkits (additionally: Motif, Java, raw X) that would not respect your configuration.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#313

Post by indymike »

bmn__ wrote: post #263
indymike wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current KDE does a great job allowing for customization.

No, it is currently barely sufficient, certainly not great. The scrollbar in System Settings is impossible to customise (through the GUI). Tray icons and log-off dialogue icons and the task bar appearance cannot quickly or easily customised because due to "theme"ing changing one thing also changes the other. The maintainers screwed up and it was all downhill after version 3. Each major version introduced an incompati…

These are small losses compared to the complete lack of customization in say ios or modern Windows. Still KDE2 was very good.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#314

Post by derefr »

saagarjha wrote: post #293
derefr wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Momentum scrolling has a capped velocity†. Your velocity with momentum scrolling approximates a sigmoid. And the cap is far too low to actually get somewhere, if where you want to be is “somewhere in the last few chapters of a book” and you’re currently at the beginning.

Scroll bars, on the other hand are perfect for that kind of jump — where you don’t know what you’re looking for, but you know mostly where it is, and you’ll recognize it when you see it.

† There was a time, right when momentum scrolling was first introduced as a third-party mouse-driver feature ca. Windows 98, where it wasn’t capped. But that was a horrible UX: if something was really far down the document, then by the time you saw the thing you wanted to stop at, you would often be going far too fast and overshoot it by a lot, requiring almost as much scrolling back in the other direction. This first iteration of the feature basically expected people to understand how to “land” on a target using inertial, frictionless thrust. I imagine there were some future Kerbal Space Program players who enjoyed that, but most people didn’t.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#315

Post by derefr »

tomc1985 wrote: post #303
gsich wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know what you want - yes.

Read the Table of Contents and Jump to Page

Often what I’m looking for in a document is a particular image or diagram I remember seeing, embedded somewhere in e.g. a long journal paper or textbook. I know enough to know what section of the paper or book it’s in, but I haven’t a clue what exactly it was labelled, let alone what the specific context was. But I can picture the diagram, so I’ll know it when I see it again, whizzing by. I just don’t need to whiz by the entire document, because I can be sure I saw it “in the middle” or “near the end.”

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#316

Post by xnx »

jefftk wrote: post #310
rkagerer wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scrollwheels are also fantastic for giving you RSI. PgUp and PgDn are still my preferred mechanism for vertical panning. Once upon a time they even reliably moved you up or down a whole "screen" of content.

I've switched to a set of foot pedals, one for scrolling up and one for scrolling down, and it's great to be able to move around without doing anything at all with my hands.

What food pedals/controls do you use? This seems like an under-utilized input channel.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#317

Post by Can_Not »

coliveira wrote: post #165

The reason desktops were customizable in the 90s is that they followed strict GUI rules and used the same toolkits. Nowadays, apps want to have control of their UI to a higher degree, which makes it difficult to provide customization. The same applies to the web: since every app wants to have it own UI, there is no space for user-level customization.

Feels like we're living life after the fall of Rome.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#318

Post by jefftk »

xnx wrote: post #316
jefftk wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've switched to a set of foot pedals, one for scrolling up and one for scrolling down, and it's great to be able to move around without doing anything at all with my hands.

What food pedals/controls do you use? This seems like an under-utilized input channel.

Cheap ones: https://www.jefftk.com/p/how-to-set-up-foot-pedals

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#319

Post by noisem4ker »

msie wrote: post #241
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…

Loved the Windows 95 UI. I dream of hacking Windows to restore that look. I've tried WindowBlinds but they don't go far enough to change everything.

NTDEV - Transforming Windows 10 to Windows 2000 (SimpleClassicTheme) https://youtu.be/an842EXWfBg

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#320

Post by suifbwish »

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.

Have you spent much time talking to UI people? The position attracts a type of person that tends to ignore everything anyone around them says about what they like or dislike but then claim to know exactly what everyone wants in a UI
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