81–90 of 356 posts
Look at that subtle off-grey colouring, the tasteful thickness of it... What the hell happened to modern GUIs, man. We peaked in the 1990s.
People of this opinion will probably enjoy using the latest version of XFCE4 on a Linux or BSD environment.
It's "less terrible" than most other modern GUIs that waste space and are full of bubble shaped smooth looking jellybean UI elements.
This is awesome! I still love the look of the Finder from this era, and I love that this has the Window Shade extension turned on too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole system.. from the sizing of the borders and titlebars to the font and the menu density to the icon sizing, spacing, and design in general... All feels more coherent than anything today. It feels like it was sketched out by a small group of people and executed incredibly well. Meanwhile things today look more disjointed like the product of a lot of design-by-committee. Susan Kare's 'Chicago' in this renderin…
I'll be that guy... the system font for menus, etc in OS 8 and 9 is "Geneva" [EDIT: It's "Charcoal" , of course. Thanks for the heads up!]. It was "Chicago" up to and including System 7.x. I do agree on all other points :)
They look pretty similar but now that I look it them side by side I see it a bit.
As much as it is the style, it's also that kinda.. not-True-type still-a-bit-pixelated edges look that is the nostalgia factor, I guess.
Look at that subtle off-grey colouring, the tasteful thickness of it... What the hell happened to modern GUIs, man. We peaked in the 1990s.
Minimalism is a good thing for an OS as it really makes it easier to use.
Another thing to note: there’s a lot or duplication in modern software. For instance, each OS file browser has a search bar to help find files. But tragically, the browser also has one, and so do many websites in the browser. So we have a recursive, ever-expanding set of search bars—yuck.
And also tragically, so do many apps have built-in file browsers. Ideally there should be one mechanism to find things, one mechanism to organize things, etc. It should be simple but flexible, and apps shouldn’t have to roll their own, they should be able to gracefully use the one provided.
We’re at a weird point in software where the browser is basically the OS for many people. ChromeOS was an interesting thought but it’s more like a limited-feature OS designed to sell Google services.
We need to take a step back and kind of assess the situation more—and then make a nice little OS :)
Look at that subtle off-grey colouring, the tasteful thickness of it... What the hell happened to modern GUIs, man. We peaked in the 1990s.
As amazing as OSX seemed when it was launched, I partially blame OSX and the whole "make everything round and groovy and graphical goodness" trend that started us down the path of making GUI's 'form over function'.
This is bleeding over from OS into power-user-oriented software like CAD and engineering tools and most everyone hates it. The whole "lets take away buttons and make the ribbon icons bigger and more graphically pleasing" to make products look more modern is a cancer for power users and productive people who just want access to everything as best and fast as possible. It's a delicate balance that I do indeed believe peaked well over a decade ago.
Look at that subtle off-grey colouring, the tasteful thickness of it... What the hell happened to modern GUIs, man. We peaked in the 1990s.
Let's see Paul Allen's operating system.
It's a great reminder of how well MacOS 9 UI and UX were designed, and how space efficient the whole OS was on screen. Even the window handle bars were subtly shadowed, the window shadows evolved when they were collapsed. Like Windows 95 at the time, Mac OS 9 was a beautiful work of interaction design.
What a difference 26 years makes.