Is Windows "themeable" anymore?
How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?
291–300 of 421 posts
Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?
#292Funny how the more the screenshots go back in history, the more 'useful' the UI looks like (even though they no longer adhere to the current fashion fad - which should actually be handled through a user-accessible themeing engine, no need to pay some UI designers big bucks to come up with rounded corners). For instance right in the first Task Manager screenshot, I have no clue what those tab icons on the left side ac…
> o need to pay some UI designers big bucks to come up with rounded corners). It’s really unfortunate how dismissive of the entire ui design profession so much of HN is. Not a great look IMO
Would you please care to point to something ACTUALLY useful to end users that came out of the W11 UI "redesign"?
Because you cannot legitimately look at the W11 task manager and tell me it was designed with any sort of professional UI/UX in mind. It's busy work to keep a job. And if it is then there's something deeply wrong where no UX theory is being applied, or they're being overruled to make it "app-y".
Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?
#293The codebase goes back to nearly 40 years. It would be more shocking if it there weren't legacy code hanging around. Windows is one of the most impressive pieces of software I have ever seen. No other platform boasts the kind of backwards compatibility that is seen in this operating system. There are shim layers on top of shim layers and the developers seem to have gone through great pains to keep the operating syste…
Doesn't Linux desktop (say Ubuntu) generally have strong backwards compatibility? There are issues occasionally, but no worse than trying to run Windows 9x apps on Win10+.
back compat is awful on Linux with the exception of the kernel. Unfortunately you need more than a stable kernel ABI to get proper back compatibility and the userland libs don't want to play ball.
Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?
#294Funny how the more the screenshots go back in history, the more 'useful' the UI looks like (even though they no longer adhere to the current fashion fad - which should actually be handled through a user-accessible themeing engine, no need to pay some UI designers big bucks to come up with rounded corners). For instance right in the first Task Manager screenshot, I have no clue what those tab icons on the left side ac…
> o need to pay some UI designers big bucks to come up with rounded corners). It’s really unfortunate how dismissive of the entire ui design profession so much of HN is. Not a great look IMO
The windows UI is not a great look either.
Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?
#295The bottom of the screen, I literally lol'd over the moreicons.dll and the STILL persistant Win3.1 MFC-ified file properties.
Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?
#296Funny how the more the screenshots go back in history, the more 'useful' the UI looks like (even though they no longer adhere to the current fashion fad - which should actually be handled through a user-accessible themeing engine, no need to pay some UI designers big bucks to come up with rounded corners). For instance right in the first Task Manager screenshot, I have no clue what those tab icons on the left side ac…
> o need to pay some UI designers big bucks to come up with rounded corners). It’s really unfortunate how dismissive of the entire ui design profession so much of HN is. Not a great look IMO
I don't know why it is so pervasive, but programmers think they are inherently good at UX/UI for some reason. And they are very possessive about it. I was until I married a designer, and they actually went to school to study visual composition, balance, color language, etc.
I'm fond of saying UIs designed by engineers look exactly like UIs designed by engineers. I'm not saying that all designers are always better than all programmers, but when you've studied visual composition, it shows.
I mean just look at the scorching replies you are getting. You definitely offended some people who fall into this "I know better than any stoopid artist" category.
Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?
#297The biggest setback in Windows UI was the "tabletization" of the UI (for the lack of a better word) introduced in Windows 8. IMO, this attempt at making Windows mobile friendly made a lot of compromises which made Windows worse for both mobile and desktop. And because Microsoft takes backward compatibility seriously (they have to, for their enterprise customers), the Windows UI ended up being this hot mess that we have today.
Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?
#298I have a bit of a perfectionistic tendency to 'start over' things over and over and do them again as perfectly as possible; the Windows side of MS feels like a corporate embodiment of this habit. They've done this sort of thing with app installers(setup.exe, click once, appv, msi, msix) and UI frameworks(win32, mfc, wpf, winui 2, winui 3). It's like the teams responsible for their respective product keep starting ove…
In fairness, MSIX is very different to MSI and ClickOnce was primarily a way to bootstrap MSIs from the web. MSI (long since deprecated) is essentially an ad-hoc relational database serialized to a file with embedded blobs that tells a generic engine how to install files and update the registry. It was written for Office in the 90s and was therefore dominated by the retail model of physically shipping CDs. MSIX is a…
MSIX is interesting but effectively unusable outside the Store (I spent a few months of my life trying to do that at $PREVIOUS_JOB). Installation will fail on a high percentage of machines, and you'll mostly be out of luck. There's a reason nobody at Microsoft uses it for installation outside the Store (Office did for a while but they gave up).
Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?
#299The codebase goes back to nearly 40 years. It would be more shocking if it there weren't legacy code hanging around. Windows is one of the most impressive pieces of software I have ever seen. No other platform boasts the kind of backwards compatibility that is seen in this operating system. There are shim layers on top of shim layers and the developers seem to have gone through great pains to keep the operating syste…
GTK and Gnome are almost 25 years old, and they're nowhere as messy as the Windows https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk
Not surprising. GTK and GNOME doesn't give a single f about backwards compatibility.
Re: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's fair when it comes to apps from random sources. But KDE apps all look consistent. I don't really use it, but it seems to me that Gnome apps also are consistent. Ditto for XFCE. Whereas Windows, even among out-of-the-box and "system" applications, there's a variety in the look & feel. Until 7 it was more or less the same. But starting with 10, it all went downhill, and 11 didn't really fix anything in that depa…
While I don't blame you for purging it from your memory, you seem to have forgotten about Windows 8. It introduced the Settings concept and who can forget that start menu!
It was never in my memory to begin with – since I've never used it. I don't use Windows a lot, just for games and occasionally at work. I went from 7 to 10.