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Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

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Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

#41

Post by exiguus »

metadat wrote: post #5

This looks nice and easy to use. My hypothesis is today's "modern" OS user interfaces are objectively worse from a usability perspective, obfuscating key functionality behind layers of confusing menus. It reminds me of these "OS popularity since the 70s" time lapse views: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cTKhqtll5cQ The dominance of Windows is crazy, even today, Mac desktops and laptops are comparatively niche

What do you mean exactly? Like the Menu-Issues in Windows 10? Because from a UX perspective, basically nothing has change. UI of course, but UX is the same like in the 90's following "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald A.

I think its more about the change management, expectations. For example in Win XP you had the option to use the NT theme. As a user: "I can decide when to move on to the new design."

Usually around 50% of your users are conservative about change. You have to keep this in mind when u change design. On the other hand, if you sell a product with subscription, you have to introduce new feature, else user will move to another product. But, when you introduce new feature, UI gets more complicated and user will blame you for that.

Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

#43

Post by cosmic_cheese »

voidfunc wrote: post #13
metadat wrote: post #5

This looks nice and easy to use. My hypothesis is today's "modern" OS user interfaces are objectively worse from a usability perspective, obfuscating key functionality behind layers of confusing menus. It reminds me of these "OS popularity since the 70s" time lapse views: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cTKhqtll5cQ The dominance of Windows is crazy, even today, Mac desktops and laptops are comparatively niche

I got in an argument with an accessibility engineer about this recently... The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability.

It’s a completely predictable result if you think about it.

Old style UI was developed with the findings of countless man-hours of UX research performed by field experts, while branded UI is typically whipped together purely based on trends and vibes in an evening by a visual designer who’s probably never performed an ounce of serious research or user trials. It’s natural that the latter is only going to be good at the most superficial of purposes. UI as branding is the McMansion of UX.

Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

#45

Post by herrherrmann »

This looks great with some apps that have matching themes, but I wonder if it quickly falls apart once you rely on apps with very non-consistent UIs (audio/video software, Discord, Spotify, Slack, and basically all other Electron-based apps). Although I guess there might be some matching CSS injection hacks available for the Electron ones?

Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

#47

Post by j45 »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #36
metadat wrote: post #5

This looks nice and easy to use. My hypothesis is today's "modern" OS user interfaces are objectively worse from a usability perspective, obfuscating key functionality behind layers of confusing menus. It reminds me of these "OS popularity since the 70s" time lapse views: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cTKhqtll5cQ The dominance of Windows is crazy, even today, Mac desktops and laptops are comparatively niche

> This looks nice These kinds of things almost always give me an uncanny-valley feeling. Here I'm looking at the screenshot and can’t help noticing that the taskbar buttons are too close to the taskbar’s edge, the window titles are too narrow, the folders are too yellow, and so on and so forth. (To its credit, Wine is the one exception that is not susceptible to this, even when configured to use a higher DPI value so…

Someone having spend too much time using the original replicating it would likely notice these things.

Still it is hopefully a nice introduction for some.

Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

#48

Post by dfox »

doright wrote: post #19

I like themes like this. The only thing that hampers the authenticity for me, and this isn't the fault of the author really, is the super high resolution fonts compared to what was available back then. There's just something charming about low resolution fonts that are readable enough on screen, probably nostalgia. I think any type of pixel font authentic to a couple decades ago won't look good on a 4K monitor, unfor…

Another issue with modern recreations of old UIs is that the dimensions are usually subtly wrong, which for me ruins the feeling. Some of that is related to the fonts having different height, but in many cases it is just that something is one-pixel off and just looks wrong. For the 95-style UI the common issue are control borders (especially the high-light side of "3d" controls), of which there is a huge amount of examples on the screenshot.

Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

#49

Post by cosmic_cheese »

esafak wrote: post #18
metadat wrote: post #5

This looks nice and easy to use. My hypothesis is today's "modern" OS user interfaces are objectively worse from a usability perspective, obfuscating key functionality behind layers of confusing menus. It reminds me of these "OS popularity since the 70s" time lapse views: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cTKhqtll5cQ The dominance of Windows is crazy, even today, Mac desktops and laptops are comparatively niche

Microsoft Windows programs hid functionality under layers of menus and the registry. MacOS, at least, surfaces much less functionality, because it offers sensible defaults. I never had to do anything akin to fiddling with the Windows Registry. I did like some Windows things, though, like the ribbon, and reconfigurable UIs. Today's UIs are more immutable, for the worse.

It’s not a 1:1 mapping, but much power user functionality in macOS is designed to progressively reveal itself as the user becomes more technically capable, a type of design known as progressive disclosure. This allows newbies to not feel overwhelmed while also allowing power users to feel at home.

The problem is that way too many people approach macOS with the Windows way of doing things firmly planted in their minds as “correct”, which interferes with this process. For example, over the years I’ve encountered numerous posters complaining about how macOS can’t do X thing, after which I point out that X thing is right there as an easy to find top level menu item, but the poster in question never bothered to take a look around and just assumed the functionality didn’t exist since it wasn’t surfaced the same way as under Windows or KDE or whatever they were coming from.

Of course there are things macOS just doesn’t do, but there’s plenty that it does if users are willing to set their preconceptions aside for a moment.

Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

#50

Post by cosmic_cheese »

diggan wrote: post #37
esafak wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Windows programs hid functionality under layers of menus and the registry. MacOS, at least, surfaces much less functionality, because it offers sensible defaults. I never had to do anything akin to fiddling with the Windows Registry. I did like some Windows things, though, like the ribbon, and reconfigurable UIs. Today's UIs are more immutable, for the worse.

> I never had to do anything akin to fiddling with the Windows Registry If I recall correctly, when I got my first Macbook, I had to edit plist files or something similar in order to do basic things like permanently showing hidden files, showing the full path in Finder, show file extensions for all file types, increase the animation speed so the computer didn't feel slow as molasses, etc, etc. Maybe these things are…

Toggling hidden file visibility in Finder and open/save dialogs has been doable with the key shortcut Command-Shift-. for quite some time now.
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