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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

#81

Post by spacedcowboy »

rbanffy wrote: post #3

How cute… imagine my childhood home would have a computer with a graphical desktop… I feel so old now…

Yeah. My first computer I soldered the chips/resistors/capacitors/etc to the PCB... It had 1K of RAM, and the screen memory had to come out of that too...

Someone wrote chess for it.

[aside] It was a Sinclair ZX-81, and I was 11 at the time. My parents bought the kit and a second-hand black & white TV with a dial-tuner (no pushbuttons to change the channel) as an Xmas present ...

I loved the TV, it was my TV when we only had one other in the house. I watched everything on that TV (even snooker and swore I could tell which ball was which)... After a couple of months, my dad started to get annoyed I'd not bothered to build the computer, so I was dispatched to the shed to build it.

A few days later (hey, I was in school), the thing worked and I was working my way through the (rather excellent) manual that came with it, getting to know it. One of the logic chapters had an example:

[P]RINT 1+1=2

(It was tokenised input, so you just pressed P and PRINT would come up in the built-in BASIC). Anyone here can see that the answer would be logical-true because 1+1 does equal 2, and indeed the computer printed "1" on the next line.

Anyway, flush with this futuristic knowledge, I set it all up using the family TV in the lounge, and we went through the same thing, just to prove to everyone that it worked...

[P]RINT 1+1=2

1

"I knew it. You've buggered it", said my dad in disgust as he got up and walked out the room. I tried to explain the (new to me) concept of logical truth to him and how the computer represented it, but I don't think he ever really believed me...

[/aside]

Anyway, that Sinclair ZX81 fundamentally changed my life. Computers and computing opened up a whole new world. Some 45 years later I'm about to retire from Apple as one of their most senior engineers, having been here for the last 20 years. Anyone with any Apple device is running some of the software I've written over the years which is kind of cool, but it's time to bow out.

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

#82

Post by exiguus »

zozbot234 wrote: post #77
exiguus wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, thats bad. And for example the "icon only" thing follows a bad but hip UI pattern where designers assume the knowledge of the icon meaning of the user. They should not in my opinion. I mean, in the end, you can decide. 1. To learn all this new patterns in windows. or 2. Move on to another, more stable window environment like gnome or KDE or whatever. In the end, its all about the effort for now and on the lo…

The 'icon only' thing is less of a problem when you can hover your mouse pointer on the icon and get a tooltip that tells you what it's for.

No no no. That's bad, relay bad because this involves at minimum 2 unnecessary steps:

1. touch the mouse (if not already) 2. move the mouse to the button 3. wait until the tool tip appears

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

#84

Post by cenamus »

hyperbrainer wrote: post #32
voidfunc wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's interesting especially because it seems like companies today pour tens of millions into "accessibility", but I never see a thing's usability in terms of simple and easy-to-do-what-I-want UX fall in to the same category.

Even just simple UX testing with people that have never seen or used your software seems to be a lost art.

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

#85

Post by bri3d »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #43
voidfunc wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I think it’s worse from a time wasting standpoint, really - a lot of modern UX does have thousands of hours of UX research dumped into it, but with faulty metrics driven goal seeking and internal politics bolted on. I agree that Vibe Branding killed UX in the way you describe in the 2000s (remember when every company had some abominable Flash site?!), but now, we’ve come full circle: from the ashes we’ve allowed warring factions of UX researchers to return to create hundreds of carefully constructed disparate systems with no consistency.

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

#86

Post by exiguus »

zozbot234 wrote: post #77
exiguus wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, thats bad. And for example the "icon only" thing follows a bad but hip UI pattern where designers assume the knowledge of the icon meaning of the user. They should not in my opinion. I mean, in the end, you can decide. 1. To learn all this new patterns in windows. or 2. Move on to another, more stable window environment like gnome or KDE or whatever. In the end, its all about the effort for now and on the lo…

The 'icon only' thing is less of a problem when you can hover your mouse pointer on the icon and get a tooltip that tells you what it's for.

There is also a very good example about this in The Design of Everyday Things - the one with the revolver doors.

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

#87

Post by cosmic_cheese »

exiguus wrote: post #79
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

macOS allows third-party drivers too, Apple just wants vendors to write them in userspace rather than kernelspace. That’s probably not the worst thing, because proprietary driver code is notoriously shoddy and should be run somewhere that limits the blast radius.

Sure, i think the userspace restriction is also the reason, that nearly no 3rd-party hardware for Mac exist.

That’s mainly restricted to graphics cards. Audio cards like used for production as well as I/O (USB, etc) and networking cards have drivers and work fine given you have a PCI-E slot to plug them into, and of course almost anything external connected via USB or Thunderbolt works fine. For GPUs, it’s only a specific subset of users that needs a discrete GPU, especially as the GPU built into M-series SoCs has become powerful enough for most uses outside of high-end gaming.

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

#88

Post by mananaysiempre »

mouse_ wrote: post #40
mananaysiempre wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Computing is largely a cargo cult thing these days. The problem is that the interfaces these bootleg skins draw "inspiration" from were designed on the back of millions of pre-inflationary dollars' R&D from only the best at Golden-Age IBM, Microsoft, Apple, etc.. BeOS, OS/2, Windows 95-2000 do not look the way they do because it looks good, they look the way they do because it works good, countless man hours went int…

I’m less inclined to attribute it to “these days”, as I remember the contemporary copycat themes in e.g. KDE and Tk looking off as well. Even Swing with the native look-and-feel didn’t quite look or feel right, IIRC.

As a (weak) counterpoint to supplicating ourselves to the old UI masters, I submit Raymond Chen’s observations from 2004[1] that the flat/3D/flat cycle is largely fashion, e.g. how the toolbars in Office 97 (and subsequent “coolbars”) had buttons that did not look like buttons until you hovered over them, in defiance of the Windows 95 UI standard. (Despite Chen’s characteristic confident tone, he doesn’t at all acknowledge the influence of the limited palettes of baseline graphics adapters on the pre-Win95 “flat” origins of that cycle.)

Also worth noting are the scathing critiques of some Windows 95 designs[2,3] in the Interface Hall of Shame (2000). I don’t necessarily agree with all of them (having spent the earlier part of my childhood with Norton Commander, the separate folder/file selectors in Windows 3.x felt contrived to me even at the time) but it helps clear up some of the fog of “it has always been this way” and remember some things that fit badly at first and never felt quite right (e.g. the faux clipboard in file management). And yes, it didn’t fail to mention the Office 97 UI, either[4,5]. (Did you realize Access, VB, Word, and IE used something like three or four different forks of the same UI toolkit, “Forms3”, among them—a toolkit that looked mostly native but was in fact unavailable outside of Microsoft?..)

None of that is meant to disagree with the point that submitting to the idea of UI as branding is where it all went wrong. (I’ll never get tired of mentioning that the futuristic UI of the in-game computers of the original Deus Ex, from 2000, supported not only Tab to go between controls and Enter and Esc to submit and dismiss, but also Alt accelerators, complete with underlined letters in the labels.)

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040728-00/?p=38...

[2] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/file95.htm

[3] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/explore.htm

[4] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/visual.html#VISUAL36

[5] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/visual.html#VISUAL38

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

#89

Post by shrx »

ranger_danger wrote: post #80
rikthevik wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it is difficult and a lot of work. Maybe _you_ can help.

I have made pixel-perfect renditions before, but I would be worried to release them for fear of legal problems.

I guess you self-answered your question then.

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

#90

Post by 4k93n2 »

myself248 wrote: post #57
exiguus wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Like making window borders 1px wide, even as screen pixel density increases. It's darn near impossible to resize a window anymore. Like making buttons auto-hide unless you mouse-over them. I don't remember when this came in, but the default PDF viewer in something did this, and I spent _weeks_ being baffled that some jerk made a PDF viewer that couldn't zoom in on the page, until I randomly waggled the mouse for some…

> Like making window borders 1px wide, even as screen pixel density increases. It's darn near impossible to resize a window anymore.

check out altDrag if youre on windows (its discontinued now but i think i remember seeing newer forks)

it lets you hold down a key and then drag the cursor in one of the 4 quarters of a window to resize it.

a lot of the ubuntu based distros ive tried have had this feature built in for a while now and its far superior

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