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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

#101

Post by Uvix »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #88
mouse_ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

It's right in the second sentence: "...Windows 1.0, which looked very flat because... color depth was practically non-existent."

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

#102

Post by trbutler »

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

Yes. I'd love to see someone take the basic design of Windows 95 or even early OS X and reimplement it not so much visually, but tactilely. Make something that works as well, is as simple but isn't nostalgia.

In any case though, this particular attempt at giving a complete Windows 95 experience is quite cool.

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

#104

Post by burnte »

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.

> The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability.

This is caused by a change in who is hired as UI/UX developers. In days past it was HCI experts and engineers, now it's graphic designers. "Pretty" is the order of the day, not "useful". "There are too many menu items" is now answered with "So let's hide them" when it used to be "How can we organize them in the UI us a simple, discoverable manner?" But then that "overflow" menu (really? Needed menu commands are now OVERFLOW?) gets crowded so they start just removing features so the UI is nice.

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

#105

Post by jwitchel »

Usually the observation that “a widely used thing is objectively bad” is strong market signal for entrepreneurial opportunity in a big tam.

I for one would welcome a set of deeply integrated ui improvements in a Mac that included a better file manager, better window management, better desktop search, a contact manager just that worked, a messaging client that just worked, audio and camera controls that just worked, a calculator that didn’t suck, etc.

I’d pay at least $100 a year for that tool set.

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

#106

Post by burnte »

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.

> I never had to do anything akin to fiddling with the Windows Registry.

I don't believe you. You have never, EVER, NOT ONCE run a terminal command to change an option on MacOS? I just refuse to believe anyone on HN hasn't altered preferences in the terminal on MacOS.

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

#107

Post by charcircuit »

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…

>they look the way they do because it works good

In modern times telemetry can show how well new designs work. The industry never forgot how to measure and do user research for ui changes. We've only gotten better at it.

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

#109

Post by charcircuit »

grayhatter wrote: post #55
mfro wrote: post #20

Is it really necessary to spin up an entirely new distro for an XFCE+GTK theme?

> Stop spending time on things I don't care about It's ok for people to waste time building stuff they think is cool. Did it need to be a distro? No but it also didn't need to exist. I'm glad it exists though, I think it really whips the llamas ass!

This attitude is why Linux based operating systems have such poor market share on the desktop. Opportunity costs are real. Friction is real. You don't see Windows creating a new OS for a single theme. You don't see macOS do it either.

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

#110

Post by hakfoo »

charcircuit wrote: post #107
mouse_ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>they look the way they do because it works good In modern times telemetry can show how well new designs work. The industry never forgot how to measure and do user research for ui changes. We've only gotten better at it.

Just because they're measuring doesn't mean they're measuring the same things as before.

The goal in 1995 might be "The user can launch the text editor, add three lines to a file, and save it from a fresh booted desktop within 2 minutes".

The goal in 2015 might be "we can get them from a bare desktop to signing up for a value-add service within 2 minutes"

I'd actually be interested if there's a lot of "regression testing" for usability-- if they re-run old tests on new user cohorts or if they assume "we solved XYZ UI problem in 1999" and don't revisit it in spite of changes around the problem.

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