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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

#151

Post by leptons »

wavemode wrote: post #116
MarkusWandel wrote: post #96

Three modern desktop environments that I use: - Windows 10/11. Especially in 11, it's easiest just to type the start of an app's name into the search box. As opposed to the two clicks it takes to get to the "traditional" menu where you still have to scroll to find it. - Gnome (only on fresh Linux installs, usually replaced with Mate pretty soon). Has a smartphone-style app grid, but here, too, its quickest just to ty…

The decline in usability and organization of the Windows start menu over the years has been frankly staggering. Whenever I see screenshots of the old menu I get pangs of nostalgia.

I use two free programs to return my computer usability to Windows 10 days.

https://open-shell.github.io/Open-Shell-Menu/

https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher

Without these I would probably give up on computers and go live under a bridge.

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

#152

Post by ivan_gammel »

burnte wrote: post #104
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.

> 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 th…

>This is caused by a change in who is hired as UI/UX developers.

„UX/UI developers“ is a strange name for it.

In 2000s the web enabled more sophisticated presentation designs and there was a push from client-server to web-based applications using incredibly strange technologies for building UIs — HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which gave the rise to UX design as a interdisciplinary job (HCI+digital graphics design). By 2010 the internet of applications kicked off and in mid-2010s moved to mobile, dramatically increasing the demand for UX designers. By then it actually mattered more who is hiring designers, not who is hired. Since only relatively small fraction of hiring managers does understand the scope of this job even now, they even started calling it „UX/UI designers“ or „Product designers“ as if that name change could help, still judging design work by often-fake screenshots on Behance rather than by case studies in the portfolio. Even HCI professionals are often reduced to mere graphic designers by those managers who skip research and apply „taste“ to a science-based discipline. At the same time, since UX design is one of the most well-paid and less stressful creative jobs, a lot of people switched to it without proper education or experience, having no idea what is statistical significance or how to design a survey. And voila, we are here.

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

#153

Post by underlipton »

hi_hi wrote: post #137
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

As a kid, the OS's supported me in learning. They were simple, intuitive and rewarding. I'd click around and explore, and discover cool things like a Wheezer music video, or engaging puzzle games. There was no one who could help me when I got stuck, beyond maybe an instruction manual. I just had to figure it out, mostly by trial and error. I learned so much, eventually being able to replace hardware, install and upgr…

There're also performance issues. Building muscle memory (which means offloading tasks from working memory, leaving it open for learning) can't happen if you're constantly trying to figure out when the system is going to actually respond to your input.

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

#154

Post by priteau »

hexmiles wrote: post #150
rauli_ wrote: post #146

That Git GUI got my attention. Does anyone have an idea what it might be? The titlebar says aurora but when I searched for it all I got was an commercial product with AI nonsense stuck into it.

From the look i suspect it is gitg: a git frontend for gnome. https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gitg

Looks like it. The aurora title comes from the Git repository they are viewing: https://github.com/ublue-os/aurora

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

#155

Post by ivan_gammel »

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #100
cenamus wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Companies are outsourcing testing. I'm not surprised that they get rid of UI testing. Back in the day companies used to invite people to sit down and use their software. Nowadays they just push out whatever they have and then start collecting bug tickets. Then they let the community to vote on the tickets. It's basically a huge "pay for being a beta tester" scheme.

UX testing is not UI testing and it is not QA.

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

#156

Post by chuckadams »

rbanffy wrote: post #26
mrweasel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where MacOS smartly separated them. Interesting that modern macOS now have them next to each other, like Windows. You'd be hard pressed to call the Window 95 UI pretty, but it is really functional. I'm still a firm believe that the majority of the work we do with computers today could be done within the Windows 95 shell. We need 64bit, more memory, faster CPUs, GPUs all that, but the modern UI aren't really "better…

> You'd be hard pressed to call the Window 95 UI pretty, but it is really functional. Ironically, the Windows 95 look seems a lot like a copy of the NeXT look, which is the OS all modern Macs are kind of running.

The window decorations in Win95 are in fact pixel-for-pixel copies of the ones in NeXTSTEP.

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

#157

Post by cyberax »

everdrive wrote: post #147
charcircuit wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I've had an alternate theory for a while. Prior to verbose metrics, UIs could only be designed by experts and via small samples of feedback sessions. And UIs used to be much, much better. I suspect two things have happened: - With a full set of metrics, we're now designing toward the bottom half of the bell curve, ie, towards the users who struggle the most. Rather than building UIs which are very good, but must be l…

There's a much simpler explanation. At some point, the UI becomes about as good as it can be. It can't really be improved any further without changing the whole paradigm, and just needs to be maintained.

But product managers inside the large corporations can't get promoted for merely maintaining the status quo. So they push for "reimagining" projects, like Google's "Material Screw You" UI.

And we get a constant treadmill of UI updates that don't really make anything better.

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

#158

Post by accrual »

hi_hi wrote: post #137
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

As a kid, the OS's supported me in learning. They were simple, intuitive and rewarding. I'd click around and explore, and discover cool things like a Wheezer music video, or engaging puzzle games. There was no one who could help me when I got stuck, beyond maybe an instruction manual. I just had to figure it out, mostly by trial and error. I learned so much, eventually being able to replace hardware, install and upgr…

> Things popping up

This is one of my biggest frustrations with modern GUI computing. It's especially bad with Windows and Office, but it happens on iOS and macOS too to an extent. Even though I've had Office installed for weeks I still get a "look over here at this new button!" pop-up while I'm in the middle of some Excel task. Pop-up here, pop-up there. It's insane the number of little bubbles and pop-ups and noise we experience in modern computing.

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

#159

Post by arcmechanica »

haswell wrote: post #141

Lately I've been strongly considering helping migrate my parents to Linux. Their needs are primarily web-based with some basic productivity tools mixed in, and Windows has just been getting more and more hostile. On top of this, they're at an age where they're now more susceptible than ever to various scams/attacks, and shutting down an entire category of problems by removing Windows from the picture is increasingly…

My parents run linux because mom likes coupon websites and I can't repair the thing every week

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

#160

Post by arcmechanica »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #118
teamonkey wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you get Windows to launch an installed app after you type the first few letters, instead of searching the web with Edge and Bing?

Type into the search box and when the app icon comes up, click on it.

"I searched bing for you and here's the link to Word on the web"
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