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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

#261

Post by xandrius »

girvo wrote: post #176
hi_hi wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I learned so much, eventually being able to replace hardware As a young teenager in the early-mid 2000s, I learned the hard way what the little standoffs are for by killing a motherboard by screwing it directly into the steel case :') Never made that mistake again, that's for sure. And I share all the same experiences as yourself

There should be a club for people like us: we learnt the hard way to double-check and never ever fully trust ourselves, especially with hardware connections.

The first Mobo I ever purchased with my own money was insta-fried exactly like that, it still hurts a little to think about that.

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

#262

Post by xandrius »

Lorkki wrote: post #122
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 also repeating what the hellscape of inconsistent skinned UIs did in the late 90s and early 2000s. People are looking back at those times with a rather selective memory.

People forget having to use IE with 12 toolbars when going over at some friend's house.

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

#263

Post by nkrisc »

LoganDark wrote: post #239
ascagnel_ wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would also argue, regardless of what mobile OS you're on, quieting, delaying, or disabling notifications on a regular basis (and taking stock of what you let through) is prudent.

I'm always shocked whenever I see someone having hundreds or even thousands of unread notifications. It pains me to see that instead of controlling their feed to only what interests them, they've just let everything pile up forever, completely unread. For example, on Discord, I sometimes see people with unreads for every server, and dozens to hundreds of completely unread DMs, just because they don't know that you ca…

That sounds like a lot of work. Alternatively, I can just ignore them all. I don’t care if there’s a red circle with a number in it. I don’t notice it and it doesn’t bother me.

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

#264

Post by whatevertrevor »

Andrex wrote: post #174
hi_hi wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Humans hate being bored but only dick-around and learn things like this when they're bored. Speaking personally, I guess. Since the 90s we've found "better" ways at "curing" our boredom. Put this UI on a modern OS in front of a kid today and they would just download Steam, Chrome and Discord. And be assured, they're very proficient at the in-and-outs of those platforms. Just some random thoughts I had, not sure any o…

Yeah I agree. The trial and error mentioned in GP needed a good amount of focused time commitment, the sort of thing at a premium in the modern attention economy of tech.

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

#265

Post by cmrdporcupine »

chuckadams wrote: post #156
rbanffy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Note that NeXTstep actually did the right thing with window controls -- close is on opposite side of the window from the others, so you can't accidentally hit it.

Windows3 and Motif hid this stuff under a menu, so wasn't a huge concern.

But then Windows95, and then (oddly) MacOS through this away in favour of throwing them all together.

Awareness of spatial patterns / frequency of use seems to have been higher among early UX/UI designers than after. I guess maybe because mice became more accurate?

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

#266

Post by mrob »

accrual wrote: post #158
hi_hi wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The worst example of things popping up I've seen is Youtube's sponsored content warnings. These immediately appear above the active click target (video thumbnail) when you move your mouse over it, hijacking the expected action there. If you click things as a single action like every skilled mouse user does (rather than pointing and then clicking as two separate actions), it's physically impossible to react in time to avoid clicking them. And because only a part of the click target gets hijacked it's too inconsistent to learn to avoid it by intuition. I've clicked them accidentally several times and every time it's been disturbing because it feels like some serious and unexpected error.

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

#267

Post by Gormo »

Lorkki wrote: post #122
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 also repeating what the hellscape of inconsistent skinned UIs did in the late 90s and early 2000s. People are looking back at those times with a rather selective memory.

The themed UIs of that era were very superficial -- if they applied to serious software at all, they were just a cosmetic layer on top of an otherwise well-engineered interface, and could be easily disabled. Most people I knew, for example, disabled the theming engine that shipped with Windows XP. Most applications that supported UI skinning still had a default or fallback UI that adhered well enough to modern conventions.

Not so much anymore. The abandonment of any coherent organizing principle to UI layout in favor of pure aesthetics has been a massive regression. Reasonably complex software often doesn't even include menu bars anymore, for example.

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

#268

Post by bshacklett »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #196
p_l wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what difference to end user it makes where exactly the key/value data is stored? No real difference whether the data is HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\MyAppName or com.my.app when you're trying to coerce some internals whose configuration is not exposed because you're not worthy of it

I’d say that a quick defaults command is probably on the whole more friendly than trawling around in the arcane mess that is the Windows registry. It’s not as friendly as it could be, but at least it’s a somewhat human readable one liner. It’s also reasonable to back up plists and/or sync them between machines like some users do with their dotfiles, because they’re just files.

Registry settings can be modified via CLI, too. Windows users are just far more averse to the command line.

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

#269

Post by Gormo »

jeroenhd wrote: post #179
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…

Pixel fonts don't accurately represent the 90's UIs because we don't use CRTs anymore. The poor souls buying the very first terrible flat screen monitors may have used computers like that, but most of that era was experienced using smudgy, edge blurring CRTs. You could probably create a CRT-filter-based font for high resolution screens (though you'd probably still need to optimise for subpixel layout for accuracy, ev…

Most people vastly overstate the effect that CRT displays had on the appearance of legacy software.

Yes, very early on, when people used TVs or cheap composite monitors as the display devices for their computers, there were blurry pixel edges, bloom effects, dot crawl, color artifacting, and all the rest.

But by the '90s, we had high-quality monitors designed for high-resolution graphics with fast refresh rates, with crisp pixel boundaries and minimal artifacting. CRT filters overcompensate for this a lot, and end up making SVGA-era graphics anachronistically look like they're being displayed on composite monitors.

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

#270

Post by Gormo »

doright wrote: post #142
selfhoster11 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For 4K monitors, why not just pixel-double? Integer scaling will solve many issues introduced by pixel fonts.

You're right in that there's nothing stopping one from doing so (I even use an integer scaler for old games on my main computer), it's just a tradeoff between "doing what's possible" and "having the most authentic experience one can". If we're talking about the subjective experience of recreating "a child's bedroom computer" from the mid 90s-early 00s, a widescreen aspect ratio alone would be jarring, since my concep…

> If we're talking about the subjective experience of recreating "a child's bedroom computer" from the mid 90s-early 00s

Is that what this project is going for? I understood it to be attempting to apply design elements from that era to create a superior UI for a modern "child's bedroom computer".

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