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Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)

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Re: Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)

#21

Post by karhuton »

Give the Windows 2 a second look and try to ignore the colorful GAME in the screenshot.

It’s actually pretty ”elegant” design with white, black, grey with two shades of primary color: dark blue and light blue/cyan. Then complementary orange for active selection. The cyan is light enough for black text and blue is dark enough for white text. Really good palette choices.

Remember this was only 16 CGA colors, of which only few are delicate enough for UI components.

The tiny resolution makes things blocky, but if it had more space with an SVGA resolution, it’d be pretty great.

I would dare say, this might be the most ”designed” UI of the bunch, considering limitations.

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Intresting aspect of the UI is the hilighting of the menu bar in each window:

These days it’s odd to hilight menus, but I think their importance must’ve been much higher due to lack of space in the UI itself. They were basiclly act as ”navigation” and action menus. We use sidepanels and tabs a lot, but those have hard time fittinh there. Also the apps were simpler.

Re: Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)

#23

Post by tomrod »

spankibalt wrote: post #8
adastra22 wrote: post #3

I cannot accept this slander of Windows XP.

It is, strictly going by looks, one of Microsoft's ugliest UIs. I will never understand how people tolerate it, let alone defend it publicly. Shameful, absolutely and thoroughly shameful!

Dark theme, menu bar on the right side, icons only, auto hide. Out of site, out of mind.

Re: Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)

#24

Post by sedatk »

spankibalt wrote: post #8
adastra22 wrote: post #3

I cannot accept this slander of Windows XP.

It is, strictly going by looks, one of Microsoft's ugliest UIs. I will never understand how people tolerate it, let alone defend it publicly. Shameful, absolutely and thoroughly shameful!

Blue one was unbearable, but it looked pretty much okay with the gray theme.

Re: Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)

#26

Post by adastra22 »

spankibalt wrote: post #8
adastra22 wrote: post #3

I cannot accept this slander of Windows XP.

It is, strictly going by looks, one of Microsoft's ugliest UIs. I will never understand how people tolerate it, let alone defend it publicly. Shameful, absolutely and thoroughly shameful!

That is an entirely subjective statement. I think it looks great.

Re: Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)

#27

Post by speedgoose »

cocoa19 wrote: post #15
derleyici wrote: post #5

8 for Windows 11? An OS that includes ads in the Start menu, made with React. I'm not even mentioning right-click, which has basically two views: you open it and see some uselessly chosen tools, and you still need to open the old version (with the old design, breaking design consistency) to access actually useful things. Viva Windows XP!

With that move to React or whatever web based monstrosity it is, it lost a lot of the existing user experience crafted over the years. Not only OS pre-installed apps are much slower, but it broke shortcuts and common sense behaviors.

It’s not web but react native.

Re: Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)

#28

Post by sedatk »

karhuton wrote: post #21

Give the Windows 2 a second look and try to ignore the colorful GAME in the screenshot. It’s actually pretty ”elegant” design with white, black, grey with two shades of primary color: dark blue and light blue/cyan. Then complementary orange for active selection. The cyan is light enough for black text and blue is dark enough for white text. Really good palette choices. Remember this was only 16 CGA colors, of which o…

I agree. That was the only unfair assessment in the article, IMHO. Windows 2 was based on the Presentation Manager standard which was developed by IBM and Microsoft, and also used with OS/2, and more importantly, CDE + Motif. That's why many Unix desktops used to look like 3D Microsoft Windows desktops back then. Because they all were based on the same GUI standard.

Re: Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)

#30

Post by dijit »

rchard2scout wrote: post #25

In hindsight, I really love the way Vista looks. I don't think I ever used it as a daily driver (I went from the family XP computer to a Win7 laptop, I think), but the glassy transparency is certainly something .

I agree, I never felt it wasn’t beautiful- aside from the widget system, especially ultimate with the black frost and animated backgrounds- wow.. It was just much too heavy for the time.

I would even say it looks nicer than what Apple is doing right now, and that’s not nostalgia necessarily, its that there’s a stronger feeling of depth and more solid design for accessibility.

Most people only saw the non-transparent Vista windows: since it was such a performance pig otherwise. Especially on laptops with iGPU’s: these were the days where an intel GMA950 (4 pixel pipelines at 166MHz) was as modern as you got. :|

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