Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

movq.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 213 posts

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#71

Post by rayiner »

al_borland wrote: post #14

> Since that button down there is called "Start", it implies that you can probably do something with it, maybe start programs? Click and you'll see the Start Menu: Over time it seems like a lot of designs stop feeling the need to lead the user in this way. There is an assumption that by now everyone knows what the menu in the bottom left corner does, and we are no longer in the phase of trying to teach the population…

The new iOS beta buries the “share” button under the line button inside the search lozenge, which was previously for view settings (and downloads). The iOS design team is just coasting on good decisions make a decade ago. The only good things are stuff they haven’t gotten around to fucking up yet.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#72

Post by marcosdumay »

exitb wrote: post #44
marcosdumay wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My parents never had any problem understanding where they can click on Windows 3.11. They never could understand how to interact with DOS GUIs. Nowadays they have decades of experience with computers. They still can't predict what part of a web-site they can interact with, but they have memorized all the actions they can make on the phone apps they use.

Let’s look at the very website we on. Would you prefer for every clickable element here to be a button? Or even underlined as a link? Do you ever get confused navigating this website?

Now that you've said it, I think PG would have designed a better site if he didn't hide the underlines.

But also, it wouldn't get any worse if the same design was kept and the underlines were enabled. And it would improve the usability for first-time users, but the nature of HN is that those are always very few.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#73

Post by falcor84 »

al_borland wrote: post #58
mkprc wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think about this, and worry about this. My go-to example is that the file-system in Windows used to clearly be a tree, and the file explorer was how you traversed this tree. With "Libraries" and other shenanigans with the location of the Desktop folder, it's not much of a tree anymore, and I wonder if this is related to kids-these-days not understanding the basics of file systems anymore. https://www.theverge.…

I think smartphones obscuring the filesystem away, and desktop search making the skill less of a requirement really hurt the filesystem understanding for younger generations. I remember Steve Jobs saying the last area of complexity they needed to be solved was the filesystem, which is why they made the iPhone the way they did, with apps owning the files, so users didn’t have to deal with it. We’ve seen the Files app…

> Jobs also said death would take care of the problem of people not knowing how to type. I often think he should have taken the similar approach

I was all set for this dark humor, and actually had to double back to then understand the full sentence.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#75

Post by ndiddy »

the_other wrote: post #19

I agree that we had much better patterns back then. The software industry in general worked towards sharing visual paradigms, making use of system designs of their host playforms, facilitated discovery etc etc. All that was good and the recent trends moving us away from that consistency and discoverability are a detrement being steamrolled over by agents… But I don’t agree that it “looked nice”. I hated Windows 95 an…

You will never see a visually consistent operating system again, the material conditions that allowed for older Windows and Mac OS versions to be consistent no longer exist. The user base for desktop computers is no longer growing, so the investment into new desktop UI technologies is largely in technologies like Electron and SwiftUI that allow developers to cut costs by reusing their existing web and mobile interfaces for desktop software. The focus on cross-platform development means that developers are far more concerned about making their software look consistent across all platforms than they are about whether their software looks native on each platform it supports.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#76

Post by zozbot234 »

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #40
Zak wrote: post #26

I agree with the author's wish for visual cues when something is clickable, scrollable, etc.... This, on the other hand: > Imitating real objects is good, too -- I don't have a single one of Android's "sliders" anywhere in my house, for example, so why don't you make this a checkbox, because writing down a check mark on paper is something that I actually do: feels like an idea from a time when many people were encoun…

There is a specific UI guideline for something that can be enabled or not: it's called a tick box. The on-off switch thing is a distinctly iOS invention [1]. The funny thing is that OS X (now macOS) mostly held off using those 'switches' too, until fairly recently. [1]: https://freeimage.host/i/CxYBW6G

The switch widget is for settings where flipping the switch takes immediate effect, unlike a checkbox where you have to press some "OK", "Submit" or "Apply" button. In Windows 2000/Office UIs, this would've been shown as a button that could visibly switch between "pressed" and "not pressed" states, just like a push-down switch, but that was rarely used. The modern labeled switch design is a lot more intuitive than that.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#77

Post by [deleted] »

petilon wrote: post #18
mig39 wrote: post #12

The article praises the UI, but isn't Windows 2000 using the Windows 95/98 UI with a different kernel?

Hold on, don't give cred it to Windows 95. The beveled 3D look was the invention of NeXT. Windows 95 copied everything from them. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/openstep42

[deleted]

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#78

Post by jerf »

makeitdouble wrote: post #46
al_borland wrote: post #14

> Since that button down there is called "Start", it implies that you can probably do something with it, maybe start programs? Click and you'll see the Start Menu: Over time it seems like a lot of designs stop feeling the need to lead the user in this way. There is an assumption that by now everyone knows what the menu in the bottom left corner does, and we are no longer in the phase of trying to teach the population…

I was a wee little kid when I first touch windows 95, and only ever used dos before. The "Start" button made no sense. The computer was already started, and clicking randomly popped up menus and opened documents in their right programs, so it felt like the natural way to progress. The owner of the computer had to point me to the start menu. Even now I still think it was a cursed UI. It was the place primarily to clos…

I never liked the word "start" itself, but if you're going to have a GUI, a single central clean place to say "every interaction you may want to do can be found from here" is a good idea. In principle having search there is pretty useful.

In practice Microsoft has consistently from the beginning gone out of their way to make the search useless and slow, a policy that is now old enough to vote. How the start menu has now gone nearly two decades without you being able to type "note" and see Notepad just pop up as one of the choices instantly beats me on my ever-more-super super computers, but that's an implementation detail that Microsoft has consistently botched. And more and more over time, Microsoft has thought more about what they want in the menu than what the user wants.

Nevertheless, the general idea of that top-level "here's everything" is a good one. The open source desktop environments do a much better job with it, without marketing trying to figure out how to stuff this half-decade's marketing push on to the user or "monetize" it.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#79

Post by ziml77 »

EGreg wrote: post #30
xg15 wrote: post #21

> Me: "I don't like smartphone UIs. Everything is flat, nothing indicates where you can touch or not. I have to randomly try everything on the screen." Response by non-tech person: "Well, yeah, of course you have to try everything? How else would this work?" I think this goes deeper than many tech people realize. From what I understood from talking with "nontechnical"(*) friends, relatives, etc, for a good potion of…

It started with iOS 7 and Jony Ive Steve Jobs was right. Then when he died (after removing Scott Forstall), Jony Ive got to do his hardware minimalism in software too. And everything Steve Jobs favored was suddenly derided as “skeumorphism”. It’s like what USSR did with Stalin under Khrustchev. I still remember when Chrome app just had a big white area where you’re supposed to enter the url and you had no idea unless…

Jony Ive is a plague on design. Just a few days ago someone showed me Ferrari's new EV that he designed. I am not a car person and even I can see it looks like crap! That man should just take his big Apple money and fully retire so he doesn't ruin anything else.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#80

Post by liendolucas »

For me Windows 2000 Professional is the best OS that Microsoft ever released. At the time I used it was really polished, stable and fast.

One recurring question that I keep asking myself is why UIs have to constantly change for the worse?

What would happen if vendors kept using the same UI for decades? Would people hate or love having a one well thought UI?

Post reply on HN