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

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 316 posts

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

#11

Post by abraxas »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #6
rbanffy wrote: post #3

How cute… imagine my childhood home would have a computer with a graphical desktop… I feel so old now…

Yeah as far as GUIs go, Win95 isn't in the "nostalgia" category for me, I was already well into adulthood. I kind of get the appeal, but it's also unnecessarily skeumorphic/fake-3d and there were some UX things that made little sense especially lumping all the window controls all together (including the destructive "close" X) where MacOS smartly separated them.

The fake 3d is actually very useful in communicating what is a button or another interactive piece of the interface and what's not. The modern clean uis where everything is a thin rectangle or just text that you are supposed to click are a nightmare.

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

#13

Post by voidfunc »

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.

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

#14

Post by mrweasel »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #6
rbanffy wrote: post #3

How cute… imagine my childhood home would have a computer with a graphical desktop… I feel so old now…

Yeah as far as GUIs go, Win95 isn't in the "nostalgia" category for me, I was already well into adulthood. I kind of get the appeal, but it's also unnecessarily skeumorphic/fake-3d and there were some UX things that made little sense especially lumping all the window controls all together (including the destructive "close" X) where MacOS smartly separated them.

> 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", if anything many of them are more confusing. I think a lot of office works would be happy to just have kept the Window 95 era UI for Windows and Office.

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

#15

Post by pwg »

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.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...

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

#16

Post by alabastervlog »

abraxas wrote: post #11
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah as far as GUIs go, Win95 isn't in the "nostalgia" category for me, I was already well into adulthood. I kind of get the appeal, but it's also unnecessarily skeumorphic/fake-3d and there were some UX things that made little sense especially lumping all the window controls all together (including the destructive "close" X) where MacOS smartly separated them.

The fake 3d is actually very useful in communicating what is a button or another interactive piece of the interface and what's not. The modern clean uis where everything is a thin rectangle or just text that you are supposed to click are a nightmare.

Old screen caps of UIs with depth feel so relaxing to look at, and I don’t think it’s just a nostalgia effect.

It’s like there’s always just a little extra brain power and attention being used by modern flat UIs, and you get to shut that off when you look at a depth-enhanced UI.

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

#17

Post by rbanffy »

abraxas wrote: post #11
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah as far as GUIs go, Win95 isn't in the "nostalgia" category for me, I was already well into adulthood. I kind of get the appeal, but it's also unnecessarily skeumorphic/fake-3d and there were some UX things that made little sense especially lumping all the window controls all together (including the destructive "close" X) where MacOS smartly separated them.

The fake 3d is actually very useful in communicating what is a button or another interactive piece of the interface and what's not. The modern clean uis where everything is a thin rectangle or just text that you are supposed to click are a nightmare.

I agree. Early Macs had to give buttons a 2D distinctive look. A good thing was that the look and feel were part of the OS and not the application, so everything would be consistent.

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

#18

Post by esafak »

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.

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

#19

Post by doright »

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, unfortunately. It got to the point where I ordered a 1024x768 monitor just to play old games with a period system.

Post reply on HN