101–110 of 312 posts
I forgot how nice it was to have underlined alt keyboard shortcuts. We got so much right so early in the age of personal computing. Goodbye to all that, hello Ribbon and flatness everywhere. It’s as if we’re in the Middle Ages now looking back at the great ruins of ancient Athens.
The flatness and whitespace everywhere though, that can die in a fire.
Back then you also could create your own theme. You could set the colors for text, backround, buttons etc. and every App did respect and use it. Today you can choose dark or light mode and almost no App does respect it, instead they bring there own colors and options.
In early 2000s, I used to make Windows applications with embedded IE browser and used system colors for CSS to make the whole UI look native. I believe it still works [0] but I don't think I've seen it in a long time on any site. [0] https://www.sitepoint.com/css-system-styles/
It is just what I needed.
Back then you also could create your own theme. You could set the colors for text, backround, buttons etc. and every App did respect and use it. Today you can choose dark or light mode and almost no App does respect it, instead they bring there own colors and options.
I've been a theme creator for a few decades now, and modifying how programs looked is what got me into development in the first place 30 years ago. The constant stripping of user definable visuals in modern computing is a legitimately depressing thing for me to see happen. It's just another step along the "you don't own the device or the software, we're just letting you borrow it" path. The constant push with SAAS an…
A generation was raised on usable designs which clearly communicated interactability with a consistent visual language. It is only natural that they would come to think of computers as inherently ordered, understandable devices. Machines had always been this way. It was obvious to this new generation that the affordances of youth were purely redundant. Clutter. Overhead. Junk! Widget by widget, pixel by pixel, bevels…
> It is only natural that they would come to think of computers as inherently ordered, understandable devices. until you get a blue screen of death... Don't get me wrong, I completely agree that modern UI is complete garbage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do not worry for the market is ready for this. Iphone started with fixed backgrounds, then later they demonstrated the oh so amazing feature of custom backgrounds. In some 80s computer chronicles episode you can find the ex-act-same-speech from a windows sales rep explaining how win 1.0 was limited, but now you can set up your own background pattern. iOS 15 will introduce ML generated computer vision trained custom t…
Yes, it's funny when some new app announces "now we have dark mode!" with much fanfare and commotion, when the ability to adjust the colours and appearance of individual UI elements across the whole OS was the norm back in Windows 3. https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/wi...
I forgot how nice it was to have underlined alt keyboard shortcuts. We got so much right so early in the age of personal computing. Goodbye to all that, hello Ribbon and flatness everywhere. It’s as if we’re in the Middle Ages now looking back at the great ruins of ancient Athens.
The ribbon is actually a good interface, for me at least, much more pleasant to use than toolbars. The flatness and whitespace everywhere though, that can die in a fire.
As others have said, targeting multiple resolutions and dpis, and supporting reactive/resizable canvases, has driven most of those guidelines to the curb. A different era.
> The ellipsis hints that this button opens a dialog, instead of immediately executing an action. That's not exactly what the ellipsis is intended to communicate. Have you ever wondered why File/Open... has the ellipsis, but in a properly designed app, Help/About does not have it? Even though Help/About opens a dialog too? The distinction is that the ellipsis indicates that a command will take some action after furth…
http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf
Search for "ellipsis" or go to pages 91-95 of the PDF (labeled as pages 67-71), in particular:
> The ellipsis character doesn’t simply mean that a dialog box or window will appear. For example in the Finder File menu, the Get Info command doesn’t have an ellipsis character and shouldn’t. When you select a Finder object and choose Get Info, a window appears displaying information about the object. The window appearing simply completes the command. The command doesn’t require additional input from the user before it executes.
Also in the Windows 95 Interface Guidelines (PDF):
https://www.ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/M...
Again search for "ellipsis" or go to page 109 of the PDF (labeled along with several other pages as page 143):
> If you provide access to copyright and version information for your application, include an About application name command on this menu. When the user chooses this command, display a window containing the application's name, version number, copyright information, and any other informational properties related to the application. Display this information in a dialog box or alternatively as a copyright page of the property sheet of the application's main executable (.EXE) file. Do not use an ellipsis at the end of this command because the resulting window does not require the user to provide any further parameters.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Force Touch is on its way out. Has been for about two generations of iPhone. There's now Haptic Touch which is nothing but a long-press with better feedback.
It has the same problem: invisible, undiscoverable UI driven by seemingly random gestures. Who cares if you long press or press harder? You still can't tell it's an option unless you try it on everything.
See: right click.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main reason they got rid of it because it was a gimmick that never really panned out and having two different ways of invoking a context menu based on force was a UX disaster for the novice user. I'm glad Apple was able to swallow their pride and drop their "breakthrough innovative pressure sensitive screen" - reducing BOM costs was the icing on the cake, although it seems like they have just replaced that space…
I’m not sure if I buy that - Apple makes millions of iPhones every year, shaving off a part from the BOM has huge impact. I worked in manufacturing for 10 years where we made 6 million things per week . It was a big deal.