Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment • Hacker News Board

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#121

Post by jonpurdy » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

selfhoster11 wrote: post #36

Unpopular opinion: optimising for "branding" is what killed theming. Everyone wants to have their own custom colour theme, brand-associated font or button style, which clashes with uniformity of system controls. If everyone renders buttons in a custom way, they bypass the native, theming-capable, accessible-by-default system controls. As long as product managers are happy, it doesn't matter that users aren't.

As a Technical PM, I fought against a former boss when they wanted to forego native controls because they wanted their app to be branded, because without a custom look they felt that their app would not be unique and memorable.

If an app can't survive on its usefulness alone, it probably shouldn't exist.

As a user, if an app doesn't have a native UI, I disregard it unless I need it for a specific and mandatory use.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#122

Post by InvisibleUp » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

selfhoster11 wrote: post #36

Unpopular opinion: optimising for "branding" is what killed theming. Everyone wants to have their own custom colour theme, brand-associated font or button style, which clashes with uniformity of system controls. If everyone renders buttons in a custom way, they bypass the native, theming-capable, accessible-by-default system controls. As long as product managers are happy, it doesn't matter that users aren't.

This MSDN article (which starts by recounting a day in 1995) backs your theory up: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/ms364048(...

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#123

Post by OkGoDoIt » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 5:11 PM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #90

wott wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Themeability doesn't rule out consistency. As long as all UIs use the system theme, they look consistent, no matter what that theme is. Agreed. That's why the GUI toolkit must provide as exhaustive as possible a set of widgets, and those widgets must be versatile; so that applications developers can build basically everything from those widgets and not feel the need to build their own from a raw canvas or something…

Having just one widely used GUI toolkit would also help, something both Linux and Windows are struggling with (Windows especially, with Win32-style WPF vs Fluent-style UWP)

Also on Windows you’ve got WinForms and MFC and I think another C++ UI framework as well. Microsoft has switched their preferred UI framework every five years or so, often leaving behind the old framework in the dust when it comes to new UI paradigms they want people to adopt. So you’re kind of forced to roll your own if you’re stuck on a legacy framework but want your app to look modern. It’s a mess. Now they’re just starting to roll out a new one called “WinUI”. I’ll wait a few years before deciding if it’s worth the effort to learn or if it’s just another one for the scrapheap.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#124

Post by gmueckl » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 5:12 PM UTC

bussierem wrote: post #47

gmueckl wrote: post #40

More configuration options come with an increased risk of inadvertently pointing one of the gun's barrels at ones own foot without noticing and then pulling the trigger. To stay with the theming example: it's nice and dandy have control over theme colors. But what happems when you set button background, window background and text color to white by accident? How do you recover from that? Back in the 90s you'd have bee…

I can understand what you mean, but let's be fair -- preventing things like "all white UI" can easily be coded into the configurability. Yes, the full iteration of possible situations you could get into are quite large, and maybe you miss some -- but there are also options for coding in some kind of "reset" quick-switch that doesn't require the UI. Also, I'm not sure I buy the claim that "things like that are tolerat…

Well, I'm sure you'd hate it if your smartphone would keep white text labels without outlines on your home screen if you set a very bright custom background. I've just tried it on my phone: if I set a mostly white background image, I can still use the home screen because the text also has a dark drop shadow (for exactly these kinds of situations!). That illustrates my point quite nicely I think: there are fewer settings now, but - when done right - those that are available behave quite well.

Theming was just the first example that came to my mind. It's a pretty benign one in the grand scheme of things. There were other ways in which you could misconfigure your system. These were also the days before PCI, USB and hardware auto-detection. You could easily pick the wrong driver and/or wrong settings for some hardware and the system would mostly just try to run with it, not knowing that anything was amiss. Pick the wrong mouse driver? Set the wrong COM port for the serial mouse? Tough luck.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#125

Post by ryandrake » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 5:18 PM UTC

squiggleblaz wrote: post #39

Santosh83 wrote: post #8

The question is: can we design deep configurability (and composeability), and hence put more accessible creative power in the hands of the user (instead of say having to edit obscure configuration files or even worse, do a full recompile, or simply have no choice at all), without exploding complexity of the system or is this fundamentally mutually exclusive? Power + complexity will only ever remain niche. But if we c…

I don't think that's the concern that led to the loss of color configuration. You probably aren't hardcoding colors anyway, but using widget toolkits and the like. It's mostly because marketers wanted it to look pretty, and that means more complex widgets, so they can't be configured as easily as the relatively flat UIs of Windows 2000 and before. (The new era of flat uncustomisable flat widgets is a direct continuat…

This attitude of “we know better than the user what the user wants” is pervasive throughout technology, not just software. Products of all kinds are getting less configurable, less adaptable for different purposes, less integratable with other products, and less suitable for uses beyond what the manufacturer intends.

If hammers were invented today, they would be locked to a particular manufacturer’s nails, have software that prevented them from hitting anything else besides nails, and have DRM that self-destructs the tool if you stopped paying the $5/mon subscription.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#126

Post by tambourine_man » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

The epitome of theming was on with Kaleidoscope. You could not only change colors, but the complete shape of every widget. And there were a few very tasteful themes, among the ocean of crazyness one would expect.

This Twitter handle shows what was possible on early OS X:

https://twitter.com/osxthemes

Web Archive's page:

https://web.archive.org/web/20050216050114/http://www.kaleid...

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#127

Post by grawprog » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

forgetfulness wrote: post #85

selfhoster11 wrote: post #36

Unpopular opinion: optimising for "branding" is what killed theming. Everyone wants to have their own custom colour theme, brand-associated font or button style, which clashes with uniformity of system controls. If everyone renders buttons in a custom way, they bypass the native, theming-capable, accessible-by-default system controls. As long as product managers are happy, it doesn't matter that users aren't.

Theming was HUGE in Linux back in 2005-2010, consistency was paramount, adherence to toolkit was extremely important just like Apple claimed. For Apple it was about delivering a consistent branded experience, for the GNOME and KDE communities it was about being able to consistently customize the experience. In Windows? Always a free-for-all of such heavy customization on the side of the third-party applications that…

Reading this discussion got me thinking. I've been using KDE now for years specifically because every part of it can be customized, but for the most part, i've used the same theme and configurations now for pretty much the entire time i've been using kde.

I still think it comes down to branding though, even with those totally customizable environments. The difference is, it's not someone else's brand. I get to turn my environment into my own 'brand'.

That's always kind of been the appeal of theming and customization to me, the ability to remove someone else's brand from my computer and replace it with my own.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#128

Post by joshmanders » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #116

joshmanders wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

macOS or Windows. Both are leading operating systems and are both very accessible. You're ranting and raving for absolute zero reason at all. You have no facts to back up your claims nor any actual experience.

I don't get where you think that I am claiming these operating systems lack accessibility features. That's an invention of yours. I do make the verifiable claim that they lack the configurability of Windows 3 as regards font and color choices throughout the UI, and further that this is in fact an accessibility feature in itself. Windows 10, for instance, only allows you to change the "accent color" and select either…

> I don't get where you think that I am claiming these operating systems lack accessibility features. That's an invention of yours.

Because you're ranting about operating systems not being accessible, there's only 3 possible options, Windows, Linux or macOS.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#129

Post by ogre_codes » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

While I do greatly miss the ability to theme, I'm not sure it would work with a modern architecture. You used to have window "Chrome", titlebars, borders, buttons, etc as very distinct and separate from the window content. Now the line has blurred greatly. On top of that, the number of cross platform apps has increased so even if you could control the bog standard apps, things like Slack wouldn't follow.

This last bit used to be a big problem with Linux, if you ran a Gnome theme, and fired up a KDE app, it was like an alien suddenly landed on your desktop. Statically linked apps were often worse because a static linked KDE app wouldn't even have the same theme as the dynamically linked ones. Java based apps, apps built with other toolkits, all added their own unique and clashing bits of chaos to your interface.

One of the upsides to MacOS, is third party toolkits have a single target look to try and mimic.

Even so, I still miss being able to theme. The recent post about Mira Furlan passing reminded me of a Babylon 5 theme I wrote for Windowmaker what seems like a lifetime ago.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#130

Post by anthk » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 5:26 PM UTC

tambourine_man wrote: post #126

The epitome of theming was on with Kaleidoscope. You could not only change colors, but the complete shape of every widget. And there were a few very tasteful themes, among the ocean of crazyness one would expect. This Twitter handle shows what was possible on early OS X: https://twitter.com/osxthemes Web Archive's page: https://web.archive.org/web/20050216050114/http://www.kaleid...

Compared to any Linux desktops and WM's that was nothing.