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Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

hisham.hm

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Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#31

Post by agumonkey »

finnthehuman wrote: post #22

I think what UI customization shows us is that software vendors providing customize-ability correlates with a lack of confidence in the defaults they ship. When someone creating software has a strong opinion about the "right" way, they can't see the possibility that anyone would ever have legit disagreement with their brilliance so they take away control. And when they can't figure out the right solution to something…

After watching a computer chronicles episode with win2 or win3 MS marketing employee pitching the new options.. it felt exactly like the most recent apple/android talks (grossly: custom backgrounds, colors).

My conclusion: whenever the core product is done, the company will sell you the 'make it your own' pitch, because that's the easiest path.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#32

Post by richard_todd »

On the Windows side, isn't it a side-effect of the shift from standardized common controls to WPF that happened around the vista time-frame? It's much harder to provide consistent user theming against non-standard controls. Similarly, on the early web you could theme sites easily with your browser settings, but as theming power shifted to web developers with CSS, that capability melted away.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#33

Post by arketyp »

>Looking back, I feel like this trend of less aesthetic configurability has diminished the sense of user ownership from the computer experience, part of the general trend of the death of “personal computing”.

This, and end of story. What's personalized today are things like the extensions for your browser and your Google account. OSs are becoming terminals.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#34

Post by janci »

finnthehuman wrote: post #22

I think what UI customization shows us is that software vendors providing customize-ability correlates with a lack of confidence in the defaults they ship. When someone creating software has a strong opinion about the "right" way, they can't see the possibility that anyone would ever have legit disagreement with their brilliance so they take away control. And when they can't figure out the right solution to something…

Unfortunately, that does not imply they are right.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#35

Post by petepete »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #25

I wish there were real high-quality Linux and Windows themes imitating Windows 3.x, 98 and XP (and some other old OSes perhaps) realistically, not just "kind of like that". I would even pay money for such if I were satisfied. Ideally, they should also be easy to combine in different ways. E.g. I want Win3.11 pixel art icons, Win98 window&panel styles and WinXP non-antialiased fonts - these 3 things make me feel orgas…

Have you tried Chicago 95?

https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#36

Post by selfhoster11 »

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.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#37

Post by bitwize »

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…

Something like X resources gave the user deep configurability indeed; what's more, because they lived on the X server they communicated user preference to even remote clients.

A graphical tool to allow users to set preferences through X resources, similar perhaps to Visual Studio Code's preferences pane, might be a great way to allow users to tweak their apps with power and precision.

Of course, literally no one uses X resources these days, all settings live in XDG_CONFIG_HOME. And it's all moot under Wayland, which doesn't even allow remote clients.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#38

Post by toyg »

I agree wholeheartedly with this (2019) post. I’m still very much a fan of customizations, forever mourning the end of easy tweaking of icons and themes on non-Linux. I used to “refresh” my desktop every two or three years, but nowadays tweaking Windows or MacOS is unsustainable: every couple of months an update will likely break all your carefully-laid-out hacks, and the knowledge is getting harder and harder to acquire. So I limit myself to wallpapers, browsers, and IDEs (IntelliJ is quite skinnable).

I understand the rationale for the market evolving as it did: the world of computers is now much seedier than it was in the ‘90s... every customisation option will be jumped on by malware writers of all sorts. Tweakers are now effectively banished from commercial vendors, but at least we’ll always have Linux.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#39

Post by squiggleblaz »

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 continuation of the branding approach — its their marketers saying "I know better than you what your working tools should look like".)

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#40

Post by gmueckl »

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 been stuck with a mostly unusable UI. Somehow that was OK.

Nowadays, things like that are tolerated a lot less. Configuration options in mainstream products are (often) fussed over to the nth degreee to make sure that there isn't a way to get the whole thing into a bad state. The result is usually somewhat more robust. And that's enough to satisfy most users most of the time.

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