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

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

#31

Post by cmrdporcupine »

rbanffy wrote: post #26
mrweasel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> You'd be hard pressed to call the Window 95 UI pretty, but it is really functional. Ironically, the Windows 95 look seems a lot like a copy of the NeXT look, which is the OS all modern Macs are kind of running.

Yeah frankly I'd take the NeXT UI over any of them, including Mac OS X, which felt like a huge step backwards to me compared to NeXTstep

EDIT: Sun's OpenLook is the other one from that era that was fantastic

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

#32

Post by hyperbrainer »

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's interesting especially because it seems like companies today pour tens of millions into "accessibility", but I never see a thing's usability in terms of simple and easy-to-do-what-I-want UX fall in to the same category.

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

#33

Post by InsideOutSanta »

bsnnkv wrote: post #9

This still remains the absolute pinnacle of cohesive desktop environment design in my books.

I think the desktop operating systems of that era were at a sweet spot. They were technically advanced enough to render good-looking, crisp color user interfaces. However, most people were still novices at using computers, so OS designers consciously designed their operating systems to be as clear as possible. Applications tended to be written for each individual platform and to follow its UI guidelines.

Windows 95, NT, System 7 and System 8, BeOS, and NextSTEP all had really clear UX. You always knew where to drag a window, what was clickable, where to find settings, etc.

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

#34

Post by wobfan »

doright wrote: post #19

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, unfor…

I actually would think less of this as a look back into the past but hopefully as a real alternative to the current DEs, which obviously then needs to have high res fonts. That would be nice.

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

#35

Post by rafram »

hyperbrainer wrote: post #32
voidfunc wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got in an argument with an accessibility engineer about this recently... The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability.

It's interesting especially because it seems like companies today pour tens of millions into "accessibility", but I never see a thing's usability in terms of simple and easy-to-do-what-I-want UX fall in to the same category.

One is required by law and/or contract terms, the other is just nice to have.

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

#36

Post by mananaysiempre »

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

> This looks nice

These kinds of things almost always give me an uncanny-valley feeling. Here I'm looking at the screenshot and can’t help noticing that the taskbar buttons are too close to the taskbar’s edge, the window titles are too narrow, the folders are too yellow, and so on and so forth. (To its credit, Wine is the one exception that is not susceptible to this, even when configured to use a higher DPI value so the proportions aren’t actually the ones I’m used to.) I’m not so much criticizing the theme’s authors as wondering why this is so universal across the many replicas.

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

#37

Post by diggan »

esafak wrote: post #18
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.

> I never had to do anything akin to fiddling with the Windows Registry

If I recall correctly, when I got my first Macbook, I had to edit plist files or something similar in order to do basic things like permanently showing hidden files, showing the full path in Finder, show file extensions for all file types, increase the animation speed so the computer didn't feel slow as molasses, etc, etc.

Maybe these things are now easier to configure via GUI on macOS?

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

#38

Post by toast0 »

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

Honestly, I don't think anyone has done real user research on basic interfaces since Microsoft did it for Windows 95. I'm pretty sure that was the last publication I've seen.

It's a lot of time, effort, and expense to run user research, but the potential benefits to the users are big.

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

#40

Post by mouse_ »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #36
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

> This looks nice These kinds of things almost always give me an uncanny-valley feeling. Here I'm looking at the screenshot and can’t help noticing that the taskbar buttons are too close to the taskbar’s edge, the window titles are too narrow, the folders are too yellow, and so on and so forth. (To its credit, Wine is the one exception that is not susceptible to this, even when configured to use a higher DPI value so…

Computing is largely a cargo cult thing these days.

The problem is that the interfaces these bootleg skins draw "inspiration" from were designed on the back of millions of pre-inflationary dollars' R&D from only the best at Golden-Age IBM, Microsoft, Apple, etc.. BeOS, OS/2, Windows 95-2000 do not look the way they do because it looks good, they look the way they do because it works good, countless man hours went into ensuring that. Simply designing an interface that looks similar is not going to bring back the engineering prowess of those Old Masters.

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