Does anyone else miss simple gray GUIs? There is something in my brain that associates that style with “real” computing. I would love to have an editor theme for it (IntelliJ / vs code / terminal.app).
I don’t know if I miss grey UIs, but I do miss the consistent design language and how easy it was to tell if something was a button, scrollable, etc.
My settings on macOS (and partly iOS):
Accessibility -> Display:
- Reduce Motion
- Increase contrast
- Differentiate without color
- Show window title icons
- Show toolbar button shapes
- Show scrollbars: always
- Keyboard Navigation (use space, tab, enter)Aren't we at a pretty good place with that stuff, though? It's rare to see the abominations that used to roam, especially in the Flash era. Web designers generally follow mostly the same principles and design language. Windows is the only place where it's still a bit wild west.
>Aren't we at a pretty good place with that stuff, though?
Hell no:
I can't tell what is and isn't a button.
I can't tell specific areas apart from others (no borders/shading).
I can't see or use the scroll bar, assuming one is even present.
I can't tell where a window begins and ends.
I can't tell which window is active.
I can't tell what a window is for.
I can't tell what the fuck these Nouveautian Hieroglpyhs from Uranus (aka icons) mean.
I could go on, but I digress: Are we in a pretty good place? Hell no.
Going past windows 7 the trend moving from graphical/textured UI chrome to minimalist/hidden elements, scrollbars has been one of the big 'casualties' for me. When it's just a solid gray there's very little to distinguish it from the content, and it doesn't help readability if the bar is meant to show what proportion of the whole document you're viewing. As much as some people hated it, going back further to winxp where they had color in the UI made contrast better again (and you could customize the theme in the win3.x/9x windows), or third party themes if you were prepared to lightly mess with OS files.
It's kind of hard to tell how real your problems are without knowing which environment you are talking about, but it would be helpful to know where you have encountered these problems. I haven't seen them in any of the apps or OSes I regularly use (Windows, macOS).
On both Windows and macOS, windows are clearly delimited by drop shadows. You have to go out of your way as a malicious app developer to explicitly disable that.
I haven't interacted with a scrollbar in decades. Its purpose in 2024 is a visual cue.
> On both Windows and macOS, windows are clearly delimited by drop shadows.
Looks like the terminal but can't zoom in on mobile, I guess UsabilityNightmares for threads too
IIRC it's the Calculator. :(
It's the minimize/maximize/close buttons. Inactive windows draw them ever so slightly in gray compared to active windows drawing them in black. Calculator has them in black.
As for Powershell/Terminal, assuming the screenshot wasn't timed deliberately, there is no caret which implies it's not the active window.
It's shading, but the worst kind of shading.
The new windows GUI framework used for the windows on the screen seems to be worse in this regard, as normal windows get their titles greyed out which is quite obvious and is a more natural place to look at than the control buttons
Most of those are immediately apparent in at least Windows, macOS and GNOME.
>On both Windows and macOS, windows are clearly delimited by drop shadows.
I disable window shadows with extreme prejudice because I find them visually painful. They obscure something I should be able to see without meaningfully highlighting what I want to see, which instinctively strains my eyes.
What the sincere hell was the problem with a simple, thick window border?
>Its purpose in 2024 is a visual cue.
Yes. They are practically non-existent in most environments.
And on top of all that is the terrible (IMHO) UX design pattern of getting rid of Apply/Cancel buttons, particularly in settings panes.
I use EMWM and a Motif theme for QT5 because of that. For GTK, a nice one it's 'backwater', good enough. Not Motif, but it blends well.
Check my post a few minutes ago to fix most problems. Also, install HazeOver to dim (or hide) inactive windows/apps.
Also: offending Fitts's law and pseudomaximized windows.
I don't think so. One example: on Windows, vscode changed the behavior of scroll bars -- something that has been a standard since the mid-80s. They changed the paging behavior and removed the end buttons. Unbelievable.
End buttons on scroll bars are a remnant from when scrolling was new. macOS has done away with them entirely. It's been decades since I interacted with one, so no, I don't miss them at all.
So, I'm not denying that the situation on Windows is inconsistent when you factor in UIs that Microsoft is trying desperately to update, but the design language around scrolling in modern UIs just doesn't seem to be a real problem (outside of accessibility, obviously, which needs special attention regardless).
I don't know about Windows 11, but on Windows 10 end buttons remain standard. Do you also think that diverging from consistency with the host platform is acceptable?
> design language around scrolling in modern UIs just doesn't seem to be a real problem (outside of accessibility, obviously, which needs special attention regardless)
This is another difference between the mentality today vs. the mentality back then. Accessibility should not need "special" attention. It should be baked into the product. Enough users lack the ability to comfortably drag while clicking, that you don't want to first release a product that doesn't work for them, and then later fix it as a bug. You need to consider Accessibility from day one, during the early design. Just like you need to consider security vulnerabilities and user privacy from day one. They're not things that get tacked on at the end.
But this example isn't even about considering Accessibility holistically. The devs just flat out -removed- the scroll end caps from the product! This wasn't an oversight or some UX over-eager designer accidentally going overboard. They deliberately went out of their way to remove a standard control.
I use Edge as my browser, but I think Chrome is the same: The scrollbar is hidden while I'm not scrolling. There's an option to always show the scrollbar, but it's still this tiny little sliver that doesn't match the system scrollbar.
Someone at Google, and someone else at Microsoft, probably think this is good UX. I beg to differ.
mobile is an UX / accessibility abyss though xD
I sure do. Modern OS UIs might be visually rich and feature-packed, but this definitely came at the cost of clarity and efficiency. Because I do a lot of writing, I keep an old thinkpad and an old PowerBook running NT 4 and Mac OS 9 respectively. There's just something about those grays and the straightforward, no-nonsense UIs that allows me to work without distractions. I can't say the same thing about my macbook and all of its colorful superfluous features. Of course, since those OSes are ancient, it's more difficult to access the internet which also helps quite a lot with me being more focused on my work.
I use the MS DOS editor theme for VS Code!
Wow, the edit.com / qbasic.exe UI!
I spent hours in QBasic when I was a teenager. Damn, that's ages ago!
GORILLA.BAS
this is already advanced LEVEL II for experienced programmes who were able to use Q Basic.
but ... real pro's were using GW Basic! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW-BASIC
LOL
Not even a little! I can get nostalgic, sure, but I wouldn't want it to be part of my everyday experience.
> There is something in my brain that associates that style with “real” computing.
That's interesting. For me, it's green or amber terminals - perhaps it's like music where the genre of your teens defines the best music for the rest of your life. Were you a teenager in the Win3.1 era?
That's a lot of the reason why I use Chicago95 where I can.
I like to run LXQt sometimes for that (and for the snappiness / low resources).
Ah, yes, "REAL" computing:
in the old days you had to pack your 17inch screen into your car, drive to your friends house, plan to game Doom or Quake, but in the end you were configuring network drivers etc. the whole weekend instead of playing: including features like countless reboots and reinstalls because something was crashed during "optimizing" the memory configuration for whatever driver<->game combo.
and if you set a wrong/not supported screen resolution in NT4, you had to set off power to reboot the computer because resolution back-switching was not available back then.
REAL computing also in the sense that a 500kb wordfile could crash your machine, if it loaded at all - because it took 1 min to load the bytestream from disk :)
yes, good ol days :-D
While I appreciate the flashbacks you just gave me, I don't think the enshittifaction of GUI:s is orthogonal to the evolution in not having to deal with hardware issues any more.
well, then we may have a different interpretation of "REAL computing" :-D LOL
but i agree: that we do not have these hardware issues anymore was huge driver in getting mass adoption of home computing & internet and the ecosystem as a whole - i remember 1994 when i needed a graphic driver update for some niche SVGA card, i had to go to the store, give them 4 x 3.5inch disks, wait one week and then i could get the disks back :-D
today, the normal DAU is able to buy a super powerful computer in a discount store and have it running with some games 1h later.
I miss the old Paintbrush application, it has a selective eraser. I remember me and my brother invented a mini-game where we drew a house with a dark green lawn and then ran the selective eraser using the arrow keys to mow the lawn and make it light green. I also miss the old times when an application took 0 seconds to load, loading solitaire in Windows 10 is a horrible user experience with loading times and bloated UI and ads.
OK, i don't associate old Windows PC with "applications taking 0 seconds to load". In fact, usually the disk drive would spring into action and it would take much longer than nowadays to load a 300kb application.
Impressive but the Microsoft product is now underwhelming. So many people here spent years of their life doing things with the wonder for its time that was WfW 3.11.
Think how many man years were wasted trying to configure autoexec.bat and config.sys.
The first decent OS that I came across was SGI's IRIX. Unlike every other OS GUI you could focus on your work, in your applications, and not be concerned with the OS. There was nothing to battle against. Operating systems should be invisible and enable you to do more important things, not an end to themselves.
I don't know why, but when I saw the bundle loading, my brain triggered the floppy disk reading sound into my ears in the background, I felt it and I miss the old days :)
Looking through the source code, it appears to be powered by js-dos: https://github.com/caiiiycuk/js-dos
https://dos.zone/diablo-1996/ Diablo I in browser? Wow. So worth it just to idle in the village and listen to Matt Uelmen's music. :)
https://d07riv.github.io/diabloweb/ here's another one that's more integrated
From the page:
> The simplest API to run DOS/Win 9x
Very cool to see there's still love for this era of computing. I still have a 486 set up, with Windows 3.11. I sometimes play minesweeper on it, or play around with Borland C++.
I discovered that my institution blocks all traffic to Russia (v8.js-dos.com is hosted in Russia).
Pretty cool. Needs a function key row. Prince of Persia seemed to load okay, but wouldn't accept input.
Works for me. Exit Windows and launch it under DOS mode.
Keyboard input wasn't working for me on several games, until I reloaded the page.
I didn't even realise mIRC worked on 3.11, wow! It was my first introduction to programming in a way.
It makes me wonder if adding something akin to the script editor you had in mIRC to for instance a game such as minecraft would serve as a good way to introduce people to programming, similar to how mIRC might have..
This feels not the original Windows 3.11 machine. Otherwise: https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/windows/3.10/
That version (and Pieter's) lacks Reversi, you have to chose Windows 3.0 to get it.
I can't believe how poorly it plays at "Master" setting now that i know some strategy.
Back in the late 90s there was some tool that ran an actual Windows 3.1 which displayed in a browser window. I had a demo, and I remember it clearly, but for the life of me I can't tell you what it was or how it worked. I think it was a Win32 program.
Windows 9x had a win 16 subsystem. You could ostensibly access it through ActiveX which was in IE at the time. Certainly more of a hack than an emulator.
It also could have been an Adobe flash imitation which is probably more likely.
Must be the former, because I loaded a Windows 3.1 app into it and ran it!
Had to have been that given the age. The only other alternative is a binary plug-in.
JavaScript/VBScript didn't have enough control to pull it off and Java was way too slow back then. It used to be a real dog - probably still carries some of that baggage albeit undeservedly (Android for instance, runs things just fine)
Flashback! Did you get Wacky Wheels running? :-D Otherwise: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/wacky-wheels-2qq
More interesting if you exit windows and run DOS.
Also the Windows 95 version of EDIT.EXE is in there for some reason, rather than the actual edit.com (which is a frontend for qbasic /edit) For some reason, edit.exe has a com file extension.
For those confused about the mouse cursor like I was, you need to click in the monitor first for it to take control of the cursor, otherwise it mostly skips over most of the window areas.
Just in time when I got new DOS/Win3.11/Win98 hardware :)
I left it to run in the background and was pleasantly surprised by the Windows-Logo-Screensaver that started after some minutes.
Holy crap, he has Jazz Jackrabbit?! I'm defo going over to Pieter's house to play vidya.
The 90s web page is a really nice touch, especially with the modern touches like the Perplexity.ai searchbar. Definitely meant to take you back to simpler tech times.
Why is it that a button that says 'DO NOT CLICK' calls out SO hard to be clicked?
I believe that's called "attractive nuisance".
I once filled in some psychological test. Some of the multiple choice questions were like "please select option C when answering this question"
I deliberately put in the wrong answers there, figuring they were probably scoring me on rebelliousness or impulsiveness or whatever... but I just had to do it.
I think they are to check if you are actually reading the questions at all, vs. just spamming random answers.
I played tripeaks and I still can't get into reliable profit 30 years later.
The mouse acceleration is insane, makes it unusable.
The games! Amazing.
ZNES 1.51
Is it just me, or is the font in the title bar/menus, off?
It's the "large"/high-DPI version of the font, intended for larger displays and resolutions like 1024x768 and up. The size and style of the system font in Windows 3 is not fixed, but depends on your display driver and what mode it's in. There would often be different choices like "1024x768 (small fonts)" and "1024x768 (large fonts)"
I clicked the link just to see whether Trumpet Winsock was installed. I wasn't disappointed.
Now I see why I love 256 colors