The big change was in Windows 9x the icons were 16-color, unless you had a 16-bit color display (even 256 color graphics cards used 16 color icons because of palette swapping between applications).
Great design stands the test of time. e.g. TrueType fonts from that era are still used today. (Actually the designs of many of those fonts are substantially older than their TrueType implementations.) These icons haven't aged well IMO. They looked cheesy back in the day and they still do today.
That's not what "dated" means in this context. It means the artifact is stuck in its time period and not well suited for the modern era. So if the Matrix is still awesome, then it's not dated.
The matrix is a simulation of the past (the late 90s) - which is a great film idea because it means even the presence of deep CRT monitors doesn't date the movie - unlike (say) in "Alien", where they do (imo).
I think the small palette is a big part of the charm. It’s limited enough to give the whole set a coherent look, but large enough to illustrate any kind of object.
I also think the aesthetic of classic Mac OS, like versions 8 and 9, as well as BeOS had great design that made it easy to know what widgets were what and how to interact with them.
Yes! The "Platinum" aesthetic in classic Mac OS was great. Simple aesthetic, easy to follow for custom UI elements.
Not all of the interface shown in these screenshots uses Platinum -- in particular, Quicktime Player did its own thing, and a handful of control panels used an older look-and-feel based on Mac OS 7 -- but it should be pretty apparent what the standard was.
Windows 2000 was just about the peak of desktop interfaces from a usability and efficiency standpoint, its really only missing out on window snapping and workspaces (which is kinda a crutch for bad window management like on OSX)
While they may have been good for the time, it’s pretty hard to distinguish a lot of these while looking at my smartphone, especially when I’m not wearing glasses.
You might want to consider adding "image-rendering: pixelated" to your CSS; on a high-dpi monitor, these render with bilinear interpolation, which I think doesn't do justice to the crispness of these icons.
Agreed, though with this sort of pixel art you really want either Lanczos, or some palette-based scaling like hq#x. That way you will preserve the "crisp", high-frequency content in the original image as much as possible while not introducing artifacts like a "blocky" appearance (instead, the result is smooth but crisp, like a watercolor painting).
(In fact, I wish modern desktop environments did this automatically on HiDPI screens while keeping the original pixel art as their source-- especially for its improved usability on lower-res displays, which are still widely used, both on desktop and mobile. Instead we tend to get SVG, which while extremely crisp on high-res displays is a mess for the original 16x16 or 32x32 use case.)
What is the problem with 'blocky' appearance? All of those filters produce icons in their own aesthetic. If the point is to preserve their pixellation when why bother with filters?
The "point" of pixel art-- what makes it so convenient for graphicians, even amateur ones-- is not the blocky appearance (what you call "pixelated" - but in fact these icons did not appear "blocky" on the CRT screens that were in common use at the time!), but to set a uniform constraint on fine detail (and sometimes color depth) within the image, and then to maximize quality while staying within that constraint. It is perfectly consistent to want a means of rendering these images that preserves whatever level of detail was in the original while not introducing blocky artifacts.
The same art style was used on portable consoles with LCD screens, and on line doubled VGA modes with blocky pixels. Even pixel art designed for SD televisions and low quality interconnects might not have been intended to be blurred, e.g. Chrono Trigger includes a pixel art typewriter in the starting room, where the keys are represented by a single-pixel checkerboard pattern that is easily made unrecognizable by blur. Some designers even showed blocky pixels in printed materials, e.g. the cover art and the instruction manual of Super Mario Bros. It's possible that some artists intended their pixel art to be blurred, but it's not universally true.
The "not blocky CRT" argument doesn't really apply to personal computer CRT monitors, as even when they maxed out at 640x480 or 800x600 the display was still pretty crisp.
I can kind of see this argument if you're talking about playing nintendo on mom's old dog-eared TV with the UHF adapter... but frankly I prefer to see pixel art in its original unmolested, pixellated form
edit- on that note I remember very clearly that 320x240 games had a blocky appearance in the 640x480 era. That was one of the biggest reasons to get a 3D card!
I remember playing Master of Orion 2 on my computer at the time (mid 90s) and thinking:
1. it's amazing this game actually runs at 640x480
2. there's no point in having resolutions any higher than that, as you can't see the individual pixels at that size anyway (I had a 14" CRT, viewable area probably around 13").
At least in the early to mid 90s you definitely still had "CRT fuzz" on computer monitors.
I think the typical CRT fuzz is actually quite close to the optimum smoothing that could be achieved with a simple, analog system, such as was common in the 1980s and early 1990s - in that it should closely approximate a Gaussian blur! But lanczos (or hq#x) is crisper than that, of course.
(And yes, 320x240 did use 2x nearest neighbor interpolation on later video cards/monitors that could only display higher resolutions natively. But I assume that back in the early 1980s, you would actually get a "native" 320x240 screen, just like on a home computer or console.)
On any CRT screen, you'd just get 320x240 as native resolution, the "interpolation" basically done by the phosphorus of the screen. This was the norm well into 90s, and not everybody was on an LCD monitor in 00s, either.
I remember that many games (myself included) resisted LCDs for a long time even beyond that, precisely because they could only do one resolution well. If you played old games, this wasn't satisfactory because those were often hardcoded in the resolutions they support - typically 320x200 or 640x480. And if you played new games, you'd often have to dial the resolution down to get it running reasonably fast.
By the criteria outlined in the article I would have thought the Windows 95 icons would be the ideal - they're essentially the same but without the "flashy" gradients and other depth indications.
Side note: gave me some joy to read the comments and find that the ZIP file with the icons in was infected with a virus. Now that's the kind of retro I can associate with Windows 98.
I tried very hard using bash scripting and some recursive archive extraction stuff to get all the icons out... but I couldnt get all the names, and I got a lot of false positives. Id be interested to know how the author did this.
I feel like older user interfaces treated me like an adult.
Whatever I did on Solaris [1] or even early OS X [2] felt like I was doing real work, important stuff, even if I was just messing around.
I don't know what changed, I use both Linux (Gnome 3) and macOS Mojave daily but they both lack that polished "workstation" feel. Maybe it's all in my head or I'm just getting old :/
Early OS X looked like a weird candyland to me. Not as lurid as XP, sure, but the 3D-like glassy buttons and the sliding animation as you minimised something always struck me as kind of overkill.
When Jobs first showed off the Aqua UI, he was pretty excited about the æsthetics and what Quartz could do. There were also many practical things shown, but…
It was quite the shock coming to OS X from NeXTSTEP. I actually ran with NeXTSTEP icons on OS X for a lot of years until they made it super hard with SIP.
I miss old Aqua. The earliest revisions were definitely over the top, but the version that was part of Mavericks that had many years of refinements baked in struck me as a nice balance — it was more subdued and professional than its predecessors without being stripped of personality (unlike the flat theme that came with Yosemite). It was nice.
XFCE was originally a visual clone of CDE, but coded in slightly less obtuse widgets (GTK vs Motif). XFCE has remained pretty great, supporting the new, but still keeping the spirit and speed of the old.
I used CDE on Linux for few weeks on laptop (IIRC only weirdness involved in building it was Imake, which makes sense for pre-X.org X11 related stuff).
It works perfectly for the same values of "works" and "perfectly" as on commercial unices. In other words it is in the middle between lightweight WM and full desktop environment, mainly because there aren't any applications that meaningfully integrate with CDE apart from all the dt* stuff (text editor, terminal, calculator...) included with CDE distribution and for the CDE's design to be meaningful you really want CDE applications that integrate with it's object model and not just plain X applications, otherwise it is only somewhat mis-designed window manager.
As a WM it is VERY useful and wraps windows for modern apps without issue. Some of the CDE apps though (dtcalendar and dtmail) are in need of a complete overhaul to be useful with modern protocols.
There’s a port/tribute of the Irix 4dwm available for modern Linux. I don’t get the satisfying clunk when I drop a file in the dumpster, but otherwise it keeps me from wasting money on an Octane and all the gear necessary to output to a digital display.
I think much is due to the mobile influence. Apples worked in a lot of hidden functionality into iOS. That’s led to things like the applications folder being nearly forgotten about and left out of UI. App switching used to be done by the top right drop down, but would never go now. Etc. I don’t know fully how to explain what’s missing, but something is.
”felt like I was doing real work, important stuff, even if I was just messing around.
I don't know what changed”
You got more experienced. When you’re looking at your second, third, etc. system, there always are cases where you think “This is so easy on ‘Foo’, why does ‘Bar’ make it so difficult?”, and feel like wasting time, even if it isn’t really difficult on that system, but just different, or if it is difficult because you are working on step A, but the new system has a better workflow that does steps A thorough Z in one go.
If you ask people what’s the most fondly remembered or impressive OS, computer game, word processor, mobile phone, music player, etc., it often is the first one they really used.
> If you ask people what’s the most fondly remembered or impressive OS, computer game, word processor, mobile phone, music player, etc., it often is the first one they really used.
I feel like this is an odd statement to make with no data.
I can only speak for myself and my partner, but our current systems hold much more love than anything that came before.
For me i3 on Linux is mature enough to not be intrusive into my life, mpd as a music player and so on.
For my partner, she uses a Mac/iPhone/Apple Watch, and after coming from windows 7 she finds it “much better”, and “I would never go back”
Games are another example. I played hundreds of computer games in my youth, from donkey king on the Commadore64 to rayman on the PlayStation. And my most fondly remembered game is almost certainly grand theft auto: vice city which is a much later title.
I don’t think it smacks true that people love the first thing they learn on. I’m not keen on MS Windows 3.1 today, or MS operating systems in general, in fact quite the opposite.
> If you ask people what’s the most fondly remembered or impressive OS, computer game, word processor, mobile phone, music player, etc., it often is the first one they really used.
Anecdata: I used Windows for the first 10 years of my computing life, and today I'd rather use any obscure Unix over any Windows. The "Unix philosophy" as an attempt to produce a consistent UX has held up pretty well over 40+ years.
I don’t think it’s just personal experience. I had a similar feeling as the OP, but my feeling happened at a very specific time. I upgraded my MacBook from Snow Leopard to either Lion or Mountain Lion (I cant remember which version it was), and overnight I went from having my entire life spelled out on my calendar to basically not being able to use iCal (it might have been renamed by that point as well) at all.
The new version of iCal’s only purpose was to look pretty and offer very basic functionality. The older version might have started looking dated, but I could use keyboard shortcuts and see details about my appointments easily at a glance. The new version didn’t even want me to know details existed.
The same story played out in Mail.app, Address book, iWork, etc.
MS’s new “Modern” apps show that the same influences have driven Windows development in recent times as well.
What changed is that computers went from a tool used by professionals who didn't start out as, but expected to become power users. To mass market devices intended for casual users who expect to not have to learn anything, to think/decise. aka for things to be intuitive.
Neither is inherently bad. The problem comes when you're apower user forced to. Use casual product or vice versa.
About when the internet started taking off as a consumption medium I think. Desktop computers started to show up in every home and were largely there just as a gateway to the internet. Prior to that, they were mostly for office work and computing enthusiasts with the occasional non-computing-enthusiast gamer thrown in. Since the consumer market was much, much larger the focus shifted.
The strange thing to me, though, is that once smart phones and tables took over as the preferred platform for internet consumption the desktop OSs didn't start reverting to targeting the market that still wants them. Instead they doubled down on trying to turn desktops into smart phones.
That, there are things that are great for everything, is a false belief. Everything is compromise. If something is good for everything, it is optimized for nothing. Power users don't want good. The need 100% optimized for purpose, the #1 best. Which, btw, means giving control and power to the user. The UI and design worlds push for the opposite extreme. All control (away from user), scripted, "experience" to the user. Those professions selling point "we know what's best for users". A sentiment which doesn't work for power users.
Our overall computing environment acquired a distinct patronizing/infantilizing feel to it in the last decade. I don't think it's only visual -- or even visual at all, not sure.
Linux has had everything for ages, and that's kind of its problem, too. Everything that fits in one bin will have a counterpart somewhere that fits in the opposite bin.
With the crucial difference that the somewhat funny message is followed by actual detailed description of what happened instead of "something went wrong".
I agree that a message like "This program attempted to do something the system won't allow" would be far more useful, along with a "more info" button with a more detailed error description behind it. It sure beats "oops" and "something went wrong". But people tend to forget what a computer said or did and remember how it made them feel. So the market pressure is toward mollycoddling error messages and away from informative ones.
(Also, the word "oops" was chosen because it connotes "something went wrong and it's our fault" -- probably chosen to avoid implying that it was the user's fault. Really ingenious, again, if your goal is to keep users comfortable rather than fully informing them.)
Okay, then how about "pretend you're a human" as opposed to the lizard people who design and write computer software. Spin it however you like. You still have to make the distinction between techies and "the rest of us". Systems have been designed that do not make this distinction and assume the user will be able to figure everything out, the most notorious of which is Unix -- when unadorned with Apple treacle, arguably one of the most user-hostile systems in common use. Normies perceive Unix as being more arrogant than the systems which "condescend" to them. It seems to say "Oh, you don't belong to the super-secret cabal of users who know these arcane commands? Fuck you, then!"
> You still have to make the distinction between techies and "the rest of us"
The language you use for this is important because it shapes the way you think about the difference. The way it is often phrased is in the form of "we're special, better, smarter, people than those dumb people who have no hope of understanding the arcane magicks we are naturally attune to". Which is of course bull. We have specialized knowledge and familiarity from spending years working with this stuff. That's it.
> [UNIX]... seems to say "Oh, you don't belong to the super-secret cabal of users who know these arcane commands? Fuck you, then!"
It seems to say that because that's exactly what UNIX says. They don't even name commands sensibly, not even in 2019. Discoverability basically doesn't exist.
> Systems have been designed that ... assume the user will be able to figure everything out, [such as] Unix -- ... arguably one of the most user-hostile systems in common use.
Um, you do know that Unix used to come with user manuals? Like, oh I dunno, the vast majority of software in the 1980s and early 1990s? The designers of Unix and comparable systems were perfectly aware that command-line incantations cannot be figured out simply by sitting at the system and playing with it; this is very much not what it was designed for!
If discoverability by novice users is a priority, then that is an argument for menu-driven, interactive interfaces and UIs - which could well be built on top of something like UNIX. But documentation is always going to be important.
Unix manuals are reference manuals, not training manuals. To learn something from them, first you already need to have a very good idea of what you're looking for.
The kind of documentation that Unix comes with is of little use to people who already have some specific training in computing disciplines.
My opinion is that the overall demeanor of desktop user interfaces have steadily become overrun with that of mobile UIs. The "mobile first" mantra has taken a toll on desktop computing, and it's difficult to measure because the desktop computing of a 2019 unmolested by that infantilizing influence (as you rightly put it) cannot be seen from the timeline of reality.
But most of us who have been around for a while can imagine a modern computing environment that still treats desktop computing as desktop computing (and not just large form factor mobile computing).
I'd argue that the desire to have windows side-by-side when multitasking is far more common than to have them be particularly overlapping and hiding one another. Certainly a lot of what I do on a computer is development, but tiling makes composing emails, image editting, writing, and web browsing less painful too. Floating windows seem to be prioritizing a metaphor over usability.
The widespread shortcut/gesture for making a window full height and half-screen width was a good middle ground for me.
Tiling WMs (which I tried 10 years ago?) would always break on some programs (say Gimp), then you had to run that program in "floating mode" and its already too much overhead for me...
They're a half realized idea though. The value of tiling WMs is that they allow you to compose what is essentially your own workflow dashboard and save it. What needs to happen is to complete the idea: entirely composable GUI interfaces.
Nah, CWM is better. Floating, not decorated env with a menu switcher and tags everywhere. Just open a FEW windows per tag, learn to context switch LESS, that's it, keep a kiss approach ;).
We're in the Fisher-Price era, pruning advanced features and providing strong visual cues in the form of bright colors is still the rage.
Who cares about having a file explorer on their mobile device? Who needs advanced networking options on their laptop when they're just using coffeeshop wifi? It'll probably get more and more segmented.
The UI testers for Windows 95 found that people were baffled by hierarchical file systems, even given the conceit of calling directories "folders" (which I found to be infantilizing and infuriating). The confusion and rage provoked by error messages intended to be specific and somewhat meaningful has become a pop-culture meme. ("PC LOAD LETTER? What the fuck does that mean?!")
I've recently had the fortune of talking at length with my mom about her past, and one thing she brought up was how she felt when my dad brought that first desktop computer into the house. To her, it was kind of like a typewriter (which she understood), and kind of like a television (which she also understood). You type things, and they appear on the screen, but -- and this is the spooky bit -- other things may appear on the screen that you never typed. It's something she got used to quickly enough, but never totally came to grips with.
I think most people -- even very smart people -- are like that. They don't know how to deal with a machine that works semi-autonomously, in ways that don't obviously correspond with their input, nor to form an internal model of how it works, nor to engage with the machine transactionally in order to successfully operate it to complete a task ("if I do A, the machine's internal state will become B and I can expect its future behavior to look like C"). This comes natural to us, because we're techies and this is what we do. Some people can sit at a piano and play it like nothing. I can't!
The insight of the GUI was to draw a representation of the machine's internal state (or a highly simplified model of it) to the screen in terms that humans readily understand, along with available options for a human response (in the form of buttons and pull-down menus). Early GUIs prioritized the mapping of machine models to aspects of the real world, leading things like the spatial Finder which presented the file system in such a way that we can use our instincts for how we find things in real space to navigate it. This approach gets you some leverage, but there are limits to how far you can go with this. As time went on, we ran harder and harder against those limits. Typical office users may have fared okay, but then computers started to enter the home in a big way AND started to be networked in a big way, leading to a whole new base of inexperienced users -- who might've otherwise never touched a computer in their daily lives -- confronted with an overwhelming tidal wave of possibilities. And they became baffled, mystified, and frustrated by even the easier-to-use, Windows 9x era interfaces we had. And then, a decade later, smartphones created a whole new base of confused users. So the designers of today, having exhausted all the good ideas of how to solve the problem, resort to the UI equivalent of shouting at a deaf person: dumbing down the UI, removing elements considered to be too distracting, enlarging and spacing out the ones that remain, replacing specific error messages with meaningless but inoffensive blobs of text ("Something went wrong", "There was a problem", etc.).
Even more maddeningly, some of these changes were inspired by corporate communications. Some of these new error messages ("We're sorry, but...") resemble the old broadcast-TV error message of "We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by." But the thing you have to understand is, this sort of communication works on normies. They don't need specific details of what went wrong, what they need is to be reassured that everything, in fact, will be okay. From an appealing-to-normies standpoint, "We are experiencing technical difficulties" would have been a vast improvement over a common Windows 9x error message -- "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." To a normie, "illegal" means criminal! The Feds put...
GUIs represent a machine’s internal state, but that representation is often misleading, especially to users who take it literally.
Take object persistence. It’s innate to assume that objects don’t go away simply because we can’t see them. Documents don’t vanish in real life simply because you stop looking at them.
Many people don’t understand why a document on a computer screen can vanish, because they don’t understand that that document has to be assembled from data and code every time it’s opened. They don’t understand why it should look different in a different version of word (or worse, in some other program), because objects shouldn’t change when you view them somewhere else.
They don’t understand why you can’t just put a Word document in an email, or a website, or in ‘the cloud’ and edit it in-place. To many people the functionality of the editing is inherently in the document, (not the system) and don’t understand that, without the system, it’s just a series of bytes with no inherent meaning or functionality.
I did mention that GUIs have limitations in how accurately they can represent machine state. You've done a nice job in elucidating some of these limitations.
> GUIs represent a machine’s internal state, but that representation is often misleading, especially to users who take it literally.
And that's largely fault of the developers, since they build on layers upon layers of utility libraries, which are not exposed to the user but inevitably pop-up in the form of a broken metaphor or unintelligible error message.
User-facing systems should be defined around powerful data&workflow metaphors, and all the layers in system built around supporting those metaphors in coherent ways.
There is a tradition of people trying to build user systems around simple concepts, easy to combine (starting with Memex, then Smalltalk, Hypercards, and nowadays with mobile OSs). But there's always been a great deal of friction in adopting them:
- first because their experimental nature can't compete with the more polished nature of commercial systems based on legacy conceptual metaphors;
- and second, because up until recently, end-user hardware was not powerful enough to support the complex graphical and computational requirements for the heavy environments required to support these novel interfaces.
Now that computers are powerful enough to build novel experimental interfaces on top of all the legacy libraries required to run generic hardware, we're starting to see again a lot of experimentation of those system-encompassing alternative metaphors for interaction.
> They don’t understand why you can’t just put a Word document in an email, or a website, or in ‘the cloud’ and edit it in-place. To many people the functionality of the editing is inherently in the document, (not the system) and don’t understand that, without the system, it’s just a series of bytes with no inherent meaning or functionality
It borrowed some technologies and ideas from NeXT but the final product from a UI/UX perspective was more a continuation of what is now Classic Mac OS.
My first real (i.e. work) usage of a GUI was DECWindows[1] on a VAXStation, which felt like a real GUI for getting work done. I believe it and Solaris GUI share a common heritage. Even now, I miss the utilitarian feel of it. You can install DECWindows/Motif style themes for Linux but it just doesn't feel 'right'...
You can build CDE on most major Linux distros and run it for that MOTIF flavor. I have been using it daily on Debian and Ubuntu since it was open sourced a few years ago.
It seems to me then that a big problem is designing interfaces to the lowest common denominator, then removing options for advanced users. This is a problem I see even (especially?) on Linux, which gives you limited GUI control and if you want to do anything beyond the most basic changes, expects you to know how to configure everything on the command-line.
A lot of it, I think, isn’t trying to design for the lowest common denominator, but trying to find abstractions that fit problems more accurately. When that works well, you end up with much higher accessibility and fewer errors.
As with all abstractions, though, they tend to leak. Software design tries to minimize those leaks, but they have to prioritize which ones to fix.
Advanced users like you or me don’t need those abstractions nearly as much, so we’re not prioritized. Which is probably fine. We end up seeing the leaks in the abstractions a lot more because of it, though.
> As with all abstractions, though, they tend to leak.
That's part of the problem, though, and not something that should be brushed aside. The old designs were good partly because they operated one abstraction level lower, where the leaks were inherently much smaller.
I wasn't exactly an adult in Win95/98 era and I absolutely loved that computers didn't care one bit and spoke to me indiscriminately. It did not feel like some game and it was great.
In 1998, 42% of US households had a computer. Children used them more than their parents did.[1] Many people without computers at home used them at work, school, or libraries.
There's nothing wrong with making error messages less intimidating. There is something wrong with not giving any information about the problem or not even displaying an error message.
FWIW, I switched to MATE[1] instead of GNOME 3 after GNOME 2. It's a fork of GNOME 2 that retains the look and feel of GNOME 2, and thus far, I've been fairly pleased with it.
Older interfaces were designed to help users learn. Newer interfaces are designed to let users do fewer things with less learning. GNOME went from underlining shortcuts in menus to eliminating menus.
No, older interfaces were designed to expose as much as the available functionality in the system as possible.
There was nothing in common widget libraries or development processes that helped users learn how to operate the system. Merely exposing all the functions is of no use if you don't already know what's their meaning and how you're supposed to use them.
People learned more those days not because the interface made it easy, but because they had no choice if they wanted to use the system at all.
A: You didnt used to have a "workstation" at your house
B: The machine you had at your house was a completely different platform than say, Solaris machines or terminals/mainframes etc.
C: The UI/UX of the work machine and the home machine are now the same -- so its easy to do the "home stuff" on the work machine now.
D: Fewer people than ever have a dedicated "work machine" and do a lot of personal stuff on that "work laptop" regardless of if they arent supposed to.
Much of the appeal of early microcomputers was actually their similarity to the more powerful machines that were being used for "real work". This was true even in the 8-bit era with CP/M, a command-line system that was used almost exclusively for work purposes. That CP/M interface took quite a few elements from the microcomputer and mainframe terminals of its day, and the trend continued with MS-DOS and early Windows. Pure "home computers" did exist during the same time period, but they still looked a lot more professional than the toys we get today, and you could even use them for some light office work.
I felt so cool in Grade 5 when I found that file. I had discovered that EXEs could contain icons, and then found some 3rd party program that loaded one from a DLL, so I went opening random DLLs until I saw that filename. What a rush! Where were all those programs? I found out many, but some were still a mystery.
This was part of whatever that Win3.1 thing was that would scan your disk for programs it recognized and add them to Program Manager, right?
I love the early Windows design, especially the Windows 2000 look. Other than the well designed icons, I find it to be much more intuitive and consistent than modern Windows GUIs and Metro. Part of the reason why I use the classic style on my Windows 7 machine (the other part is better performance). I like it so much I implemented it in ReactJS https://github.com/Gikoskos/react-win32dialog/
Moreover, if you guys haven't read it yet you should definitely check out Raymond Chen's Old New Thing, which talks about the reasoning behind some of the design choices that went down in earlier Windows desktops.
No plans yet but I guess I'd have to adapt. Do you know of any ways to get that look on 8.1 or 10 natively? At least without having to install a third-party theming app.
Funny how the icon of a floppy disk which was used to represent saving is slowly being phased out because the new generations have never even handled a floppy, so they don't remember how crucial it was to put files on floppy before storing them somewhere safe (or handing them over to a colleague/friend). I even had a floppy organizer in my desk drawer with fresh labels and sharpies, and peeling off old labels was actually satisfying back then.
Quite possibly both? I can definitely see where my son is coming from, as he's only seen floppies once in his life, whereas even his Nintendo Switch uses a floppy to indicate that it is saving his progress. Must be baffling.
I hadn't felt as old as I did then since I bumped into the first kid who didn't know what a landline was. ("Imagine a cellphone with no battery, so you needed to keep it plugged in at all times...")
This gets funnier. I just asked the little one whether his comment had been as spontaneous as it had seemed at the time, and got a sigh and eyes rolling for my trouble.
"Dad, it is a joke off the Internet. All the kids in school say that whenever they see a diskette."
Well, the complete concept of "saving" becomes less and less relevant. With apps and websites there often is no explicit need to save. Just edit the document and all changes are immediately synced up to persistent (cloud) storage.
Not just explicit saving, but the whole concept of documents and especially files is disappearing under our noses. Somewhat disconcertingly nobody seems particularly worried that our whole model of computing is shifting away from file-oriented systems. Remember that DOS stands for Disk Operating System, managing files was arguably one of the main functions of it. Now days our data is locked up inside "services" and "apps", not in user-accessible files.
And a key feature of Windows 95 was the explorer with your home directory where you could doubleclick on files and the appropriate application would open, so users won't have to think about the application, but the file first.
However abstracting away from a pure file based view also has benefits, like history or having different views on the document (i.e. to share a read only version)
The main question is: How well will those things serve as lock-in in future, GDPR does a first step there by enforcing that there is a way to extract the data (not that the export format neccisarily is is really usable ...)
Windows was document-centric in other respects, too. For example, the standard UX guidelines defined three types of apps: dialog, single-document interface, and multi-document interface. Most apps were actually expected to be of the last two varieties, and the guidelines covered a lot of points on how it was all supposed to look. And when it came to implementation, frameworks like MFC were designed around that concept as well, with the ability to automatically handle things like multiple views into the same document.
UX designers actually fought for this for ages. Like, at least since the 80s.
“Save the document?” is a stupid question: of course I want the program to preserve what I do. But I also need a way to roll back the changes afterwards if I discover a mistake.
I enjoy opening a photo in photoshop and just putzing around with filters and tools to see what they do. I expect it to throw away my changes unless I explicitly state I want to keep them.
Or you could just click “revert to the original” about the same way as you click “discard changes.” With the difference that your use-case is super rare whereas saving the changes is what everyone wants almost every time.
It is removed from a lot of MS office software (online versions) and it is a complete disaster, because nobody took their time to evaluate some of the most basic use cases.
Users often use a document as a template. Better teach them to SAVE! it under a different name first before editing anything. If they fail that step, content vanishes regularly.
I love how concepts like "folder structures" apparently get deprecated. Yeah, sure, because a tree is bad to model relations. It is like when we removed table of contents from books and just added the required meta information to a long list. Sumerian literature can suck it.
Sorry for the rant, but I already know the transgressions we will have to endure. I want to just save documents in a defined state. No, I do not want to tag it.
This rolling save mechanic would have been possible without a persistent cloud storage. Why just have these bad ideas now?
Ugh, I hope we're not trying to kill the floppy save. There's nothing wrong with anachronistic icons as long as their meaning is well-established. Phone receivers haven't looked like this for a long time: [phone symbol here], but they're still useful symbology for "call" and "hang up".
I was so disappointed with Visual Studio 2018 when somebody decided to remove all the colors from the icons. This made users guess the icon only by its outline. The icon color design of windows 98, 2000 and xp were great, i miss it so much.
The "remove color from all the toolbar icons" thing also happened with Firefox Quantum. And you're right, it's so weird. Perhaps it's a side effect of the ongoing transition to ubiquitous "big", touch-friendly buttons, where a combination of large size and full color would be overly distracting.
The idea is to increase the contrast between content and chrome, by making chrome itself less visually contrasting.
I don't buy into it, though. They tried monochrome grey icons in Visual Studio 2012, and people hated it, for good reasons. So now VS icons have colors again.
I was in a senior position at Microsoft back at the time early versions of Office, Windows 95 and 98 were being developed. In fact a number of groups including the Visual Interface Design group reported to me. That's the group that designed the general visual appearance and also icons in the UI for both Office and Windows. (They were not designing the actual user interaction, just the visual appearance.)
At that time the visual designers were strongly urging that all icons be greyscale because they said color was "distracting". I overruled them and insisted the icons have color because it was better for overall usability.
Now the whole industry seems to have come under the influence of the visual designers favoring visual appearance over usability. Much less attention seems to being given to real overall usability.
What's most infuriating about Office icons is how they change complete look and feel of the launcher icons for the various programs so often, even the color scheme...
And then they ripped the text labels out of the Windows taskbar, as if we are supposed to remember what the icon for Word and Outlook looks like today.
I tend to agree color is another channel of communication, but you need to think the UI that way from the bottom-up. If they wanted grayscale buttons, they'd need them easily recognizable by both new and old users. This was not the case except for the most basic ones.
Did they run labs with actual users to check how they reacted to the monochrome icons?
If you do that well, you can use color to convey another dimension, much like it layers meaning on top of source code (by coloring keywords, variables, comments, etc)
Yeah, windows phone 7 was iirc Microsoft's first foray into flat/monochrome design, and in some ways it was wonderful... WP7 had a hyper-consistent design language that made normally-confusing flat UIs a dream... But ditching color in icons in favour of simple silhouettes was not one of its better ideas, and MS is still trying to make that a thing sometimes like 8 years later.
Seeing only the icons is barely half the truth. There should also be a rendering of the noise those boxes made during operation. With every movement of the mouse and each key press the hard disk made a sound as if it were being eaten by the cookie monster. And of course the disk access indicator flashed like mad all the time. Contemporary hardware seldom reaches that level of entertainment.
I remember that noise. I blame Microsoft more than the hardware. From 1984 to about 1994, Macintoshes were my main computer, and they didn't make noise just for moving the mouse or opening a menu. Later, I ran Ubuntu on a computer that used to run Windows XP. The noise and latency that Windows had, just for opening a menu or folder, were replaced by silence and instant action. (Just to be clear, of course all three had to spin the hard drive when I did something major, like opening a file or program. But Windows is the only one where all interactions were erratic.)
I agree that it wasn't due to the hardware. It's just that today's hardware has gotten so fast that even Microsoft products seem to run almost smoothly.
And in fact, you still get that noise and activity light on Windows 10 and a spinning-rust HD! On a system that wouldn't even manage to use the RAM completely while running on a sensible Linux install, let alone filling RAM up or swapping to disk.
I mean, swapping used to be a fact of life in the late 1990s and early 2000s, even on Linux - RAM was just too cramped back then. But then we got machines with lots and lots of RAM even at the low end, and Linux became snappy and quiet-- while Windows is still as bad as ever.
This — constant swapping — is what drove me to Linux. Though, the laptop I am typing this on is still using 16/32 GiB of RAM, mostly due to the "modern" web. (But that's not any operating system's fault.)
RAM is, I feel, one of the more precious commodities on a machine, still. I have spinning rust in my machines (more space/$), and I've not regretted it, or really had a need for the speed an SSD could bring. (If anything, I think I'd do a hybrid install, with a small SSD and a large HDD.) But I've never once regretted upgrading RAM on a machine, and I definitely miss it on my work MBP.
My HD light on my laptop still flashes endlessly. I wish it flashed brighter when it was doing more work, letting me know the resource intensive task I just initiated was happening... in some way.
But the grind of the hard drive when something happens. I never would have thought of that again had you not made this comment. Crazy nostalgia there.
I never would have thought of that again had you not made this comment. Crazy nostalgia there
So there's this notion in video gaming where you're strolling through a forest or in a cave or factory or some sort of level with no enemies, no battle music, but you suddenly find yourself upon ammo crates and health packs.
Indicator that a big fight was about to happen.
For me and my early voyages through computing, learning how to write little programs and messing about with settings to see what they did, if I ever got stuck on a problem it was THAT noise that told me "hey you're onto something here".
It's ironic that the mass adoption of SSDs also coincides with the gradual disappearance of HDD activity lights on laptops, because with a completely silent SSD the light becomes the only way to know if the machine is slow because of heavy disk activity or something else. Nonvisual/"side-channel" cues are extremely useful for understanding what's happening.
I suppose it's similar to the situation with newer cars, where the engine is so quiet that one sometimes forgets whether it's even on, and attempts to start it again. There have even been laws introduced to make sure that cars can be heard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8925126
I find indicator lights, if they only have the purpose of conveying something that's already obvious in some other way (e.g. "the computer is on"-led plus a monitor that's clearly saying it is) fairly useless. I'm glad that most devices nowadays don't have them and are completely dark even when they're on.
And to your comment about cars, it seems to be more about pedestrians that can know about an oncoming vehicle and less about whether the user thinks it's running. The latter seems to be something that can be easily fixed.
The indicators are normally not used, but when they are, they're very useful. When the screen is off on a laptop, is it because the whole machine is off, just sleeping, the video output is set to external, or something wrong happened? I've had to use a laptop where the POST was unusually long, and without the power LED I would've probably accidentally turned it off again because I would think I hadn't pressed the power button hard enough, and try pressing it again.
Oh Windows 95... the last MS OS to feel completely uniform in aesthetic design.
And that teal... gets me every time. I used to think it was hideously ugly, but these days there's an understated elegance to it that just can't be denied.
[My comment was really a thinly-veiled excuse to link to windows95tips.com. I don't actually have any aesthetic preferences between the icons/design of different versions of Windows.]
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 381 ms ] threadhttps://imgur.com/GpS5Dln
The Matrix is 20 years old this year, it is dated, it is still awesome.
https://win98icons.alexmeub.com/
Not all of the interface shown in these screenshots uses Platinum -- in particular, Quicktime Player did its own thing, and a handful of control panels used an older look-and-feel based on Mac OS 7 -- but it should be pretty apparent what the standard was.
https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos90
(In fact, I wish modern desktop environments did this automatically on HiDPI screens while keeping the original pixel art as their source-- especially for its improved usability on lower-res displays, which are still widely used, both on desktop and mobile. Instead we tend to get SVG, which while extremely crisp on high-res displays is a mess for the original 16x16 or 32x32 use case.)
The "point" of pixel art-- what makes it so convenient for graphicians, even amateur ones-- is not the blocky appearance (what you call "pixelated" - but in fact these icons did not appear "blocky" on the CRT screens that were in common use at the time!), but to set a uniform constraint on fine detail (and sometimes color depth) within the image, and then to maximize quality while staying within that constraint. It is perfectly consistent to want a means of rendering these images that preserves whatever level of detail was in the original while not introducing blocky artifacts.
I can kind of see this argument if you're talking about playing nintendo on mom's old dog-eared TV with the UHF adapter... but frankly I prefer to see pixel art in its original unmolested, pixellated form
edit- on that note I remember very clearly that 320x240 games had a blocky appearance in the 640x480 era. That was one of the biggest reasons to get a 3D card!
1. it's amazing this game actually runs at 640x480
2. there's no point in having resolutions any higher than that, as you can't see the individual pixels at that size anyway (I had a 14" CRT, viewable area probably around 13").
At least in the early to mid 90s you definitely still had "CRT fuzz" on computer monitors.
(And yes, 320x240 did use 2x nearest neighbor interpolation on later video cards/monitors that could only display higher resolutions natively. But I assume that back in the early 1980s, you would actually get a "native" 320x240 screen, just like on a home computer or console.)
I remember that many games (myself included) resisted LCDs for a long time even beyond that, precisely because they could only do one resolution well. If you played old games, this wasn't satisfactory because those were often hardcoded in the resolutions they support - typically 320x200 or 640x480. And if you played new games, you'd often have to dial the resolution down to get it running reasonably fast.
Side note: gave me some joy to read the comments and find that the ZIP file with the icons in was infected with a virus. Now that's the kind of retro I can associate with Windows 98.
kinda like NT5 fading.. it added a bit of information but without distraction nor cost (unlike today UX)
Whatever I did on Solaris [1] or even early OS X [2] felt like I was doing real work, important stuff, even if I was just messing around.
I don't know what changed, I use both Linux (Gnome 3) and macOS Mojave daily but they both lack that polished "workstation" feel. Maybe it's all in my head or I'm just getting old :/
[1] http://agilo.acjs.net/files/screenshot_solaris.png
[2] https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/picture-2-png.57621...
Solaris [1] UI certainly does though!
[1] https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/LinuxBuild/
It works perfectly for the same values of "works" and "perfectly" as on commercial unices. In other words it is in the middle between lightweight WM and full desktop environment, mainly because there aren't any applications that meaningfully integrate with CDE apart from all the dt* stuff (text editor, terminal, calculator...) included with CDE distribution and for the CDE's design to be meaningful you really want CDE applications that integrate with it's object model and not just plain X applications, otherwise it is only somewhat mis-designed window manager.
I don't know what changed”
You got more experienced. When you’re looking at your second, third, etc. system, there always are cases where you think “This is so easy on ‘Foo’, why does ‘Bar’ make it so difficult?”, and feel like wasting time, even if it isn’t really difficult on that system, but just different, or if it is difficult because you are working on step A, but the new system has a better workflow that does steps A thorough Z in one go.
If you ask people what’s the most fondly remembered or impressive OS, computer game, word processor, mobile phone, music player, etc., it often is the first one they really used.
I feel like this is an odd statement to make with no data.
I can only speak for myself and my partner, but our current systems hold much more love than anything that came before.
For me i3 on Linux is mature enough to not be intrusive into my life, mpd as a music player and so on.
For my partner, she uses a Mac/iPhone/Apple Watch, and after coming from windows 7 she finds it “much better”, and “I would never go back”
Games are another example. I played hundreds of computer games in my youth, from donkey king on the Commadore64 to rayman on the PlayStation. And my most fondly remembered game is almost certainly grand theft auto: vice city which is a much later title.
I don’t think it smacks true that people love the first thing they learn on. I’m not keen on MS Windows 3.1 today, or MS operating systems in general, in fact quite the opposite.
Anecdata: I used Windows for the first 10 years of my computing life, and today I'd rather use any obscure Unix over any Windows. The "Unix philosophy" as an attempt to produce a consistent UX has held up pretty well over 40+ years.
The new version of iCal’s only purpose was to look pretty and offer very basic functionality. The older version might have started looking dated, but I could use keyboard shortcuts and see details about my appointments easily at a glance. The new version didn’t even want me to know details existed.
The same story played out in Mail.app, Address book, iWork, etc.
MS’s new “Modern” apps show that the same influences have driven Windows development in recent times as well.
I didn't understand Lion, at all. As much as I loved skeuomorphism on iOS, it felt out of place on the desktop.
Neither is inherently bad. The problem comes when you're apower user forced to. Use casual product or vice versa.
The strange thing to me, though, is that once smart phones and tables took over as the preferred platform for internet consumption the desktop OSs didn't start reverting to targeting the market that still wants them. Instead they doubled down on trying to turn desktops into smart phones.
I stick with KDE and have been happy.
That's the sort of phrasing you don't want to inflict on everyday users.
(Also, the word "oops" was chosen because it connotes "something went wrong and it's our fault" -- probably chosen to avoid implying that it was the user's fault. Really ingenious, again, if your goal is to keep users comfortable rather than fully informing them.)
And right here is why modern tech is so condescending.
The language you use for this is important because it shapes the way you think about the difference. The way it is often phrased is in the form of "we're special, better, smarter, people than those dumb people who have no hope of understanding the arcane magicks we are naturally attune to". Which is of course bull. We have specialized knowledge and familiarity from spending years working with this stuff. That's it.
> [UNIX]... seems to say "Oh, you don't belong to the super-secret cabal of users who know these arcane commands? Fuck you, then!"
It seems to say that because that's exactly what UNIX says. They don't even name commands sensibly, not even in 2019. Discoverability basically doesn't exist.
Um, you do know that Unix used to come with user manuals? Like, oh I dunno, the vast majority of software in the 1980s and early 1990s? The designers of Unix and comparable systems were perfectly aware that command-line incantations cannot be figured out simply by sitting at the system and playing with it; this is very much not what it was designed for!
If discoverability by novice users is a priority, then that is an argument for menu-driven, interactive interfaces and UIs - which could well be built on top of something like UNIX. But documentation is always going to be important.
The kind of documentation that Unix comes with is of little use to people who already have some specific training in computing disciplines.
I learned the command line from a book that came in a Redhat boxed set.
But most of us who have been around for a while can imagine a modern computing environment that still treats desktop computing as desktop computing (and not just large form factor mobile computing).
That's why Microsoft set the "always on top TWM/FVWM IconBar", that's it, the taskbar.
Tiling WMs (which I tried 10 years ago?) would always break on some programs (say Gimp), then you had to run that program in "floating mode" and its already too much overhead for me...
Who cares about having a file explorer on their mobile device? Who needs advanced networking options on their laptop when they're just using coffeeshop wifi? It'll probably get more and more segmented.
I've recently had the fortune of talking at length with my mom about her past, and one thing she brought up was how she felt when my dad brought that first desktop computer into the house. To her, it was kind of like a typewriter (which she understood), and kind of like a television (which she also understood). You type things, and they appear on the screen, but -- and this is the spooky bit -- other things may appear on the screen that you never typed. It's something she got used to quickly enough, but never totally came to grips with.
I think most people -- even very smart people -- are like that. They don't know how to deal with a machine that works semi-autonomously, in ways that don't obviously correspond with their input, nor to form an internal model of how it works, nor to engage with the machine transactionally in order to successfully operate it to complete a task ("if I do A, the machine's internal state will become B and I can expect its future behavior to look like C"). This comes natural to us, because we're techies and this is what we do. Some people can sit at a piano and play it like nothing. I can't!
The insight of the GUI was to draw a representation of the machine's internal state (or a highly simplified model of it) to the screen in terms that humans readily understand, along with available options for a human response (in the form of buttons and pull-down menus). Early GUIs prioritized the mapping of machine models to aspects of the real world, leading things like the spatial Finder which presented the file system in such a way that we can use our instincts for how we find things in real space to navigate it. This approach gets you some leverage, but there are limits to how far you can go with this. As time went on, we ran harder and harder against those limits. Typical office users may have fared okay, but then computers started to enter the home in a big way AND started to be networked in a big way, leading to a whole new base of inexperienced users -- who might've otherwise never touched a computer in their daily lives -- confronted with an overwhelming tidal wave of possibilities. And they became baffled, mystified, and frustrated by even the easier-to-use, Windows 9x era interfaces we had. And then, a decade later, smartphones created a whole new base of confused users. So the designers of today, having exhausted all the good ideas of how to solve the problem, resort to the UI equivalent of shouting at a deaf person: dumbing down the UI, removing elements considered to be too distracting, enlarging and spacing out the ones that remain, replacing specific error messages with meaningless but inoffensive blobs of text ("Something went wrong", "There was a problem", etc.).
Even more maddeningly, some of these changes were inspired by corporate communications. Some of these new error messages ("We're sorry, but...") resemble the old broadcast-TV error message of "We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by." But the thing you have to understand is, this sort of communication works on normies. They don't need specific details of what went wrong, what they need is to be reassured that everything, in fact, will be okay. From an appealing-to-normies standpoint, "We are experiencing technical difficulties" would have been a vast improvement over a common Windows 9x error message -- "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." To a normie, "illegal" means criminal! The Feds put...
Take object persistence. It’s innate to assume that objects don’t go away simply because we can’t see them. Documents don’t vanish in real life simply because you stop looking at them.
Many people don’t understand why a document on a computer screen can vanish, because they don’t understand that that document has to be assembled from data and code every time it’s opened. They don’t understand why it should look different in a different version of word (or worse, in some other program), because objects shouldn’t change when you view them somewhere else.
They don’t understand why you can’t just put a Word document in an email, or a website, or in ‘the cloud’ and edit it in-place. To many people the functionality of the editing is inherently in the document, (not the system) and don’t understand that, without the system, it’s just a series of bytes with no inherent meaning or functionality.
And that's largely fault of the developers, since they build on layers upon layers of utility libraries, which are not exposed to the user but inevitably pop-up in the form of a broken metaphor or unintelligible error message.
User-facing systems should be defined around powerful data&workflow metaphors, and all the layers in system built around supporting those metaphors in coherent ways.
There is a tradition of people trying to build user systems around simple concepts, easy to combine (starting with Memex, then Smalltalk, Hypercards, and nowadays with mobile OSs). But there's always been a great deal of friction in adopting them:
- first because their experimental nature can't compete with the more polished nature of commercial systems based on legacy conceptual metaphors;
- and second, because up until recently, end-user hardware was not powerful enough to support the complex graphical and computational requirements for the heavy environments required to support these novel interfaces.
Now that computers are powerful enough to build novel experimental interfaces on top of all the legacy libraries required to run generic hardware, we're starting to see again a lot of experimentation of those system-encompassing alternative metaphors for interaction.
Hello, OpenDoc.
http://www.windowmaker.org/themes/
It borrowed some technologies and ideas from NeXT but the final product from a UI/UX perspective was more a continuation of what is now Classic Mac OS.
---
[1] http://toastytech.com/guis/DWindows.html
They did, because usually only adults used PCs.
Now kids through elders use PCs and there's nothing wrong making the UX more friendly to people unaccustomed to working in tech.
It's in your head because I think you're missing the roles PCs now play for everyone in society.
As with all abstractions, though, they tend to leak. Software design tries to minimize those leaks, but they have to prioritize which ones to fix.
Advanced users like you or me don’t need those abstractions nearly as much, so we’re not prioritized. Which is probably fine. We end up seeing the leaks in the abstractions a lot more because of it, though.
That's part of the problem, though, and not something that should be brushed aside. The old designs were good partly because they operated one abstraction level lower, where the leaks were inherently much smaller.
There's nothing wrong with making error messages less intimidating. There is something wrong with not giving any information about the problem or not even displaying an error message.
[1] https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/issuebrf/sib00314.htm
[1]: https://mate-desktop.org/
There was nothing in common widget libraries or development processes that helped users learn how to operate the system. Merely exposing all the functions is of no use if you don't already know what's their meaning and how you're supposed to use them.
People learned more those days not because the interface made it easy, but because they had no choice if they wanted to use the system at all.
A: You didnt used to have a "workstation" at your house
B: The machine you had at your house was a completely different platform than say, Solaris machines or terminals/mainframes etc.
C: The UI/UX of the work machine and the home machine are now the same -- so its easy to do the "home stuff" on the work machine now.
D: Fewer people than ever have a dedicated "work machine" and do a lot of personal stuff on that "work laptop" regardless of if they arent supposed to.
(it should be called "moreicons.dll", but this was from when filenames had to be 8 + 3 characters long)
This was part of whatever that Win3.1 thing was that would scan your disk for programs it recognized and add them to Program Manager, right?
Moreover, if you guys haven't read it yet you should definitely check out Raymond Chen's Old New Thing, which talks about the reasoning behind some of the design choices that went down in earlier Windows desktops.
Sigh.
I hadn't felt as old as I did then since I bumped into the first kid who didn't know what a landline was. ("Imagine a cellphone with no battery, so you needed to keep it plugged in at all times...")
I feel like you've been had another time.
At least I keep hoping that kids see plenty of those in older movies.
Not to say it didn’t happen to lb1lf.
1: https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/24/16505912/floppy-disk-3d-...
"Dad, it is a joke off the Internet. All the kids in school say that whenever they see a diskette."
Now I feel really old.
However abstracting away from a pure file based view also has benefits, like history or having different views on the document (i.e. to share a read only version)
The main question is: How well will those things serve as lock-in in future, GDPR does a first step there by enforcing that there is a way to extract the data (not that the export format neccisarily is is really usable ...)
“Save the document?” is a stupid question: of course I want the program to preserve what I do. But I also need a way to roll back the changes afterwards if I discover a mistake.
Users often use a document as a template. Better teach them to SAVE! it under a different name first before editing anything. If they fail that step, content vanishes regularly.
I love how concepts like "folder structures" apparently get deprecated. Yeah, sure, because a tree is bad to model relations. It is like when we removed table of contents from books and just added the required meta information to a long list. Sumerian literature can suck it.
Sorry for the rant, but I already know the transgressions we will have to endure. I want to just save documents in a defined state. No, I do not want to tag it.
This rolling save mechanic would have been possible without a persistent cloud storage. Why just have these bad ideas now?
Edit: apparently hn hates emoji.
https://www.iconfinder.com/iconsets/beos
I don't buy into it, though. They tried monochrome grey icons in Visual Studio 2012, and people hated it, for good reasons. So now VS icons have colors again.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/02/23/intr... (the hilarious original annoucement)
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ChangeConsideredHarmfulTheNew... (commentary)
https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-stud... (a rollback)
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/extensibility/... (Visual Studio 2017 icon color pallette and guidelines)
It's unbelievable it was even implemented, let alone released.
At that time the visual designers were strongly urging that all icons be greyscale because they said color was "distracting". I overruled them and insisted the icons have color because it was better for overall usability.
Now the whole industry seems to have come under the influence of the visual designers favoring visual appearance over usability. Much less attention seems to being given to real overall usability.
And then they ripped the text labels out of the Windows taskbar, as if we are supposed to remember what the icon for Word and Outlook looks like today.
I honestly don't know how the most loathed form of support, phone support, can even do it these days.
Did they run labs with actual users to check how they reacted to the monochrome icons?
If you do that well, you can use color to convey another dimension, much like it layers meaning on top of source code (by coloring keywords, variables, comments, etc)
I mean, swapping used to be a fact of life in the late 1990s and early 2000s, even on Linux - RAM was just too cramped back then. But then we got machines with lots and lots of RAM even at the low end, and Linux became snappy and quiet-- while Windows is still as bad as ever.
RAM is, I feel, one of the more precious commodities on a machine, still. I have spinning rust in my machines (more space/$), and I've not regretted it, or really had a need for the speed an SSD could bring. (If anything, I think I'd do a hybrid install, with a small SSD and a large HDD.) But I've never once regretted upgrading RAM on a machine, and I definitely miss it on my work MBP.
But the grind of the hard drive when something happens. I never would have thought of that again had you not made this comment. Crazy nostalgia there.
So there's this notion in video gaming where you're strolling through a forest or in a cave or factory or some sort of level with no enemies, no battle music, but you suddenly find yourself upon ammo crates and health packs.
Indicator that a big fight was about to happen.
For me and my early voyages through computing, learning how to write little programs and messing about with settings to see what they did, if I ever got stuck on a problem it was THAT noise that told me "hey you're onto something here".
What a time.
I suppose it's similar to the situation with newer cars, where the engine is so quiet that one sometimes forgets whether it's even on, and attempts to start it again. There have even been laws introduced to make sure that cars can be heard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8925126
And to your comment about cars, it seems to be more about pedestrians that can know about an oncoming vehicle and less about whether the user thinks it's running. The latter seems to be something that can be easily fixed.
And that teal... gets me every time. I used to think it was hideously ugly, but these days there's an understated elegance to it that just can't be denied.