I remember when Win 7 came out - even then it was so easy to click through the veneer of the Win 7 style. I think it was the 'display' dialogue, which looked almost identical to the Win98 version, complete with the CRT-style monitor. Likewise, Windows 10 looks good with superficial use. Seems like each iteration adds an extra shell.
This is great for people who already know it, but terrible for people who don’t and try to understand why there are 4 different panels for the same thing that all look different.
Eh, UI consistency is overrated. I'm old enough to remember the 90s and early 00s when people said the webapps would never really be widely used outside of toy applications because of UI/UX inconsistencies.
This entire field of so-called *design" is WILDLY overrated. The biggest problem is that there is way too much mere fashion masquerading as "scientifically proven methodologies of human interaction with machines." There's so much ridiculousness in this space because "designers" treat their own preferences (or worse, those of their company) as nearly immutable laws. Just let me pick poofy or flat buttons and get over yourselves.
I'm inclined to agree. I'm always wary of design refresh/update in operating systems and commonly used applications like Firefox, because more often than not, it means worse user experience and no perceptible benefit.
Your whole comment also rings true when "design" and "designers" are replaced with "software" and "programmers".
On this new update of Firefox, tabs are disconnected from the page. Are they even tabs anymore?!? They're just disconnected rectangles with round corners!
I'm half joking but honestly I don't know why they bother with this. And for whatever reason, it gets under my skin and feels weird.
How about let me have text on my buttons so I know what the hell they are for. And I can communicate to my parents what the hell they should be clicking on. And stop hiding every single button.
Businesses are great at iterating to find out just how much customers are willing to put up with in quality reductions before they actually leave, and also great at putting up barriers to shift that tipping point further in the company's favour. It turns out people will put up with a lot. Even stuff they hate.
We have the technology and ability to create things that are far higher quality, but it's usually a losing proposition from a profit-seeking perspective.
It's just the same old "worse is better" story.
(This is just a tangential thought, not some kind of disagreement or rebuttal.)
It’s pretty sad, but unfortunately the exact reason why it seems like everything we use is terrible. Executives at companies don’t care for the aforementioned reason, but they discount the deep scorching branding damage this incurs that no amount of marketing will fix.
Users who have the choice will switch eventually, whenever they get the chance, they will never come back and they will hate you and share their discomfort. This will lead to scales being tipped against you wherever possible.
Now, you can still build a hard to avoid product and make a ton of money from it (Microsoft), so it‘s still not a losing strategy.
So here I am just begging companies to stop building terrible products because they make people miserable.
You can also build a high quality loved product and the effect above will reverse, but probably not at the same price (Apple, Jetbrains).
I don't find the the experiences of native desktop apps particularly compelling. I think much of the thinking behind this mentality grew from an era where computers were scary and intimidating and you had huge swaths of the population that didn't even want to use them. So everyone bent over backwards trying to appeal to reluctant adopters. That world doesn't exist anymore.
I'm glad Windows still has a high contrast mode for the people who really need it to see things, but I so wish that designers everywhere would think much more about keeping good contrast. They're all working on high-end monitors in ideal conditions, all nicely color calibrated. But that's not normal. TN panels are still very popular. On those, elements displayed on screen very easily lose contrast when looking at them at an angle. I have a sub-optimal positioning right now on a TN panel where the center is lined up with my eyes and looks good, but if I look to the top of the panel, everything is darker than it should be.
TN panels are still very popular. On those, elements displayed on screen very easily lose contrast when looking at them at an angle.
Back when ads were actually a different background color on Google, I suspect they A/B tested background colors right up to the point that they disappeared on cheap TN laptops. I experienced this first hand when helping a friend with their laptop 5-10 years ago, and they clicked on an ad by mistake. Turned out that the ad background turned white at normal laptop viewing angles.
You'd probably like GTK/QT. Both of them are effectively delineations of that same functional design language, with holistically different approaches to the subject. I personally love both, but they're a fascinating case study if nothing else.
I'm always wondering whether my preference for this more "traditional" design paradigm just comes from using Win32 in my formative years or some objective difference of quality.
Anyone who shares the sentiment might want to check out the Chicago95 theme[1].
I think they were quite efficient designs. I grew up using a lot of paradigms, from 3.1, 95, RiscOS, Workbench and dabble of Mac 9/10 later on. I gave gnome 3 a good go, but while I really enjoyed the visual appeal of it, I found I wasn't as productive - trying to switch Windows was hard as the windows didn't stay in the same place like they did with a taskbar. Unity was more productive for me. But I'm happiest on MATE.
Is it just me, or can this Reddit post not even be viewed with iOS Safari? I understand that Reddit wants me to download their app, but to prevent me from even seeing the post is a step too far.
What stopped me was having to click "View rest of discussion" to read a full comment thread. When I clicked it, it didn't show me the discussion, but instead took me to a window with another submission from r/Windows11 in focus. I had to scroll back up to actually find the discussion. Good grief!
Edit: I meant "Continue this thread," not "View rest of discussion."
Try to view too many comments and it'll force you to log in, too. At which point I just close the tab, remembering that I've never read anything in a reddit thread that was worth the time it takes to log in.
There's also the NSFW thing too. If you try to view post in specific subreddits it will try to force you to the app. These aren't even smut subreddits. I think /r/greentext (4chat story screenshots) does this. I really need to finally leave.
Instagram walked back the forced-login-to-view-page change 2-3 weeks ago, and within the last couple days put it back on.
Guess I don't get to see Instagram pages anymore. Sad thing is many small businesses use Instagram for their "website", there's a few around me that I haven't checked out because I can't see their "website" on Instagram.
> I wonder if it's affecting influencers' business.
HN is a self-selecting bunch. The vast, vast majority of people that care about influencers are logged in all the time anyway.
I've long suspected that there is a glut of not-terribly-good UX people who continually create pointless redesigns to justify their ongoing employment. I can't remember the last time (maybe never?) that I saw a redesign and thought, "Oh, yes, that's so much better, I'm excited for this!"
This is a good way to think of it. We've had clothes for ages but they get boring. We seek different things that look unique because we want to be excited. Our brains didn't like staring at text all day so we started wrapping the text with fun colors and shapes and it spiraled from there.
Breeze cleaned things up a bit, but almost all the apps have an „I made the UI in 5 minutes before I fall asleep“ vibe (namely because the spacings are all weird).
The open source way of splitting out the actual utility into some command line thing, and then making a thin UI wrapper, seems to really improve consistency. Which, I guess, is unsurprising -- the open source community needed to make a UI on top of a chaotic ecosystem, so they actually had to deal with the problem up front. Windows skated by accidental consistency for quite a while.
Don't forget applications that still use a forked version of the Windows 3.1 common dialog.
To be fair, the last consistent Windows UI was probably Windows 3.1. In hindsight, it looks is incredibly cohesive and functional. Swap out the font (MS Sans Serif, especially bold, looks pretty bad), make the graphical components vector-based, and it would still look great today.
Windows 3.1 had something like 5 built-in widgets. CTL3D.DLL (dating myself here!) IIRC added a bunch more. IMHO somewhere between CTL3D and XP was when design topped out.
I still love elements of 7 and 10, but honestly would have been totally fine if 2K or XP were the final themes. Imagine if after all this time, the only way to date a Windows installation was by subtle design variations of the window title bar. Such bliss! Although of course, I am glad for many of the changes made during the mobile/touch revolution.
I wonder if the tide will ever turn on UX ideologists. Chased out of the industry like the witches and warlocks they are :)
I hate the inconsistencies, but this is a bit of an extreme breakdown.
The ones marked as 95, NT, and XP are all fit with each other. Vista and 7 also go together fine, and with the UI theming still don't look inconsistent with the previous set.
The one marked as 8 looks right at home with 11 (which was really just a matter of giving it blurred transparency and rounded corners).
Splitting 10 RTM and the Store is weird. They very much go together.
That leaves 10 19H1 which is the biggest oddball to me and hopefully gets fixed to be consistent with 11.
But anyway, isn't it better that they haven't fucked with some of the older (95-7) UIs that your normal user is never going to see? (I'm counting add/remove programs in that set since there is a non-.cpl replacement that is modernized) Power users tend to hate it when things get changed for no reason other than aesthetics, especially since they often lose functionality.
Yes, difficult to navigate. The list can only display a few items at a time because it's so small. And really I don't want to be clicking my way to a folder anyway, I want to be able to paste the path in or type it with autocomplete.
I grew up with 3.1 and 9x. I don't want that back.
If I recall correctly, the 3.1 file picker isn't resizable. And it's very small. The small size wasn't such a problem when the filesystem enforced 8.3 file name lengths, but these days it's reasonable to expect names for individual files or folders to be much longer than that.
We have a bug in our backlog right now because we tack on an extra bit when we export files. Imagine we open foobar.raw and export foobar.txt and foobar.txt.info. But when the application tried to write out foobar.txt.info it hits the 260 character limit in NTFS. Meaning that the original file name was over 255 characters.
The ODBC Driver interface for configuration is tied to the old dialog.
The interface for the drivers was designed around GetOpenFileName() as it was at the time.
One of the features of GetOpenFileName/GetSaveFileName is that the structure passed in can include two special options- a function pointer to a hook routine, as well as a custom dialog template which windows will insert.
The functions were improved in Windows 95 with the "Explorer style". Even old programs get this style at the very least, because windows will imply the flag.
unless a template or hook routine is specified. See if a hook routine or template is specified and the OFN_EXPLORER flag is not, then the hook routine or template was designed for the old-style dialog. Windows uses the old-style dialog in this instance so that the program can run and doesn't crash.
The ODBC Driver configuration uses a dialog template to add the "read Only" and "Exclusive" checkboxes. That is why it shows the old style dialog.
People might say, "They should update it"
Update what?
If GetOpenFileName()'s ability to fallback to the old-style dialog is removed, than you won't see this dialog. Instead, it will crash. Cool. great experience.
the driver interface? OK great. so now there is a new version of the ODBC Driver interface. Now all the ODBC Drivers need to be updated. Some of the drivers were written by companies that are either out of business or rather different. I have this sneaking suspicion that Paradox software isn't going to be writing a new ODBC Driver for the MS-DOS Database.
Just drop everything? OK Cool.... so now companies get forcibly upgraded to Windows 11 and literally cannot do business because they rely on them in some manner. "They should upgrade". I won't get into that except to say it's the stupidest thing I've ever heard, but companies in that position are far more likely to find ways to not upgrade the software that caused the problem so, you know, they can keep doing business. And not upgrading the OS is certainly cheaper than countless thousands of man-hours in upgrading their Business software.
And a big thing people don't understand about backwards compatibility is it's not just about old programs working. It's about new ones working to.
If Microsoft removed all "backwards compatibility", than practically nothing would actually work. Software would be constantly crashing, sending error reports, etc. Now, call me crazy, but somehow that doesn't seem like it's a great experience. And if upgrading to Windows X+1 suddenly caused programs to crash left & right, nobody is going to blame the programs.
Perhaps, but I've sat in design meetings for a very similar concept: the original product was something similar to "My Pass" and there was well over an hour of a dozen people discussing the psychological effects changing it to something closer to "[Brand] Pass" - the biggest one being that exact transition of ownership. The overwhelming majority agreed that removing the sense of individual ownership implied by "My" would both encourage sharing (in this case it was reasonable to do this as an "upgrade") and to encourage brand loyalty. I suggested "My [Brand] Pass" but was roundly shot down as "that just complicated things". Surveys were performed (NB: I do not know what these surveys contained or how they were handled) and eventually it was decided to call it something like "Family Pass".
Point being that name changes can come from such over thinking.
People who are downvoting you don't realise that sometimes corporates even spend millions of dollars to determine such small things, like even choosing the right word or colour to determine how to best influence consumers.
I have to do the same with my mom and her mac every week or two. The latest was all of the flash deprecation warnings and she uses flash routinely for puzzle games although she's never heard of this "flash" thing. I spend about as much time getting her mac fixed as I used to her windows computer and she's been using computers since the 80s. Remember, we're talking about "normal users," not us on HN. Most normal users don't know 90% of their computer. They know how to turn it on and do what they did yesterday, and if that doesn't work any longer they are mostly lost. Kind of like cars. Most know how to drive them and gas them up, but if there is ever any other sort of issue that isn't obvious like a flat tire they are lost. That's most "normal" users. There's a reason why "did you simply try turning it off and on again" is a meme, because that's most people.
> There's a reason why "did you simply try turning it off and on again" is a meme, because that's most people.
Well, that and the fact that it actually does the trick 90% of the time, which is fairly stupid to begin.
Troubleshooting Windows is largely an exercise in futility to begin with; turning it off and on again is usually the only thing that even IT people can reasonably do (that, and google the error to find out about turning on/off this specific thing)
> Well, that and the fact that it actually does the trick 90% of the time, which is fairly stupid to begin.
I don't think it is, it's like aging on an accelerated scale. Turning on and off is like death and rebirth, you don't have all the stuff you acumulate with age. No injuries, no tumors, it's a clean start.
If you want to start that competition, ok. It’s not nearly the same. For one, the Mac will actually turn off when you want to turn it off. System updates are far in between and usually just work. On windows you get driver updates every week (which still don’t automatically install for the most part), and you might have audio / graphics issues start popping up out of the blue. Or your favorite software stops working. Or it just refuses to wake up from sleep. Or one of the 17 things running in the tray (the mouse driver maybe, or fan manager, or the manufacturers “optimization” software) starts eating your CPU. Your fans start going wild every 30 seconds for no particular reason. The start menu stops responding. Some app locks the whole system up and you can’t even open the task manager because it steals focus. One day your audio volume is off and you can’t figure out why. Windows decides that the default output is something else and ignores your attempts at reverting that. Your mouse locks up randomly. The Windows key decides it doesn’t work anymore. Alt-tab stops working. Everything slows down to a crawl one day while watching YouTube, and again you can’t open the task manager…
The solution (if there is one) usually involves a fair bit of googling, uninstalling/reinstalling/updating things, maybe messing with the registry or settings.
You may think I’m exaggerating, but this is actually the list of issues I’ve had myself in a span of two years. I use the PC for browsing and gaming, nothing else. It has been very frustrating, and I’ve been working with computers for 20 years. I used to think Linux was a pain but am rethinking that.
Flash has been deprecated on the Mac for ages, and Adobe stopped supporting it completely last year.
In the image, they've provided colored boxes around the different types, that seem to match your breakdown pretty well. (so, 95, NT, and XP are teal in the image). I guess for the post title, the more dramatic count was used.
> The ones marked as 95, NT, and XP are all fit with each other.
They aren't really though. Aesthetically they are reasonably close but employ different conventions (e.g. the list/tree in win32 and the list in NT4 display the same kind of information but different ways, and with different icons).
Consistency is a pretty fundamental thing in interface design, and whether or not something "fits" aesthetically is only a small part of all this, which I think was OP's point.
The Microsoft's insistence on maintaining native backwards compatibility with software some of which is as old as me is so perplexing.
I saw what the API of the classic Mac OS looked like[1] the other day, and it does resemble WinAPI very much. It's procedural, many functions take descriptors, many other functions take structs you allocate and fill in, there's a DIY event loop, and so on. It even has a windows.h (lol). Apple got rid of this in 2000. It then provided a VM-style "classic environment" backwards compatibility layer in OS X for ~5 years, and Carbon library for source-level compatibility for even longer.
Apple did manage to pull this off. Why can't Microsoft do the same? Why can't they put a seamlessly integrated 95/XP/whatever VM into their system that would launch when you run a win32 application, and finally give themselves the freedom to rewrite everything from scratch, with more sensible APIs and in a more memory-safe language?
Microsoft's insistence on maintaining native backwards compatibility with software some of which is as old as me is so perplexing.
This is why Microsoft has such a huge presence in corporate - unlike you or me, most corporates do not immediately update to latest, hi tech flashy tool of the month. If something works really well, they'll keep using it, sometimes for decades. And demand that Microsoft don't break it on their OS. Microsoft will happily support them as they earn a lot from corporate licenses and support.
Apple doesn't have the kind of importance that Microsoft does in corporate. Nor does Apple have to support the kind of hardware and software that Microsoft does, and so Apple's monoculture helps them makes changes to their platform faster than Microsoft can.
> If something works really well, they'll keep using it, sometimes for decades.
But why does it apparently not apply to the operating systems themselves? And how would running win32 apps in a seamless VM (a-la Apple's classic environment) break that?
Yes the 2 different flavours of Control Panel for example are jarring. If MS seems to think that the new UI style is not fit for purpose or worth the effort for more rarely used or technical settings, why should I?
Also 2 different flavors of the open/save file dialog, the one from Windows 95 and the newer one from vista/7.
From looking at the evolution of Windows, it feels like they're only capable of writing new code, but not deleting or rewriting anything existing unless absolutely necessary to support new code. Those shiny UWP apps? Yeah, they still have that win32 message loop deep inside them.
It does apply to the OS too - that is why Microsoft (and others) offer LTS (long-term-support) for their OS and pubilicise an end-of-life date for every version they release. (And sometimes some businesses continue using it even after Microsoft stops LTS - it's only a recent trend that everyone is now forced to upgrade OSes over fears of security / lack of security updates). This is also why Microsoft Windows can get away with forced updates for home users but the business versions offer more fine-grained control over Windows update.
As for running Win32 apps on different setups, it makes the system more complicated. When more vendors are involved, it also makes fixing things difficult - In case something breaks, Microsoft can say it is Apple's fault, and Apple will say we don't support Win32 apps, contact your developer. (Not to mention that Apple is not as corporate friendly as many others, like Microsoft, or IBM, as they are largely a business-to-consumer company and not a business-to-business company).
No, I didn't mean to say to run win32 apps on OS X. I was comparing my idea to the thing[1] Apple actually made in the early 00s to ease the transition from classic Mac OS to OS X.
My idea is that Microsoft would build a special version of Windows that supports all kinds of legacy apps, and put it into a VM. And probably not update it much if ever. That would allow them to deprecate, and then remove, older APIs in the main system, which would in turn allow rewriting the internals to be less vulnerable. They totally have the resources needed to do this. And there's no technical innovation needed to do this, either.
As far as the end user is concerned, old apps still run. Except now they run in a sandboxed environment.
Seems like some progress has been made because the oldest style here is as recent as Win95.
For a long time, the "Install Font" dialog was unchanged from Windows 3.0, with a tiny little folder tree view meant for 8.3 character file names and a drive picker button...
I wonder if the software update dialog box will still feature the useless flying dots instead of providing useful information like: what update is actually doing (or more like trying to do but failing), how much progress it has made in trying to do it (or, more like where has the damn thing hung again) and (god forbid) a solid guess as to how many fricking hours are left.
~2T$ and these jokers can't figure out how to reasonably update their kludgy mess.
(sorry for the rant, but this update crap killed a half a day of my non-profit volunteer time and is still unresolved)
I kind of wonder - maybe it's a sign of what a company like MS is, and its strengths. i.e. they are focusing on being a good platform/services company, and end user UI/UX is really more of an afterthought for them. If somehow they end up with a good Apple-like UI/UX, would that be a bad sign the company is losing its focus or getting its culture muddled?
I do use windows. And it does annoye me how inconsistent it is. And I also use Linux, which is inconsistent by design. Yet windows is even worse than this IMHO.
I like how the tabbed dialog to set the system path env vars is the same for 20 years, then if I open up the calculator and it's got a fancy new look and feel, that's good too.
I'm really disappointed in the center-justification of the task bar and start menu. I'm assuming that means the start menu icon will forever be creeping left as I open more apps, along with the start menu itself. Not a fan of this at all. There's an option to left-justify, I understand - and I like options - but would prefer left-justified to remain the default for users.
I assume they're building in the option to left-justify in case this move turns out to be another Windows 8 cock-up of a UI experience. I remember MS executives being "excited" about Windows 8 as well, it means little to nothing to me that Satya is excited about Win11.
A mere hypothesis, but I wonder if that task bar centering wasn't pushed because of the increase in popularity of ultrawide screens as well as tablets (Microsoft has been pushing for Windows use on tablets for quite some time now). Because when you imagine a centered taskbar on an ultrawide screen or a tablet, it makes absolute sense and is preferable to having it on the left side of the screen. The centered taskbar doesn't work at all on smaller screens though.
Huge advantage of the start button on the bottom left: I can just “throw” my mouse pointer as far down and left as I can and click, and I’ll always hit the start button.
This is actual supported by Fitts' law, one of the very few laws in UX design [0]:
"Placing layout elements on the four edges of the screen allows for infinitely large targets in one dimension and therefore present ideal scenarios. As the user's pointer will always stop at the edge, they can move the mouse with the greatest possible speed and still hit the target. The target area is effectively infinitely long along the movement axis. Therefore, this guideline is called “Rule of the infinite edges”. The use of this rule can be seen for example in MacOS, which places the menu bar always on the top left edge of the screen instead of the current program's windowframe."
Talking to modern UI / Designer folks for these things - so much mushy weird aspirational language and constructs.
What happened to this will be easier to see, to remember, takes fewer clicks, is quicker.
I mean, you spend a billion bucks on a new design and get things like this (from MS Fluent):
Fluent experiences listen and adapt... They unite people and ideas, whether they’re on opposite sides of the globe or standing right next to each other... Fluent speaks in light and shadow, in spatial dimensions...
I just want to get work done. Save me from my spatial dimensions (and whitespace overload).
> Fluent experiences listen and adapt... They unite people and ideas, whether they’re on opposite sides of the globe or standing right next to each other... Fluent speaks in light and shadow, in spatial dimensions...
BARF. I can hear the thrumming of Enya's "Storms in Africa" behind this text...
Considered on its own, it's quite lovely. I was going for the overuse of it to punch up meaningless faux-inspirational ad/prezo copy with generic positive vibes.
I'm no designer but I've seen amazing ones work. Could it be that this is just marketing talk unrelated to actual design philosophy underneath because it is not targeting people related to that?
But the modern interfaces are relative junk from my view with some exceptions.
Just basic things like putting focus on an input field of a pop-up dialog. I get that isn't sexy but it IS efficient. They should focus more on the later and less on the sexy gradient / look stuff.
This may seem crazy but that was one of the major accomplishments of the google.com search page. Before that when you navigated to a search engine, you still had to click the search box. The cursor was not located in the box for you.
You're just looking at the marketing speak from the new design language.
When thinking about design systems, there are few different levels and you speak about different ones depending on who you are talking to. For me it breaks down something like this, going from high-level to low-level:
137 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadYour whole comment also rings true when "design" and "designers" are replaced with "software" and "programmers".
I'm half joking but honestly I don't know why they bother with this. And for whatever reason, it gets under my skin and feels weird.
I am specifically referring to Google.
Businesses are great at iterating to find out just how much customers are willing to put up with in quality reductions before they actually leave, and also great at putting up barriers to shift that tipping point further in the company's favour. It turns out people will put up with a lot. Even stuff they hate.
We have the technology and ability to create things that are far higher quality, but it's usually a losing proposition from a profit-seeking perspective.
It's just the same old "worse is better" story.
(This is just a tangential thought, not some kind of disagreement or rebuttal.)
Users who have the choice will switch eventually, whenever they get the chance, they will never come back and they will hate you and share their discomfort. This will lead to scales being tipped against you wherever possible.
Now, you can still build a hard to avoid product and make a ton of money from it (Microsoft), so it‘s still not a losing strategy.
So here I am just begging companies to stop building terrible products because they make people miserable.
You can also build a high quality loved product and the effect above will reverse, but probably not at the same price (Apple, Jetbrains).
There is also a Twitter thread that notes what got lost over time - especially separation and contrast. https://twitter.com/tuomassalo/status/978717292023500805
Back when ads were actually a different background color on Google, I suspect they A/B tested background colors right up to the point that they disappeared on cheap TN laptops. I experienced this first hand when helping a friend with their laptop 5-10 years ago, and they clicked on an ad by mistake. Turned out that the ad background turned white at normal laptop viewing angles.
I'm always wondering whether my preference for this more "traditional" design paradigm just comes from using Win32 in my formative years or some objective difference of quality.
Anyone who shares the sentiment might want to check out the Chicago95 theme[1].
[1] https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
Edit: I meant "Continue this thread," not "View rest of discussion."
This post forces you to use the app to see any of it period, or returns you to /r/popular. First time I’ve ever seen it as well.
https://imgur.com/a/IFI9ik9
I guess this is a trend. I wonder if it's affecting influencers' business.
Guess I don't get to see Instagram pages anymore. Sad thing is many small businesses use Instagram for their "website", there's a few around me that I haven't checked out because I can't see their "website" on Instagram.
> I wonder if it's affecting influencers' business.
HN is a self-selecting bunch. The vast, vast majority of people that care about influencers are logged in all the time anyway.
(just change www. to old. or i. for mobile layout)
Breeze cleaned things up a bit, but almost all the apps have an „I made the UI in 5 minutes before I fall asleep“ vibe (namely because the spacings are all weird).
To be fair: That is very consistent.
To be fair, the last consistent Windows UI was probably Windows 3.1. In hindsight, it looks is incredibly cohesive and functional. Swap out the font (MS Sans Serif, especially bold, looks pretty bad), make the graphical components vector-based, and it would still look great today.
I still love elements of 7 and 10, but honestly would have been totally fine if 2K or XP were the final themes. Imagine if after all this time, the only way to date a Windows installation was by subtle design variations of the window title bar. Such bliss! Although of course, I am glad for many of the changes made during the mobile/touch revolution.
I wonder if the tide will ever turn on UX ideologists. Chased out of the industry like the witches and warlocks they are :)
I guess the same people who applaud each time when Federighi anounces the redesign of the macOS trashcan icon.
The ones marked as 95, NT, and XP are all fit with each other. Vista and 7 also go together fine, and with the UI theming still don't look inconsistent with the previous set.
The one marked as 8 looks right at home with 11 (which was really just a matter of giving it blurred transparency and rounded corners).
Splitting 10 RTM and the Store is weird. They very much go together.
That leaves 10 19H1 which is the biggest oddball to me and hopefully gets fixed to be consistent with 11.
But anyway, isn't it better that they haven't fucked with some of the older (95-7) UIs that your normal user is never going to see? (I'm counting add/remove programs in that set since there is a non-.cpl replacement that is modernized) Power users tend to hate it when things get changed for no reason other than aesthetics, especially since they often lose functionality.
https://i.redd.it/5xo6c8xmst571.png
I grew up with 3.1 and 9x. I don't want that back.
We have a bug in our backlog right now because we tack on an extra bit when we export files. Imagine we open foobar.raw and export foobar.txt and foobar.txt.info. But when the application tried to write out foobar.txt.info it hits the 260 character limit in NTFS. Meaning that the original file name was over 255 characters.
It was designed to work on a VGA screen with 480x640 pixels after all.
And this is from Windows NT 3.5 IIRC. Windows 3.1 didn’t have long file names (like the Apple II had in 1979 or so).
https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/o1x183/the_famou...
The ODBC Driver interface for configuration is tied to the old dialog.
The interface for the drivers was designed around GetOpenFileName() as it was at the time.
One of the features of GetOpenFileName/GetSaveFileName is that the structure passed in can include two special options- a function pointer to a hook routine, as well as a custom dialog template which windows will insert.
The functions were improved in Windows 95 with the "Explorer style". Even old programs get this style at the very least, because windows will imply the flag.
unless a template or hook routine is specified. See if a hook routine or template is specified and the OFN_EXPLORER flag is not, then the hook routine or template was designed for the old-style dialog. Windows uses the old-style dialog in this instance so that the program can run and doesn't crash.
The ODBC Driver configuration uses a dialog template to add the "read Only" and "Exclusive" checkboxes. That is why it shows the old style dialog.
People might say, "They should update it"
Update what?
If GetOpenFileName()'s ability to fallback to the old-style dialog is removed, than you won't see this dialog. Instead, it will crash. Cool. great experience.
the driver interface? OK great. so now there is a new version of the ODBC Driver interface. Now all the ODBC Drivers need to be updated. Some of the drivers were written by companies that are either out of business or rather different. I have this sneaking suspicion that Paradox software isn't going to be writing a new ODBC Driver for the MS-DOS Database.
Just drop everything? OK Cool.... so now companies get forcibly upgraded to Windows 11 and literally cannot do business because they rely on them in some manner. "They should upgrade". I won't get into that except to say it's the stupidest thing I've ever heard, but companies in that position are far more likely to find ways to not upgrade the software that caused the problem so, you know, they can keep doing business. And not upgrading the OS is certainly cheaper than countless thousands of man-hours in upgrading their Business software.
And a big thing people don't understand about backwards compatibility is it's not just about old programs working. It's about new ones working to.
If Microsoft removed all "backwards compatibility", than practically nothing would actually work. Software would be constantly crashing, sending error reports, etc. Now, call me crazy, but somehow that doesn't seem like it's a great experience. And if upgrading to Windows X+1 suddenly caused programs to crash left & right, nobody is going to blame the programs.
It reminds me of when My Computer was renamed to This PC, and My Documents became Documents --- a subtle way to say it's not yours.
The latest anti user trend is of course that of referring to computers as "devices".
Point being that name changes can come from such over thinking.
You underestimate the amount of ducking around a normal user has to do to keep windows happy over the years.
Well, that and the fact that it actually does the trick 90% of the time, which is fairly stupid to begin.
Troubleshooting Windows is largely an exercise in futility to begin with; turning it off and on again is usually the only thing that even IT people can reasonably do (that, and google the error to find out about turning on/off this specific thing)
I don't think it is, it's like aging on an accelerated scale. Turning on and off is like death and rebirth, you don't have all the stuff you acumulate with age. No injuries, no tumors, it's a clean start.
The solution (if there is one) usually involves a fair bit of googling, uninstalling/reinstalling/updating things, maybe messing with the registry or settings.
You may think I’m exaggerating, but this is actually the list of issues I’ve had myself in a span of two years. I use the PC for browsing and gaming, nothing else. It has been very frustrating, and I’ve been working with computers for 20 years. I used to think Linux was a pain but am rethinking that.
Flash has been deprecated on the Mac for ages, and Adobe stopped supporting it completely last year.
They aren't really though. Aesthetically they are reasonably close but employ different conventions (e.g. the list/tree in win32 and the list in NT4 display the same kind of information but different ways, and with different icons).
Consistency is a pretty fundamental thing in interface design, and whether or not something "fits" aesthetically is only a small part of all this, which I think was OP's point.
I saw what the API of the classic Mac OS looked like[1] the other day, and it does resemble WinAPI very much. It's procedural, many functions take descriptors, many other functions take structs you allocate and fill in, there's a DIY event loop, and so on. It even has a windows.h (lol). Apple got rid of this in 2000. It then provided a VM-style "classic environment" backwards compatibility layer in OS X for ~5 years, and Carbon library for source-level compatibility for even longer.
Apple did manage to pull this off. Why can't Microsoft do the same? Why can't they put a seamlessly integrated 95/XP/whatever VM into their system that would launch when you run a win32 application, and finally give themselves the freedom to rewrite everything from scratch, with more sensible APIs and in a more memory-safe language?
[1] https://github.com/cy384/ssheven/blob/master/ssheven.c
Apple doesn't have the kind of importance that Microsoft does in corporate. Nor does Apple have to support the kind of hardware and software that Microsoft does, and so Apple's monoculture helps them makes changes to their platform faster than Microsoft can.
But why does it apparently not apply to the operating systems themselves? And how would running win32 apps in a seamless VM (a-la Apple's classic environment) break that?
From looking at the evolution of Windows, it feels like they're only capable of writing new code, but not deleting or rewriting anything existing unless absolutely necessary to support new code. Those shiny UWP apps? Yeah, they still have that win32 message loop deep inside them.
As for running Win32 apps on different setups, it makes the system more complicated. When more vendors are involved, it also makes fixing things difficult - In case something breaks, Microsoft can say it is Apple's fault, and Apple will say we don't support Win32 apps, contact your developer. (Not to mention that Apple is not as corporate friendly as many others, like Microsoft, or IBM, as they are largely a business-to-consumer company and not a business-to-business company).
My idea is that Microsoft would build a special version of Windows that supports all kinds of legacy apps, and put it into a VM. And probably not update it much if ever. That would allow them to deprecate, and then remove, older APIs in the main system, which would in turn allow rewriting the internals to be less vulnerable. They totally have the resources needed to do this. And there's no technical innovation needed to do this, either.
As far as the end user is concerned, old apps still run. Except now they run in a sandboxed environment.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_macOS_components#Class...
For a long time, the "Install Font" dialog was unchanged from Windows 3.0, with a tiny little folder tree view meant for 8.3 character file names and a drive picker button...
Some googling reveals they cleaned these up around 2015: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/09/windo...
~2T$ and these jokers can't figure out how to reasonably update their kludgy mess.
(sorry for the rant, but this update crap killed a half a day of my non-profit volunteer time and is still unresolved)
Bonus points had actually updated them to the new design language (god fucking damn it).
I assume they're building in the option to left-justify in case this move turns out to be another Windows 8 cock-up of a UI experience. I remember MS executives being "excited" about Windows 8 as well, it means little to nothing to me that Satya is excited about Win11.
"Placing layout elements on the four edges of the screen allows for infinitely large targets in one dimension and therefore present ideal scenarios. As the user's pointer will always stop at the edge, they can move the mouse with the greatest possible speed and still hit the target. The target area is effectively infinitely long along the movement axis. Therefore, this guideline is called “Rule of the infinite edges”. The use of this rule can be seen for example in MacOS, which places the menu bar always on the top left edge of the screen instead of the current program's windowframe."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law#Implications_for...
What happened to this will be easier to see, to remember, takes fewer clicks, is quicker.
I mean, you spend a billion bucks on a new design and get things like this (from MS Fluent):
Fluent experiences listen and adapt... They unite people and ideas, whether they’re on opposite sides of the globe or standing right next to each other... Fluent speaks in light and shadow, in spatial dimensions...
I just want to get work done. Save me from my spatial dimensions (and whitespace overload).
BARF. I can hear the thrumming of Enya's "Storms in Africa" behind this text...
Just basic things like putting focus on an input field of a pop-up dialog. I get that isn't sexy but it IS efficient. They should focus more on the later and less on the sexy gradient / look stuff.
Startup time is stable though: windows calculator has the same startup time as excel. Don't get me started on microsoft photos...
Modern UI quickly breaks down when you need to have complex software - software that needs a menubar, for example.
When thinking about design systems, there are few different levels and you speak about different ones depending on who you are talking to. For me it breaks down something like this, going from high-level to low-level:
Design Philosophy - Marketing (what you posted)
Design Principles - Designers / UX (accessible, minimal, emotion)
Design Language - Designers / UX (red is used to denote danger)
Design Library - Designers / UX / Engineers (ButtonPrimary color = blue, ButtonDanger color = red)
Design Implementation - Engineers (<ButtonDanger>Cancel</ButtonDanger>)
https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o2a0kp/there_are...