The UI in terms of space and usability looks great. Two "modern" things I don't want to miss: Good font rendering and a fast application launcher (mod -> type a few characters -> enter). What I dislike the most on modern UI, and maybe absolutely hate, are all those super slow animations. Just gimme the damn thing, I don't need those animations. (Yes I know on most plattforms I can disable them, but this often takes quite a few steps)
> What I dislike the most on modern UI, and maybe absolutely hate, are all those super slow animations.
Slow animations are a way to hide latency, they are essentially loading screens. Apple is really good at it, or at least it was with the early iPhones, and a reason why iPhones felt so smooth compared to their Android counterparts while not being actually faster. For me, it is an impressive technical feat and it took years for Android to catch up (see: "project butter"), and in the end, it was mostly by brute force, i.e. putting ridiculously overpowered hardware in smartphones.
Remove the animations or make them faster (you can do that sometimes), and the lag may become apparent.
Why you have latency to hide in the first place is another problem. There may also be some clueless designers who put slow animations for no good reason, maybe because they are just copying Apple, not understanding why Apple did it in the first place.
There are also some animations that that have utility beyond eye candy in communicating to the user what’s going on, which is particularly important for non-technical individuals.
For example the animation associated with minimizing windows in most desktop environments makes it crystal clear where your window went after you press the minimize button, even for novices. Removing that animation makes the interaction significantly more confusing.
Those animations are a no brainer because they both communicate something meaningful and don't get in your way. While the animation is happening you can keep working with whatever you were doing. I think a great UI can both be animated and allow you to work unhindered, if the designers put their mind to it.
Well, the iPhones were in fact faster. Faster at playing the animations, at least.
I worked on an app in the iPhone 4S and Galaxy S II era and we wanted to use the same trick on both: smoothly animate the view switch between user interaction event and the API response. It worked super smooth on iPhone, and it was jittery as hell on Android. In the end we left the animation on the former, and move the users straight into the loading screen on the latter.
> Slow animations are a way to hide latency, they are essentially loading screens.
Except that most of the time there really isn't any latency to be hidden, the action becomes effectively instant once you remove the animation. Starting a new app (or switching to an app that was evicted from memory) is the main exception and that's quite rare.
> Remove the animations or make them faster (you can do that sometimes), and the lag may become apparent.
This is my number one trick on Android phones. Enable developer options and change the animation speeds from 1x to 0.5x. It makes your old phone feel new.
> Apple is really good at it, or at least it was with the early iPhones, and a reason why iPhones felt so smooth compared to their Android counterparts while not being actually faster.
Is that why iOS animations always feel so slow to me? Modern phone hardware can do things so much faster, but the animations are still utterly sluggish in my opinion. Worse, there's no way to speed them up; even with reduced motion, slow movements are simply translated into just-as-slow fades, which are somehow even more obnoxious.
> Slow animations are a way to hide latency, they are essentially loading screens. Apple is really good at it, or at least it was with the early iPhones, and a reason why iPhones felt so smooth compared to their Android counterparts while not being actually faster.
Now it got flipped. I turned off animations on my Android phone, and it's great. And now every time I have to use iOS (for app development), everything seems to be moving in slow motion.
And you can not turn it off! Apple in their infinite wisdom doesn't provide ways for app developers to disable animated transitions.
Agreed on the animations but that isn't my top of the list because as you observed, those can usually be disabled. The most annoying aspect of modern interfaces is total inconsistency in looks and behaviour across different applications. Even common action icons vary in style, colouring and shape from one application to another. Title bars are hijacked for whatever fanciful ideas the app designers had in mind, scrollbars and other basic widgets are rarely drawn using native desktop components, tab ordering is a dream of the distant past and so on and that's if a given app even responds to the tab key.
You would've really hated software in the early 90's -- every single thing had an aesthetic of its own. It was actually quite wonderful, and a lot of style/"personality" embedded in these design choices.
Are you thinking here of pre-multitasking desktop usage, stuff like DeluxePaint, Scream Tracker, that kind of thing?
Certainly the late 90s was the heyday of desktop consistency on Windows, in the 95/98/ME era, I think driven largely by the conventions Microsoft established in Office. And I believe Mac OS gave pretty good platform-level guidance then too, so things were generally okay with a few exceptions— stuff like media players that have always been more on the fanciful side.
Early 90's, especially on Amiga -- where a proper windowing desktop env ("workbench") coexisted with the wildest custom UIs. Maybe it was the roots of the machine, heavily used as a games console and a demoscene workhorse? It seems like at that time there was so much creative design effort put into UX -- and it didn't seem to get in the way, maybe because each genre of software was kind of on the cutting edge back then, establishing what would eventually evolve into conventions. Mod trackers, image editing, disk copying, etc. Maybe it's a bit of nostalgia, but it felt really immersive to pull up a piece of software you were familiar with; each UI was so distinct and purpose-built, but it also had.. flourish? style? soul? Not so much now.
It is my recollection as well. Most applications used VB, Delphi, MFC etc. that all had the "native" OS look and feel. There were some exceptions like WinAmp and others, but from what I can remember most applications were more consistent than today.
Those toolkits would usually reimplement the "native" look and feel from scratch, or nearly so. It was uncommon to rely directly on the basic OS widgets.
MFC was Microsoft, so that was definitely native, and I think a lot of stuff used native even just for performance reasons. I remember getting very frustrated around then when something would want me to install the JVM and I knew I was in for a laggy mess of an application that would have bad font rendering, strange little buttons, and its own file picker.
Don't modern versions of Windows contain at least 5 different widget frameworks? Like, Win32, Ribbon (I think engineered for Office as you said), WinForms, WPF, WinUI 1/2/3... I think Apple just has Cocoa (Carbon is long gone), AppKit, UIKit, and SwiftUI.
Nah, the Windows ecosystem never even got close to being consistent.
MS Office had its own UI toolkit and routinely invented new UI paradigms that weren't exposed in any Windows API, leaving people who wanted to look native scrambling to reimplement. This was particularly the case for toolbars. MS Office first invented the so-called "coolbar" and then the ribbon. Internet Explorer also rolled its own toolbar styles in ways not supported in the base Windows API e.g. toolbars with large icons and sliding sub-sections. Inventing custom toolbars was practically a sport on Windows; Netscape also did it.
At the time the most popular media players were WinAmp (totally custom and themeable to boot), RealPlayer (custom UI https://andrewnile.co.uk/blog/remembering-realplayer/), Quicktime (custom UI) and Windows Media Player (mostly but not entirely native).
Even the base utilities that came with Windows weren't consistent with each other. It wasn't uncommon in the Win 9x era to find programs still using Win3.1 style file dialogs ... a few are still buried in Windows today!
The problem got worse when you examined the artwork. The stock icon library in Windows was anemic, so dev platforms frequently had to expand the core library with their own. Delphi apps could be easily identified by the distinctive icons in their buttons (https://zarko-gajic.iz.hr/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/delp...).
Restyling window decorations was also very common. Microsoft themselves did it routinely, for example their flagship Encarta encyclopedia app had totally custom widgets and window styling: https://winworldpc.com/product/encarta/1999
Windows apps of this era were much like web apps are today: they shared some common code for things like rendering menus, buttons or widgets in their settings screens, but the main UI users interacted with were almost always custom widgets that were extremely varied between apps. Win32 was nearly impossible to style compared to HTML so this represented a large investment of developer time, but a custom branded UI was believed to be worth nearly any cost. This is something fundamental to how humans work and is pointless to fight, a lesson the web platform fully embraced giving it an advantage over other UI toolkits of the era.
Yes, it’s wonderful having to figure out 50 different UIs designed by 50 different artists with 50 different ideas of what a drop-down should look like and how it should work.
The mental overhead from having slightly different drop shadows and button sizes is minimal, and I think pretty overblown by people who prefer identical UIs for everything regardless of form factor (which is of course a valid take).
But someone could just as easily respond to today's UIs with "Yes, it's wonderful that every single app looks identical, as if it was all designed by one pretty boring artist with no creativity whatsoever" and that would also be a perfectly valid take.
Predictability is a feature. That does include button sizes. To me that's where the asymmetry is. The "boring artist with no creativity" complaint is aesthetic, whereas predictability is a functional concern.
Do you have a solution in mind? While a platform (OS) can provide a UI toolkit and provide a HIG, one cannot stop language and programming tools vendors or programmers from doing whatever they like.
I'm starting to think that it would take replacing basically everything that's happened on Web frontend development since XMLHttpRequest with an alternative system that's still standards-based, platform-agnostic and Web-centric, but designed from the ground up as a GUI toolkit instead of a markup language for hypermedia formatting.
Because with the current status quo, the platform that dominates everyone's mindshare is HTML/JavaScript/CSS. Which has a really rudimentary concept of UI controls, and human interface guidelines that spend 90% of their effort on begging people to manually implement usability features that we used to get for free with native GUI toolkits. And I think that we might need to get away from that mess before it's possible for anyone to have any energy left over for worrying about HCI on the level that we used to in the late '90s and early '00s.
But realistically, you’re never going to stop a motivated app designer who is dead set on making their app an unique snowflake art project rather than a tool that users need to use.
It’s to be expected when almost every app is electron or some web wrapper, that all consistency is lost. The only way to get it back (kinda) is to avoid those apps.
But for a lot of use cases that's not possible anymore, that is, a lot of the applications using the OS' UI libraries are no longer maintained.
And a lot of people have to use the applications as supplied, e.g. Slack or Microsoft Teams. Which can be accessed via a web browser, sure, but dedicated apps for these are also nice because they have a dedicated spot in the app switchers.
Nobody forces you to install and use apps made of a different toolkit (or version of said toolkit) from the one shipped with the desktop.
You can use only Cocoa apps on MacosX, qt6 apps on a kde plasma 6, gnome/gtk4 apps on a gnome3 desktop or whatever is the equivalent in the windows 11 world.
The OS / UI toolkit should be strongly opinionated, making the consistent, happy path easier to develop and making customization possible but with great effort.
But people would claim that it's easier for a company to take a bunch of web frontend devs and have them develop a UI which rides on top the already-existing Electron. Which is why we have such a plague of bloated Electron apps - because companies are lazy and don't care about the end user experience.
I like the idea of trying crazy and new ideas, but this looks like they just thought corners weren't round enough, and that people will pay money for a file manager that has no sharp edges and won't integrate with your OS.
My No.1 pet peeve is the scrollbars. Somehow every modern UI designer hates it, and hates it deeply. They always want to get rid of it. And TBH I'd prefer the other way around - how about we get rid of them instead?
There’s a similar disdain for menubars which I really can’t understand. The disorderly and abbreviated hamburger menus that most often are used as a replacement are just worse on every single axis except for maybe visual appeal. They throw out what could be the single strain of consistent usability across apps in favor of looking good on a PowerPoint slide and web marketing blurb.
Two of GNOME's recent updates have made searching menus for a rarely used item incredibly painful:
1. Replace the menubar with a hamburger menu; in some cases the hamburger menu then contains file/edit/&c. so it's just a spurious extra click
2. Require a click to see the contents of a submenu and a click to go back
Fortunately my most-used GNOME application (Evolution) has an option to restore the old behavior for both of those, but I literally cannot think of the motivation for these two changes that clearly make things worse. The only halfway plausible idea I have heard for #2 is that the GNOME UX designers think that submenus are bad, so if you make them hard enough to use, developers will stop putting them in their applications. #1 is probably partly a looks thing, and partly a "too many people have fewer horizontal lines on their screens than I did in 2004[1]" thing.
1: That's when I got a 1600x1200 monitor; people today with 1080p screens have only 56 more lines than the 1280x1024 monitor I had been using since the previous millennium
The GNOME project seems like it has a strong desire to converge all on-screen UI onto mobile-like patterns. There are some mobile conventions that can be brought over to desktop without impairing usage too much but I think that perhaps it’s starting to cross too far over to the mobile side of the line.
It’s unfortunate because in other ways I find GNOME/GTK more agreeable than KDE/Qt (layout of controls within windows is consistently better in GTK environments/apps for example, Qt apps have a tendency to feel slapdash/haphazard/“engineery”) but I don’t like the increasingly strong mobile influence.
I agree. Hamburger menus aren't any better than menu bars. It seems like an example where design has more importance than function.
My alternative to the menu bar would be a search bar that allowed me to search in a Google style everything related to that program: functions, features, shortcuts, and documentation.
File | Edit | View | etc. is not the right choice for every program.
This is where it’s useful for the menu bar to be system-owned rather than the responsibility of individual programs (whether that be a global bar as in macOS or attached to window decorations). That would make it easy to implement a toggle that hides menubars either globally or on a per-app basis and enable a Unity-type shortkey-summoned HUD to be used instead.
Hamburger menus work much better on mobile screens that are horizontally constrained, are less visually intrusive when not in use and don't require at least two levels of nesting like classical desktop menu bars do.
Even on mobile, in most situations there are better UX choices than hamburger menus. Nearly every app using them I’ve encountered has put as little thought into navigation and UI hierarchy as possible and are awkward to get around in. They’re the ones where one has to go down a winding ever-changing maze to access the desired functionality.
Most would be better served by surfacing the most commonly used screens as tabs and most commonly used functions within those tabs. Ideally 2-4 taps is all it should take to get anywhere, and there should only ever be a tiny handful of niche things that take 5+ taps to access.
Agreed. And the worst part is that you could use a (well designed) menubar with a keyboard by using the Alt-key combinations together with cursor key menu navigation and similar techniques. But you don't have that luxury in hamburger menus. You are forced to use a pointing device such as the mouse, or if you are lucky, a completely non-standard key combination to bring it down. Awful.
Certain long emails I get don’t show the scroll bar at all in iOS Mail, and I get low grade anxiety not knowing how long the email is or how much more is left.
I’m also perplexed why the mail developers would allow such a thing or what kind of bug causes such behavior.
My hunch is that they are just using an existing framework that does that, and it may require some digging into the configuration to disable that (or worse, have to change some code). Since this is never going to be an urgent thing it will never be fixed.
I work in MacOS VSCode frequently, and whenever I open a large repo with a huge number of files, it's PIA to find the scrollbar. I have to hover the mouse above it to make it appear, but how can I hover above it without knowing where it is?
> Certain long emails I get don’t show the scroll bar at all in iOS Mail, and I get low grade anxiety not knowing how long the email is or how much more is left.
Yet in iOS you can swipe vertically some pixels and you will see the scrollbar telling you this exact information.
> What I dislike the most on modern UI, and maybe absolutely hate, are all those super slow animations.
This is what drives me crazy on macOS. Specifically, the animation for switching between virtual desktops. When I hit Ctrl+1/2/3/etc I want it to switch instantly, no animation - not slide into place. It's even unresponsive until the animation finishes.
I use the Aerospace tiling window manager for macOS just so I can move my apps to different spaces and opt+key move to them. usually vscode in opt+1, firefox in opt+2 and discord in opt+d
I have to use a Mac for work and it drives me crazy. I disabled everything I could find, enabled reduced motion preferences or whatever it's called and still got some animations.
My "solution" is to use Aerospace [0], which reimplements window management. That's the only way I found to not have animations. Unfortunately i still feel some delay when switching windows compared to i3wm/sway in Linux.
I hate the default animation speed of Androids that come with Pixel phones. They are too long and makes it feel like the phone is slow. One of the first things I do after buying a new phone is to half the animation durations using developer settings, and the phone feels much faster.
Agreed! Whenever I use someone's phone I instantly notice how sluggish it feels with animations turned on. If I offer to turn them off they often get surprised at how much faster the phone feels after.
My pet peeve: Animations are a crutch used by designers who think they need them when in fact they should just have improved the UI so users don't get confused about the origin of a popup or window. The only justified use of animations in UIs that make sense is in scrolling, everything else is just adding latency to hide your incompetence.
> If I offer to turn them off they often get surprised at how much faster the phone feels after.
If you're using Android there's also a "visible touches" option you can turn on in the Developer settings. It's a big UX enhancement of its own and IMHO should be promoted to the Accessibility settings (together with the options for speeding up or disabling animations).
It provides a quick feedback loop when you're trying to poke at stuff on-screen with your fingers. Which is nice since it lets you know quite seamlessly (1) how good your aim is, which gets kind of critical when using fingers on a touchscreen compared to a mouse. and (2) whether a tap has even registered in the first place, which is often problematic for many users who may be wearing gloves, have drier skin that doesn't register as easily, etc. etc.
A large part of the charm of these 90s UI recreations is precisely the lack of antialiasing and other niceties we expect of modern UIs. There was another project recently on HN that uses modern font rendering with a Windows 9x look, and it's just not the same, IMO. SerenityOS comes closer to what I remember, though it still doesn't quite match the look of MS Sans Serif(?).
I agree that it is charming when I want to tinker with stuff. But if it's for "real world " usage, I don't think that being charming matters a lot. I mean, it really depends, not everything has to be about "serious" usage but if it's the intended goal then I think that good font rendering is something that still matters a lot.
I still use chrome sometimes for example just because it seems to have a better font rendering (on Linux but also on Windows) than Firefox. It's completely irrational in a way but it does matter sometimes
AFAIK there was a case being made at the time that the animations were to provide predictability in performance, users get into a bit of a rhythm and it was better to slow everything down a bit to lower the overall variance of response. This made more sense when HDDs were slow.
Peak usability in my opinion. Space efficient and simple.
Not my favorite design and color scheme, but certainly better than what modern Windows looks like.
That has no direction and doesn't even look modern. And the line of text with "Windows Update is committed to helping reduce carbon emissions" is as superfluous as many other controls as well. I mean nice for MS, but it really doesn't belong there.
> Peak usability in my opinion. Space efficient and simple.
Disagree. Aside from nostalgia, there are numerous visual clutter issues that affect the ability to overview. Not to mention the aliased text rendering. Then you have double click to open files/dirs which might feel normal, but both younger and older people struggle with (like long press on iOS) + knowing what can be double clicked. My mom always asks me if she’s supposed to double or single click. But she can use a smartphone UI without my help.
That said, the one thing I like compared to modern designs is the very clear layering (with awful fake bevel 3d but nevertheless it does the job). This makes it very clear what toggle state a button has, and also which things are on top of other things.
>My mom always asks me if she’s supposed to double or single click. But she can use a smartphone UI without my help.
That's honestly just an old person thing to do, usually coupled with a huge helping of learned helplessness "I just don't get these newfangled computers" and refusing to learn anything new. Show them right click one time and they'll forever ask if you if something that they've always double-clicked on requires a right click.
If that were the cause it’d apply universally. But the point is that she can use her phone to a much higher degree of independence, despite fat finger issues, much smaller screen real estate, and lack of hover effects, double clicks and right clicks. I always find new apps and figuring things out, but struggling to explore and learn on the computer.
To add on top of that, the double click navigation isn’t even consistent on the same platform. In the sidebar on desktop you have single click navigation even on the same type of entity (directories). Look at the younger gens who only used phones. They struggle too.
double click vs single click is interesting, seems nobody knows how to handle an object needing to be interacted with more than a single way.
Maybe the right idea is to just pick one arbitrarily and stick to it consistently.
I’m only mildly joking, UX guidelines are basically just this. There is no way to make people implicitly know how to do things (skeuomorphism was a solid attempt).
In society it’s only things like hammers that have a universal/innate understood use.
It was the Internet Explorer shell integration that brought us this feature. The idea was to blend the desktop and web user interfaces. If you installed IE4 on Windows 95, you'd get that option there too.
> And the line of text with "Windows Update is committed to helping reduce carbon emissions" is as superfluous as many other controls as well. I mean nice for MS, but it really doesn't belong there.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, but would note that this isn’t anything new. I can remember seeing messages like this on HP and DELL machines as early as 2007.
Are those the systems you learned as a teenager/young adult?
I felt the same way about XP, despite it being generally regarded as a UI abomination. I think it was just familiar.
Anyway, I eventually shook lose of that nostalgia, and for me the best usability has been more recent. The wmii/i3/sway family of window managers are have been just great: simple, to the point, and automatic.
I dunno. There are pretty clearly some bad trends in computing generally and mainstream UX specifically, but improvements are still bouncing around in the margins.
Snow Leopard is pretty good, but personally I’ve found that Mavericks (10.9) edges it out for the little bits of polish it has that SL doesn’t, as well as its brighter more cheery color scheme. The only big downside of Mavericks for me is that it’s missing Snow Leopard’s 2D grid of virtual desktops and instead only has the linear arrangement found in modern versions. I really miss the 2D grid.
Mavericks is also the last HiDPI release of Mac OS X that used the Leopard-era icon pack. After that, it went to these garish looking flat icons that I couldn't stand to look at.
I was never a fan of the skeuomorphic icons (and design in general), personally. I think there's a place for flat design and it isn't all bad, in particular peripheral UI elements, like the top menu bar, dock icons, etc. It is interactive elements that should be the ones to stand out, not everything.
If the homogeny of flat design makes the main interactive elements less salient, then everything designed to look 3D with glossy surfaces and brushed metal outlines does the same, just with noise.
I think there should be a combination of both, which I think is why many find the older interfaces from the 90s and early 2000s much more usable.
That's a long way of saying that I prefer the flat application icons and dock on current macOS. The dock stays in the peripheral and the icons identify the application all while not drawing my attention until I purposefully go to it.
I prefer the older psuedo-photorealistic icon style that macOS used to use because it makes dock icons, sidebar items, etc much easier to quickly distinguish. The icons in modern docks all bearing the same shape and rough set of colors significantly impairs usability.
> I think there's a place for flat design and it isn't all bad, in particular peripheral UI elements, like the top menu bar, dock icons
Funnily enough, these are precisely the elements that are flat in the Windows 9x look. (Windows 9x does not have a "dock" but it does have a quick launch bar and a system tray, and these show flat icons.)
It's funny that you mentioned "Snow Leopard", as Apple moving on from that OS version was my reason for going Linux 100% of the time, and I haven't regretted the switch at all.
The UI was very good. The tiles didn't work on the desktop (Windows 8) but it make a lot of sense on the phone. Every touchable element was large enough that you'd never miss. The UI itself ensured a very consistent experience. I assume that you could do more custom apps, but most apps I used conformed to the general look an feel of the operating system.
One thing I don't think enough people mentions is the messaging app. It integrated with Facebook, before Facebook Messenger. This might not be a big thing today, with people leaving Facebook, but it was absolutely brilliant back then. Basically like iMessage, but with Facebook as the non-SMS protocol. I think it may also have integrated with LinkedIn, I don't recall, but it was suppose to just merge all your contacts into one messaging app.
As much as I dislike Windows on the desktop, Windows Phone made perfect sense. The UI was completely tailored to the touchscreen and was so easy it use and navigate. It's a real shame it didn't take of. In some sense Microsoft should have treated it more like Windows on the desktop and aggressively offered it to OEMs.
The interface was incredibly fast and intuitive. It was slick and easy to understand but felt modern at the same time. The font felt timeless, it had the best camera app for the time, which was a time where amazing mobile phone cameras were just starting to become a thing (Nokia famously made a 42 megapixel camera for their flagship windows phone and the pics were gorgeous)
The first party software was really fast and stable. They were also some of the first phones I ever used with proper OLED screens
If you ever get a chance to use one it’s worth it even if it’s only for a day. Really changes one’s perspective on what’s possible with mobile devices. IMO nothing has captured that magic again
I had the Nokia Lumia 920, which wasn't an OLED screen, but an IPS, if I recall correctly. Even that screen looked beautiful. I think part of it was the font rendering and the UI design just being perfectly suited to the platform. In any case it just looked amazing.
Not OP but I also had a Windows Phone (8). It had a consistent design in every app and it just "felt" good to use. The inboxed apps were great (surprisingly!) and the phones themselves were quite cheap. Windows Phone was optimized for low RAM phones so it ran smooth there. I also miss the keyboard, I rarely mistyped which happens constantly with GBoard. Haven't found a replacement that doesn't suck yet...
It's hard to put into words because you have had to use it to understand!
I despise Windows 10 Mobile though - it killed the whole platform and made the OS unbearably slow. It was full of bugs and it was clear that it was the beginning of the end for Microsoft's mobile amibitions. I use Android now but it's a mess. Google can't decide on a consistent UI + UX and everything is all over the place.
Everything feel smooth, on par with iOS. Unfortunate there no quality apps for it. If you want a detox phone (like light phone) just get an old WP, it's cheaper.
> Current interfaces are generally a lot more simpler than those ones though?
Unless and until you need to do something that isn't one of the three or four basic functions.
> Are you saying those elaborate 90s style window menus are somehow simpler than iPad interfaces?
A perfectly-designed window menu is going to be simpler than a perfectly-designed iPad interface. There's only so much you can really have access to in iPad/Android-land, and any functionality that can't be encompassed with tap/long-tap/tap-and-drag is going to require a drastic break from the ordinary functionality. With window-menus, since you're already using window-menus for lots of stuff, it's not as drastic a break from the routine.
Now, I was careful to say "perfectly-designed" for each, because around the edges it can absolutely be a bit of a pain (my favorite go-to example is finding a "preferences" menu, which in Windows software can be in any of File > Preferences, Edit > Preferences, Tools > Preferences, or Options > Preferences - among many other options; and sometimes there's even a separate "Settings" menu with different options buried somewhere else), but even so, more often than not, window-menus still win by virtue of flexibility.
Touch-screen interfaces today are anything but "perfectly designed". The most effective and most easily controlled UX action on a touch-screen is a swipe, so if complex interactions are a priority you should pick something like pie-menus throughout. The basic idea is that what takes multiple clicks on a mouse should ideally take only a single swipe motion (with confirmation for destructive actions) on a touchscreen.
> Touch-screen interfaces today are anything but "perfectly designed".
I don't disagree.
However, a mouse will always be more versatile than a touchscreen. There's a finite theoretical ceiling for touchscreens that's well underneath that of mice. Even looking beyond the completely-obvious fact that there's no real way to distinguish between "point" and "drag" on a touchscreen (other than "did this start on a draggable element", which is far from ideal), two fingers and a thumb can readily control five separate buttons plus a scrollwheel, and I can add even more buttons to a mouse.
> Also, do you realise you attempting an apples to pears comparison?
Compare with current-gen GNOME then.
> "simpler" == "easier to find the feature you need", not "fewer gui items to click"
The tabbed ribbon design of post-07 Microsoft Office apps is a LOT simpler by that definition than the traditional menu based one before it, and so are a lot of modern interfaces across various applications and OS's. Neat tabs and toolbars > oblong menus, anytime.
> The tabbed ribbon design of post-07 Microsoft Office apps is a LOT simpler by that definition than the traditional menu based one before it, and so are a lot of modern interfaces across various applications and OS's. Neat tabs and toolbars > oblong menus, anytime.
Not when the menus were 15-20 entires with occasional icons and the ribbon is 50+ icons of various sizes (and hidden functionalities - the little group corner arrows). "Easier" also implies easy visual parsing.
The original 1990s version could be scaled by just picking different pixel sizes for the UI elements. And the tiny 16px icons and labels would actually look quite nice in a basic 640x480 resolution.
> And the tiny 16px icons and labels would actually look quite nice in a basic 640x480 resolution.
For those who didn't live through these days: the physical size of common computer monitors wasn't very different from what we have now (other than being more square, bulky, and really heavy), but the resolution was much lower; 640x480 was not just a "basic resolution", it was the standard display resolution everybody used (a higher 800x600 resolution became common later). Icons, labels, fonts, etc, were designed to be readable and look good on a typical-sized CRT monitor at 640x480 resolution. The whole user interface was designed to work well at 640x480 resolution.
How's this project doing after it lost its founder and biggest contributor (Andreas Kling)? I see the commit history is still reasonably active, so it's not dead at least . . .
It's a super cool project that boots up surprisingly fast. You can just grab the git repo and and `Meta/serenity.sh run` and its starts up in qemu on my mac.
They only show the good part of 90s UIs, the standardized part. They don't show the part where every installer wanted to look unique, weird ICQ clients.
I don't do much with Windows nowadays, but I do touch it from time to time and I don't think much has changed in this regard. Off the top of my head: driver installers for Intel, Nvidia, and Brother printers all look unique. Same with the installers for Firefox, Chrome, etc. The MSI format has brought some standardization, but it's a fairly rigid framework that leads projects to building their own installers.
I'm very curious to hear why you feel that way. Windows 95 always felt like more of an amalgamation of CDE and what Mac OS was doing at the time, than anything to do with NeXTSTEP.
NeXTSTEP's interface (1988–1989) used subtle shading and depth for buttons and windows, creating a dimensional appearance. Its visual design pioneered the use of shading for depth in GUIs.
Microsoft's timeline:
CTL3D.DLL: Introduced circa 1991–1992, primarily for Windows 3.1 applications (not the OS itself). It added 3D effects to dialog boxes and controls but was optional for developers.
Windows 95: Introduced native 3D controls (e.g., recessed buttons, drop shadows) as the system-wide default in 1995, eliminating the need for CTL3D.DLL
If you're referring to the window buttons especially, I can definitely see that. I did hear that Microsoft did acquire several NeXT Computer boxes in the early 90s to study the hardware and the operating system, and I'm absolutely sure it played a role in influencing Windows 95's look and feel.
NeXTSTEP is peak programmer UI. It looks absolutely atrocious, even by early GUI standards.
Windows 95's success was in part because Microsoft put in the effort to test and write good standardised UI controls and configurations. Throwing a bunch of UI elements on a heap with pretty high-res (at the time) graphics makes for a good freeze frame in a movie but a terrible UI.
MS copied from everyone, like Apple did before them and Unix display managers did after them, but their copy was far from cheap.
NeXTSTEP was widely regarded as visually striking and innovative for its time, particularly for its clean, minimalist design and advanced graphical capabilities. Key elements contributing to its perceived beauty included:
3D chiseled widgets: Beveled buttons and controls with subtle shading created a dimensional, tactile appearance.
Full-color icons: Large, detailed icons (uncommon in late 1980s GUIs) enhanced visual clarity.
Consistent typography: System-wide use of Display PostScript enabled professional-quality fonts and anti-aliasing.
Transparency and compositing: Advanced graphics handling allowed overlapping windows and semi-transparent elements.
Current discussions still praise NeXTSTEP's design as better looking and more usable than Windows 11 and macOS.
It inspired Win95. It inspired the original Netscape browser's UI (toolbar etc is very NeXTSTEP-inspired, not surprising because it was developed on a NeXT box). It inspired the Mac OS X and the iPhone, although both have degraded since then. As things exist today, NeXTSTEP from 40 years ago (!) looks much nicer - and way more usable - than today's flat UIs.
The appeal of this UI can be boiled down to: form follows function + vintage rendering. Minus the vintage design it's basically isomorph to most common Linux window managers. Be it Cinnamon, xfce, KDE, mate ...
Is there a practical daily driver Linux that has this feel and vibe? Can I do this cleanly with GNOME/Debian or XFCE/Manjaro, or a bespoke OS with an underlying package manager?
The closest I know of is Blue95. I have only run the live environment but it worked pretty well and was impressive.
"Blue95 is a modern and lightweight desktop experience that is reminiscent of a bygone era of computing. Based on Fedora Atomic Xfce with the Chicago95 theme."
Serenity is an amazing accomplishment. It’s odd to me though because I always hated the windows interface, even 3.11. It seems a lot of modern Linux desktops (I know serenity isn’t Linux) try to emulate the feel of modern windows but it ends up looking like a meh version of an already bad interface imo. I still prefer the look of enlightenment or motif+4dwm.
I think the screenshots are a bit squashed. When he was doing Andreas was doing streams the fonts looked fine they just wasn't using hinting/cleartype.
KDE is that. The two things I don't like about it are: KIO integration with GTK apps even with kio-fuse installed, and not having dbus based configuration system like gsettings/dconf.
Not sure if it's a NixOS bug, but even other KDE apps have hit-or-miss KIO integration for me; e.g. Krusader cannot open my MTP devices, while Dolphin can.
I enjoy this as an art project, but it does frustrate me as a reaction against the chickenshit minimalism of UI today, because I think it's the wrong reaction. I don't want a "love letter to 90s UI", I want a UI that takes full advantage of the hardware we have now. Graphics processing is a million times more powerful than it was in the 90s, and I now have a monitor with 220 ppi and 5K of horizontal resolution, which was the stuff of science fiction then. Surely the best UI for such hardware is neither the shitty low-density Jony Ive suckoff of today nor a carbon copy of the world as it existed 30 years ago just for nostalgia's sake.
(This is ranty but isn't really directed at the SerenityOS devs, they've delivered exactly what they promised and done a good job at it. I just wish someone, somewhere was interested in functional UI design for the current era)
The UI in terms of space and usability looks great. Two "modern" things I don't want to miss: Good font rendering and a fast application launcher (mod -> type a few characters -> enter). What I dislike the most on modern UI, and maybe absolutely hate, are all those super slow animations. Just gimme the damn thing, I don't need those animations. (Yes I know on most plattforms I can disable them, but this often takes quite a few steps)
> What I dislike the most on modern UI, and maybe absolutely hate, are all those super slow animations.
Slow animations are a way to hide latency, they are essentially loading screens. Apple is really good at it, or at least it was with the early iPhones, and a reason why iPhones felt so smooth compared to their Android counterparts while not being actually faster. For me, it is an impressive technical feat and it took years for Android to catch up (see: "project butter"), and in the end, it was mostly by brute force, i.e. putting ridiculously overpowered hardware in smartphones.
Remove the animations or make them faster (you can do that sometimes), and the lag may become apparent.
Why you have latency to hide in the first place is another problem. There may also be some clueless designers who put slow animations for no good reason, maybe because they are just copying Apple, not understanding why Apple did it in the first place.
There are also some animations that that have utility beyond eye candy in communicating to the user what’s going on, which is particularly important for non-technical individuals.
For example the animation associated with minimizing windows in most desktop environments makes it crystal clear where your window went after you press the minimize button, even for novices. Removing that animation makes the interaction significantly more confusing.
Those animations are a no brainer because they both communicate something meaningful and don't get in your way. While the animation is happening you can keep working with whatever you were doing. I think a great UI can both be animated and allow you to work unhindered, if the designers put their mind to it.
Well, the iPhones were in fact faster. Faster at playing the animations, at least.
I worked on an app in the iPhone 4S and Galaxy S II era and we wanted to use the same trick on both: smoothly animate the view switch between user interaction event and the API response. It worked super smooth on iPhone, and it was jittery as hell on Android. In the end we left the animation on the former, and move the users straight into the loading screen on the latter.
> Slow animations are a way to hide latency, they are essentially loading screens.
Except that most of the time there really isn't any latency to be hidden, the action becomes effectively instant once you remove the animation. Starting a new app (or switching to an app that was evicted from memory) is the main exception and that's quite rare.
Sometimes it's a decision made for consistency of expectation.
> Remove the animations or make them faster (you can do that sometimes), and the lag may become apparent.
This is my number one trick on Android phones. Enable developer options and change the animation speeds from 1x to 0.5x. It makes your old phone feel new.
> Apple is really good at it, or at least it was with the early iPhones, and a reason why iPhones felt so smooth compared to their Android counterparts while not being actually faster.
Is that why iOS animations always feel so slow to me? Modern phone hardware can do things so much faster, but the animations are still utterly sluggish in my opinion. Worse, there's no way to speed them up; even with reduced motion, slow movements are simply translated into just-as-slow fades, which are somehow even more obnoxious.
> Slow animations are a way to hide latency, they are essentially loading screens. Apple is really good at it, or at least it was with the early iPhones, and a reason why iPhones felt so smooth compared to their Android counterparts while not being actually faster.
Now it got flipped. I turned off animations on my Android phone, and it's great. And now every time I have to use iOS (for app development), everything seems to be moving in slow motion.
And you can not turn it off! Apple in their infinite wisdom doesn't provide ways for app developers to disable animated transitions.
Agreed on the animations but that isn't my top of the list because as you observed, those can usually be disabled. The most annoying aspect of modern interfaces is total inconsistency in looks and behaviour across different applications. Even common action icons vary in style, colouring and shape from one application to another. Title bars are hijacked for whatever fanciful ideas the app designers had in mind, scrollbars and other basic widgets are rarely drawn using native desktop components, tab ordering is a dream of the distant past and so on and that's if a given app even responds to the tab key.
You would've really hated software in the early 90's -- every single thing had an aesthetic of its own. It was actually quite wonderful, and a lot of style/"personality" embedded in these design choices.
The utmost worst was software that had complete custom UI, filled with buttons that didn't really look like buttons.
Media software and game launchers were usually the worst offenders.
Are you thinking here of pre-multitasking desktop usage, stuff like DeluxePaint, Scream Tracker, that kind of thing?
Certainly the late 90s was the heyday of desktop consistency on Windows, in the 95/98/ME era, I think driven largely by the conventions Microsoft established in Office. And I believe Mac OS gave pretty good platform-level guidance then too, so things were generally okay with a few exceptions— stuff like media players that have always been more on the fanciful side.
Early 90's, especially on Amiga -- where a proper windowing desktop env ("workbench") coexisted with the wildest custom UIs. Maybe it was the roots of the machine, heavily used as a games console and a demoscene workhorse? It seems like at that time there was so much creative design effort put into UX -- and it didn't seem to get in the way, maybe because each genre of software was kind of on the cutting edge back then, establishing what would eventually evolve into conventions. Mod trackers, image editing, disk copying, etc. Maybe it's a bit of nostalgia, but it felt really immersive to pull up a piece of software you were familiar with; each UI was so distinct and purpose-built, but it also had.. flourish? style? soul? Not so much now.
It is my recollection as well. Most applications used VB, Delphi, MFC etc. that all had the "native" OS look and feel. There were some exceptions like WinAmp and others, but from what I can remember most applications were more consistent than today.
Those toolkits would usually reimplement the "native" look and feel from scratch, or nearly so. It was uncommon to rely directly on the basic OS widgets.
MFC was Microsoft, so that was definitely native, and I think a lot of stuff used native even just for performance reasons. I remember getting very frustrated around then when something would want me to install the JVM and I knew I was in for a laggy mess of an application that would have bad font rendering, strange little buttons, and its own file picker.
> MFC was Microsoft, so that was definitely native
Microsoft reimplemented this stuff from scratch all the time. Not just in MFC itself but Office too.
Don't modern versions of Windows contain at least 5 different widget frameworks? Like, Win32, Ribbon (I think engineered for Office as you said), WinForms, WPF, WinUI 1/2/3... I think Apple just has Cocoa (Carbon is long gone), AppKit, UIKit, and SwiftUI.
Nah, the Windows ecosystem never even got close to being consistent.
MS Office had its own UI toolkit and routinely invented new UI paradigms that weren't exposed in any Windows API, leaving people who wanted to look native scrambling to reimplement. This was particularly the case for toolbars. MS Office first invented the so-called "coolbar" and then the ribbon. Internet Explorer also rolled its own toolbar styles in ways not supported in the base Windows API e.g. toolbars with large icons and sliding sub-sections. Inventing custom toolbars was practically a sport on Windows; Netscape also did it.
At the time the most popular media players were WinAmp (totally custom and themeable to boot), RealPlayer (custom UI https://andrewnile.co.uk/blog/remembering-realplayer/), Quicktime (custom UI) and Windows Media Player (mostly but not entirely native).
Even the base utilities that came with Windows weren't consistent with each other. It wasn't uncommon in the Win 9x era to find programs still using Win3.1 style file dialogs ... a few are still buried in Windows today!
The problem got worse when you examined the artwork. The stock icon library in Windows was anemic, so dev platforms frequently had to expand the core library with their own. Delphi apps could be easily identified by the distinctive icons in their buttons (https://zarko-gajic.iz.hr/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/delp...).
Restyling window decorations was also very common. Microsoft themselves did it routinely, for example their flagship Encarta encyclopedia app had totally custom widgets and window styling: https://winworldpc.com/product/encarta/1999
To get online most users were running something like CompuServe (custom web-style main UI https://thedayintech.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/0...), or AOL (custom UI https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/ehxb1g/the_aol_h...), or MSN (custom UI https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6179a66d5f9cc70024c61878/...)
Windows apps of this era were much like web apps are today: they shared some common code for things like rendering menus, buttons or widgets in their settings screens, but the main UI users interacted with were almost always custom widgets that were extremely varied between apps. Win32 was nearly impossible to style compared to HTML so this represented a large investment of developer time, but a custom branded UI was believed to be worth nearly any cost. This is something fundamental to how humans work and is pointless to fight, a lesson the web platform fully embraced giving it an advantage over other UI toolkits of the era.
Yes, it’s wonderful having to figure out 50 different UIs designed by 50 different artists with 50 different ideas of what a drop-down should look like and how it should work.
The mental overhead from having slightly different drop shadows and button sizes is minimal, and I think pretty overblown by people who prefer identical UIs for everything regardless of form factor (which is of course a valid take).
But someone could just as easily respond to today's UIs with "Yes, it's wonderful that every single app looks identical, as if it was all designed by one pretty boring artist with no creativity whatsoever" and that would also be a perfectly valid take.
Predictability is a feature. That does include button sizes. To me that's where the asymmetry is. The "boring artist with no creativity" complaint is aesthetic, whereas predictability is a functional concern.
Do you have a solution in mind? While a platform (OS) can provide a UI toolkit and provide a HIG, one cannot stop language and programming tools vendors or programmers from doing whatever they like.
I'm starting to think that it would take replacing basically everything that's happened on Web frontend development since XMLHttpRequest with an alternative system that's still standards-based, platform-agnostic and Web-centric, but designed from the ground up as a GUI toolkit instead of a markup language for hypermedia formatting.
Because with the current status quo, the platform that dominates everyone's mindshare is HTML/JavaScript/CSS. Which has a really rudimentary concept of UI controls, and human interface guidelines that spend 90% of their effort on begging people to manually implement usability features that we used to get for free with native GUI toolkits. And I think that we might need to get away from that mess before it's possible for anyone to have any energy left over for worrying about HCI on the level that we used to in the late '90s and early '00s.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43762571
But realistically, you’re never going to stop a motivated app designer who is dead set on making their app an unique snowflake art project rather than a tool that users need to use.
Maybe using computers is not for you.
It's different that back in the early 90s everyone at least agrees that people don't want to disable certain important UI elements by default.
Personally, I dislike the flatness. It's hard (at times) to distinguish one from another when multiple windows are open.
Window shadows are the solution here in my experience.
It’s to be expected when almost every app is electron or some web wrapper, that all consistency is lost. The only way to get it back (kinda) is to avoid those apps.
But for a lot of use cases that's not possible anymore, that is, a lot of the applications using the OS' UI libraries are no longer maintained.
And a lot of people have to use the applications as supplied, e.g. Slack or Microsoft Teams. Which can be accessed via a web browser, sure, but dedicated apps for these are also nice because they have a dedicated spot in the app switchers.
This is self induced misery.
Nobody forces you to install and use apps made of a different toolkit (or version of said toolkit) from the one shipped with the desktop.
You can use only Cocoa apps on MacosX, qt6 apps on a kde plasma 6, gnome/gtk4 apps on a gnome3 desktop or whatever is the equivalent in the windows 11 world.
This will never happen because:
1. Companies will always want to brand their apps with their particular UI styles.
2. In order to prevent the above, the OS would have to deliberately NOT expose the ability for apps to control their own pixels.
Doing 2 means you are making it impossible to support many application types (photo editors, games, etc.).
NOT doing 2 means that app companies will eventually use the same APIs that the photo editor and game applications use.
The OS / UI toolkit should be strongly opinionated, making the consistent, happy path easier to develop and making customization possible but with great effort.
No-one would claim building a web browser is easier than putting some widgets together in Win32/Cocoa/GTK+/whatever, yet here we are with Electron.
But people would claim that it's easier for a company to take a bunch of web frontend devs and have them develop a UI which rides on top the already-existing Electron. Which is why we have such a plague of bloated Electron apps - because companies are lazy and don't care about the end user experience.
But you're describing pretty much every UI toolkit!
Some projects are doing (2) anyway to get a better result. Examples: Kitty, Zed, File Pilot.
File Pilot has got to be the biggest fuck-you to modern app development practices I've seen in a long time.
I like the idea of trying crazy and new ideas, but this looks like they just thought corners weren't round enough, and that people will pay money for a file manager that has no sharp edges and won't integrate with your OS.
My No.1 pet peeve is the scrollbars. Somehow every modern UI designer hates it, and hates it deeply. They always want to get rid of it. And TBH I'd prefer the other way around - how about we get rid of them instead?
There’s a similar disdain for menubars which I really can’t understand. The disorderly and abbreviated hamburger menus that most often are used as a replacement are just worse on every single axis except for maybe visual appeal. They throw out what could be the single strain of consistent usability across apps in favor of looking good on a PowerPoint slide and web marketing blurb.
Two of GNOME's recent updates have made searching menus for a rarely used item incredibly painful:
1. Replace the menubar with a hamburger menu; in some cases the hamburger menu then contains file/edit/&c. so it's just a spurious extra click
2. Require a click to see the contents of a submenu and a click to go back
Fortunately my most-used GNOME application (Evolution) has an option to restore the old behavior for both of those, but I literally cannot think of the motivation for these two changes that clearly make things worse. The only halfway plausible idea I have heard for #2 is that the GNOME UX designers think that submenus are bad, so if you make them hard enough to use, developers will stop putting them in their applications. #1 is probably partly a looks thing, and partly a "too many people have fewer horizontal lines on their screens than I did in 2004[1]" thing.
1: That's when I got a 1600x1200 monitor; people today with 1080p screens have only 56 more lines than the 1280x1024 monitor I had been using since the previous millennium
The GNOME project seems like it has a strong desire to converge all on-screen UI onto mobile-like patterns. There are some mobile conventions that can be brought over to desktop without impairing usage too much but I think that perhaps it’s starting to cross too far over to the mobile side of the line.
It’s unfortunate because in other ways I find GNOME/GTK more agreeable than KDE/Qt (layout of controls within windows is consistently better in GTK environments/apps for example, Qt apps have a tendency to feel slapdash/haphazard/“engineery”) but I don’t like the increasingly strong mobile influence.
I agree. Hamburger menus aren't any better than menu bars. It seems like an example where design has more importance than function.
My alternative to the menu bar would be a search bar that allowed me to search in a Google style everything related to that program: functions, features, shortcuts, and documentation.
File | Edit | View | etc. is not the right choice for every program.
This is where it’s useful for the menu bar to be system-owned rather than the responsibility of individual programs (whether that be a global bar as in macOS or attached to window decorations). That would make it easy to implement a toggle that hides menubars either globally or on a per-app basis and enable a Unity-type shortkey-summoned HUD to be used instead.
Hamburger menus work much better on mobile screens that are horizontally constrained, are less visually intrusive when not in use and don't require at least two levels of nesting like classical desktop menu bars do.
Even on mobile, in most situations there are better UX choices than hamburger menus. Nearly every app using them I’ve encountered has put as little thought into navigation and UI hierarchy as possible and are awkward to get around in. They’re the ones where one has to go down a winding ever-changing maze to access the desired functionality.
Most would be better served by surfacing the most commonly used screens as tabs and most commonly used functions within those tabs. Ideally 2-4 taps is all it should take to get anywhere, and there should only ever be a tiny handful of niche things that take 5+ taps to access.
Agreed. And the worst part is that you could use a (well designed) menubar with a keyboard by using the Alt-key combinations together with cursor key menu navigation and similar techniques. But you don't have that luxury in hamburger menus. You are forced to use a pointing device such as the mouse, or if you are lucky, a completely non-standard key combination to bring it down. Awful.
Certain long emails I get don’t show the scroll bar at all in iOS Mail, and I get low grade anxiety not knowing how long the email is or how much more is left.
I’m also perplexed why the mail developers would allow such a thing or what kind of bug causes such behavior.
My hunch is that they are just using an existing framework that does that, and it may require some digging into the configuration to disable that (or worse, have to change some code). Since this is never going to be an urgent thing it will never be fixed.
I work in MacOS VSCode frequently, and whenever I open a large repo with a huge number of files, it's PIA to find the scrollbar. I have to hover the mouse above it to make it appear, but how can I hover above it without knowing where it is?
BTW if you share the same frustration with VSCode, please vote this ticket: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/244123
> Certain long emails I get don’t show the scroll bar at all in iOS Mail, and I get low grade anxiety not knowing how long the email is or how much more is left.
Yet in iOS you can swipe vertically some pixels and you will see the scrollbar telling you this exact information.
For most emails, yes. Some other emails, no. I don't know what determines when it works and when it doesn't.
> What I dislike the most on modern UI, and maybe absolutely hate, are all those super slow animations.
This is what drives me crazy on macOS. Specifically, the animation for switching between virtual desktops. When I hit Ctrl+1/2/3/etc I want it to switch instantly, no animation - not slide into place. It's even unresponsive until the animation finishes.
I use the Aerospace tiling window manager for macOS just so I can move my apps to different spaces and opt+key move to them. usually vscode in opt+1, firefox in opt+2 and discord in opt+d
I don't use Mac because I prefer Linux tiling WMs, but this is easy to fix?
Most animations can be disabled using the defaults system.
I think the desktop animation option is called workspaces-swoosh-animation-off or similar.
I also recall that Settings > Accessibility has a reduce motion option that disables lots of things.
I have to use a Mac for work and it drives me crazy. I disabled everything I could find, enabled reduced motion preferences or whatever it's called and still got some animations.
My "solution" is to use Aerospace [0], which reimplements window management. That's the only way I found to not have animations. Unfortunately i still feel some delay when switching windows compared to i3wm/sway in Linux.
[0] https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace
I hate the default animation speed of Androids that come with Pixel phones. They are too long and makes it feel like the phone is slow. One of the first things I do after buying a new phone is to half the animation durations using developer settings, and the phone feels much faster.
Agreed! Whenever I use someone's phone I instantly notice how sluggish it feels with animations turned on. If I offer to turn them off they often get surprised at how much faster the phone feels after.
My pet peeve: Animations are a crutch used by designers who think they need them when in fact they should just have improved the UI so users don't get confused about the origin of a popup or window. The only justified use of animations in UIs that make sense is in scrolling, everything else is just adding latency to hide your incompetence.
> If I offer to turn them off they often get surprised at how much faster the phone feels after.
If you're using Android there's also a "visible touches" option you can turn on in the Developer settings. It's a big UX enhancement of its own and IMHO should be promoted to the Accessibility settings (together with the options for speeding up or disabling animations).
What are the benefits of enabling this feature?
It provides a quick feedback loop when you're trying to poke at stuff on-screen with your fingers. Which is nice since it lets you know quite seamlessly (1) how good your aim is, which gets kind of critical when using fingers on a touchscreen compared to a mouse. and (2) whether a tap has even registered in the first place, which is often problematic for many users who may be wearing gloves, have drier skin that doesn't register as easily, etc. etc.
Idunno man, I enjoy the animations. They're a big part of the 'feel' of MacOS. But they could be faster in some cases.
> Good font rendering
A large part of the charm of these 90s UI recreations is precisely the lack of antialiasing and other niceties we expect of modern UIs. There was another project recently on HN that uses modern font rendering with a Windows 9x look, and it's just not the same, IMO. SerenityOS comes closer to what I remember, though it still doesn't quite match the look of MS Sans Serif(?).
You might need a CRT to properly recreate the look of a 90s UI.
You can always turn it off. I don't think lack of antialiasing is what gives these UIs their character.
I agree that it is charming when I want to tinker with stuff. But if it's for "real world " usage, I don't think that being charming matters a lot. I mean, it really depends, not everything has to be about "serious" usage but if it's the intended goal then I think that good font rendering is something that still matters a lot.
I still use chrome sometimes for example just because it seems to have a better font rendering (on Linux but also on Windows) than Firefox. It's completely irrational in a way but it does matter sometimes
The screenshot with the wrong width+height values is not helping appearances.
AFAIK there was a case being made at the time that the animations were to provide predictability in performance, users get into a bit of a rhythm and it was better to slow everything down a bit to lower the overall variance of response. This made more sense when HDDs were slow.
Peak usability in my opinion. Space efficient and simple.
Not my favorite design and color scheme, but certainly better than what modern Windows looks like.
That has no direction and doesn't even look modern. And the line of text with "Windows Update is committed to helping reduce carbon emissions" is as superfluous as many other controls as well. I mean nice for MS, but it really doesn't belong there.
> Peak usability in my opinion. Space efficient and simple.
Disagree. Aside from nostalgia, there are numerous visual clutter issues that affect the ability to overview. Not to mention the aliased text rendering. Then you have double click to open files/dirs which might feel normal, but both younger and older people struggle with (like long press on iOS) + knowing what can be double clicked. My mom always asks me if she’s supposed to double or single click. But she can use a smartphone UI without my help.
That said, the one thing I like compared to modern designs is the very clear layering (with awful fake bevel 3d but nevertheless it does the job). This makes it very clear what toggle state a button has, and also which things are on top of other things.
>My mom always asks me if she’s supposed to double or single click. But she can use a smartphone UI without my help.
That's honestly just an old person thing to do, usually coupled with a huge helping of learned helplessness "I just don't get these newfangled computers" and refusing to learn anything new. Show them right click one time and they'll forever ask if you if something that they've always double-clicked on requires a right click.
If that were the cause it’d apply universally. But the point is that she can use her phone to a much higher degree of independence, despite fat finger issues, much smaller screen real estate, and lack of hover effects, double clicks and right clicks. I always find new apps and figuring things out, but struggling to explore and learn on the computer.
To add on top of that, the double click navigation isn’t even consistent on the same platform. In the sidebar on desktop you have single click navigation even on the same type of entity (directories). Look at the younger gens who only used phones. They struggle too.
double click vs single click is interesting, seems nobody knows how to handle an object needing to be interacted with more than a single way.
Maybe the right idea is to just pick one arbitrarily and stick to it consistently.
I’m only mildly joking, UX guidelines are basically just this. There is no way to make people implicitly know how to do things (skeuomorphism was a solid attempt).
In society it’s only things like hammers that have a universal/innate understood use.
Single-click was implemented possibly by 2k but definitely by XP. Think it had to do with IE—yes, details below.
You could single-click to open files in Windows 98 already. You could also hover your mouse pointer on a file icon and it would become selected.
It was the Internet Explorer shell integration that brought us this feature. The idea was to blend the desktop and web user interfaces. If you installed IE4 on Windows 95, you'd get that option there too.
Yes, it was called Active Desktop if memory serves.
> And the line of text with "Windows Update is committed to helping reduce carbon emissions" is as superfluous as many other controls as well. I mean nice for MS, but it really doesn't belong there.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, but would note that this isn’t anything new. I can remember seeing messages like this on HP and DELL machines as early as 2007.
somewhere, "simplicity is a feature" got lost in the everyday computer experience
It seems sometimes the past is better than the future that came after.
In my opinion, peak usability for platforms I use:
- iOS 6
- Windows 7
- Snow Leopard
- Windows Phone 10 (may actually have been the best mobile OS user experience I ever had)
Are those the systems you learned as a teenager/young adult?
I felt the same way about XP, despite it being generally regarded as a UI abomination. I think it was just familiar.
Anyway, I eventually shook lose of that nostalgia, and for me the best usability has been more recent. The wmii/i3/sway family of window managers are have been just great: simple, to the point, and automatic.
I dunno. There are pretty clearly some bad trends in computing generally and mainstream UX specifically, but improvements are still bouncing around in the margins.
Snow Leopard is pretty good, but personally I’ve found that Mavericks (10.9) edges it out for the little bits of polish it has that SL doesn’t, as well as its brighter more cheery color scheme. The only big downside of Mavericks for me is that it’s missing Snow Leopard’s 2D grid of virtual desktops and instead only has the linear arrangement found in modern versions. I really miss the 2D grid.
Mavericks is also the last HiDPI release of Mac OS X that used the Leopard-era icon pack. After that, it went to these garish looking flat icons that I couldn't stand to look at.
I was never a fan of the skeuomorphic icons (and design in general), personally. I think there's a place for flat design and it isn't all bad, in particular peripheral UI elements, like the top menu bar, dock icons, etc. It is interactive elements that should be the ones to stand out, not everything.
If the homogeny of flat design makes the main interactive elements less salient, then everything designed to look 3D with glossy surfaces and brushed metal outlines does the same, just with noise.
I think there should be a combination of both, which I think is why many find the older interfaces from the 90s and early 2000s much more usable.
That's a long way of saying that I prefer the flat application icons and dock on current macOS. The dock stays in the peripheral and the icons identify the application all while not drawing my attention until I purposefully go to it.
I prefer the older psuedo-photorealistic icon style that macOS used to use because it makes dock icons, sidebar items, etc much easier to quickly distinguish. The icons in modern docks all bearing the same shape and rough set of colors significantly impairs usability.
> I think there's a place for flat design and it isn't all bad, in particular peripheral UI elements, like the top menu bar, dock icons
Funnily enough, these are precisely the elements that are flat in the Windows 9x look. (Windows 9x does not have a "dock" but it does have a quick launch bar and a system tray, and these show flat icons.)
It's funny that you mentioned "Snow Leopard", as Apple moving on from that OS version was my reason for going Linux 100% of the time, and I haven't regretted the switch at all.
why? Snow Leopard was widely regarded as an excellent release.
Mavericks to Yosemite I would understand, but Snow Leopard felt like a strict improvement to me. What did it do wrong?
Pretty sure they're agreeing with you.
Apple moved on from Snow Leopard, so they moved on to Linux.
Ah, sorry, I must have read it wrong.
The thing that gets me about iOS is that they tanked responsiveness in exchange for such a small number of features that don’t even work well.
Can you elaborate on what you enjoyed about the Windows Phone? I've heard people say they liked it, but I've never really dug into why before.
The UI was very good. The tiles didn't work on the desktop (Windows 8) but it make a lot of sense on the phone. Every touchable element was large enough that you'd never miss. The UI itself ensured a very consistent experience. I assume that you could do more custom apps, but most apps I used conformed to the general look an feel of the operating system.
One thing I don't think enough people mentions is the messaging app. It integrated with Facebook, before Facebook Messenger. This might not be a big thing today, with people leaving Facebook, but it was absolutely brilliant back then. Basically like iMessage, but with Facebook as the non-SMS protocol. I think it may also have integrated with LinkedIn, I don't recall, but it was suppose to just merge all your contacts into one messaging app.
As much as I dislike Windows on the desktop, Windows Phone made perfect sense. The UI was completely tailored to the touchscreen and was so easy it use and navigate. It's a real shame it didn't take of. In some sense Microsoft should have treated it more like Windows on the desktop and aggressively offered it to OEMs.
Windows Phone was really snappy even on the low end devices. Android at the time had significant lag issues.
The UI was fairly consistent. There was no guessing what was a button, what an accidental drag would do, etc.
The live squares on the homepage, in my opinion, are still better than anything iOS has come up with.
In my opinion it’s this:
The interface was incredibly fast and intuitive. It was slick and easy to understand but felt modern at the same time. The font felt timeless, it had the best camera app for the time, which was a time where amazing mobile phone cameras were just starting to become a thing (Nokia famously made a 42 megapixel camera for their flagship windows phone and the pics were gorgeous)
The first party software was really fast and stable. They were also some of the first phones I ever used with proper OLED screens
If you ever get a chance to use one it’s worth it even if it’s only for a day. Really changes one’s perspective on what’s possible with mobile devices. IMO nothing has captured that magic again
> proper OLED screens
I had the Nokia Lumia 920, which wasn't an OLED screen, but an IPS, if I recall correctly. Even that screen looked beautiful. I think part of it was the font rendering and the UI design just being perfectly suited to the platform. In any case it just looked amazing.
And it really felt like a professional device. Very minimalist but on point. A tablet version of it (not Win8 mismatch) would have been great!
Not OP but I also had a Windows Phone (8). It had a consistent design in every app and it just "felt" good to use. The inboxed apps were great (surprisingly!) and the phones themselves were quite cheap. Windows Phone was optimized for low RAM phones so it ran smooth there. I also miss the keyboard, I rarely mistyped which happens constantly with GBoard. Haven't found a replacement that doesn't suck yet...
It's hard to put into words because you have had to use it to understand!
I despise Windows 10 Mobile though - it killed the whole platform and made the OS unbearably slow. It was full of bugs and it was clear that it was the beginning of the end for Microsoft's mobile amibitions. I use Android now but it's a mess. Google can't decide on a consistent UI + UX and everything is all over the place.
Everything feel smooth, on par with iOS. Unfortunate there no quality apps for it. If you want a detox phone (like light phone) just get an old WP, it's cheaper.
Current interfaces are generally a lot more simpler than those ones though?
Are you saying those elaborate 90s style window menus are somehow simpler than iPad interfaces?
> Current interfaces are generally a lot more simpler than those ones though?
Unless and until you need to do something that isn't one of the three or four basic functions.
> Are you saying those elaborate 90s style window menus are somehow simpler than iPad interfaces?
A perfectly-designed window menu is going to be simpler than a perfectly-designed iPad interface. There's only so much you can really have access to in iPad/Android-land, and any functionality that can't be encompassed with tap/long-tap/tap-and-drag is going to require a drastic break from the ordinary functionality. With window-menus, since you're already using window-menus for lots of stuff, it's not as drastic a break from the routine.
Now, I was careful to say "perfectly-designed" for each, because around the edges it can absolutely be a bit of a pain (my favorite go-to example is finding a "preferences" menu, which in Windows software can be in any of File > Preferences, Edit > Preferences, Tools > Preferences, or Options > Preferences - among many other options; and sometimes there's even a separate "Settings" menu with different options buried somewhere else), but even so, more often than not, window-menus still win by virtue of flexibility.
Touch-screen interfaces today are anything but "perfectly designed". The most effective and most easily controlled UX action on a touch-screen is a swipe, so if complex interactions are a priority you should pick something like pie-menus throughout. The basic idea is that what takes multiple clicks on a mouse should ideally take only a single swipe motion (with confirmation for destructive actions) on a touchscreen.
> Touch-screen interfaces today are anything but "perfectly designed".
I don't disagree.
However, a mouse will always be more versatile than a touchscreen. There's a finite theoretical ceiling for touchscreens that's well underneath that of mice. Even looking beyond the completely-obvious fact that there's no real way to distinguish between "point" and "drag" on a touchscreen (other than "did this start on a draggable element", which is far from ideal), two fingers and a thumb can readily control five separate buttons plus a scrollwheel, and I can add even more buttons to a mouse.
I can't add more fingers for touchscreens.
Current interfaces are generally a lot more simpler than those ones though?
Are you saying those elaborate 90s style window menus are somehow simpler than iPad interfaces?
"simpler" == "easier to find the feature you need", not "fewer gui items to click"
Also, do you realise you attempting an apples to pears comparison?
> Also, do you realise you attempting an apples to pears comparison?
Compare with current-gen GNOME then.
> "simpler" == "easier to find the feature you need", not "fewer gui items to click"
The tabbed ribbon design of post-07 Microsoft Office apps is a LOT simpler by that definition than the traditional menu based one before it, and so are a lot of modern interfaces across various applications and OS's. Neat tabs and toolbars > oblong menus, anytime.
> The tabbed ribbon design of post-07 Microsoft Office apps is a LOT simpler by that definition than the traditional menu based one before it, and so are a lot of modern interfaces across various applications and OS's. Neat tabs and toolbars > oblong menus, anytime.
Not when the menus were 15-20 entires with occasional icons and the ribbon is 50+ icons of various sizes (and hidden functionalities - the little group corner arrows). "Easier" also implies easy visual parsing.
Horrible accessibility. I couldn't make out jack without my glasses on those UIs, unlike current interfaces and fonts.
The original 1990s version could be scaled by just picking different pixel sizes for the UI elements. And the tiny 16px icons and labels would actually look quite nice in a basic 640x480 resolution.
> And the tiny 16px icons and labels would actually look quite nice in a basic 640x480 resolution.
For those who didn't live through these days: the physical size of common computer monitors wasn't very different from what we have now (other than being more square, bulky, and really heavy), but the resolution was much lower; 640x480 was not just a "basic resolution", it was the standard display resolution everybody used (a higher 800x600 resolution became common later). Icons, labels, fonts, etc, were designed to be readable and look good on a typical-sized CRT monitor at 640x480 resolution. The whole user interface was designed to work well at 640x480 resolution.
“Large fonts” was a setting back then.
How's this project doing after it lost its founder and biggest contributor (Andreas Kling)? I see the commit history is still reasonably active, so it's not dead at least . . .
It's a super cool project that boots up surprisingly fast. You can just grab the git repo and and `Meta/serenity.sh run` and its starts up in qemu on my mac.
I interviewed Andreas about it some time ago:
https://corecursive.com/serenity-os-with-andreas-kling/
oh i listened to this podcast couple of days ago. lovely stuff, and i _really_ like the human side of it. a lot actually.
your podcasts are really great from that perspective. thank you !
They only show the good part of 90s UIs, the standardized part. They don't show the part where every installer wanted to look unique, weird ICQ clients.
I don't do much with Windows nowadays, but I do touch it from time to time and I don't think much has changed in this regard. Off the top of my head: driver installers for Intel, Nvidia, and Brother printers all look unique. Same with the installers for Firefox, Chrome, etc. The MSI format has brought some standardization, but it's a fairly rigid framework that leads projects to building their own installers.
That was every installer looking unique now it's every app wanting to look unique.
Win95 UI is a cheap copy of NeXTSTEP. The original is so much nicer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_...
"nicer" is very subjective. To me it looks like a train wreck.
>"nicer" is very subjective. To me it looks like a train wreck.
This, it looks like the most generic x-windows client ever.
I suppose one could always use WindowMaker if they're looking for that experience:
https://www.windowmaker.org/
This is much nicer: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace/blob/master/Documen...
Another roughly contemporary point of comparison, Haiku OS: https://www.haiku-os.org/slideshows/haiku-1/
I'm very curious to hear why you feel that way. Windows 95 always felt like more of an amalgamation of CDE and what Mac OS was doing at the time, than anything to do with NeXTSTEP.
NeXTSTEP's interface (1988–1989) used subtle shading and depth for buttons and windows, creating a dimensional appearance. Its visual design pioneered the use of shading for depth in GUIs.
Microsoft's timeline:
CTL3D.DLL: Introduced circa 1991–1992, primarily for Windows 3.1 applications (not the OS itself). It added 3D effects to dialog boxes and controls but was optional for developers.
Windows 95: Introduced native 3D controls (e.g., recessed buttons, drop shadows) as the system-wide default in 1995, eliminating the need for CTL3D.DLL
NextStep is virtually unknown outside of USA. DOS/Win clones have much bigger absolute market cap measured in eyeballs.
If you're referring to the window buttons especially, I can definitely see that. I did hear that Microsoft did acquire several NeXT Computer boxes in the early 90s to study the hardware and the operating system, and I'm absolutely sure it played a role in influencing Windows 95's look and feel.
NeXTSTEP is peak programmer UI. It looks absolutely atrocious, even by early GUI standards.
Windows 95's success was in part because Microsoft put in the effort to test and write good standardised UI controls and configurations. Throwing a bunch of UI elements on a heap with pretty high-res (at the time) graphics makes for a good freeze frame in a movie but a terrible UI.
MS copied from everyone, like Apple did before them and Unix display managers did after them, but their copy was far from cheap.
As someone who hasn't used NeXTSTEP before, can you explain why it is nicer?
What do you like better about it?
NeXTSTEP was widely regarded as visually striking and innovative for its time, particularly for its clean, minimalist design and advanced graphical capabilities. Key elements contributing to its perceived beauty included:
3D chiseled widgets: Beveled buttons and controls with subtle shading created a dimensional, tactile appearance.
Full-color icons: Large, detailed icons (uncommon in late 1980s GUIs) enhanced visual clarity.
Consistent typography: System-wide use of Display PostScript enabled professional-quality fonts and anti-aliasing.
Transparency and compositing: Advanced graphics handling allowed overlapping windows and semi-transparent elements.
Current discussions still praise NeXTSTEP's design as better looking and more usable than Windows 11 and macOS.
>NeXTSTEP was widely regarded as visually striking and innovative for its time
Widely? You seem like the only one carrying the water for nextstep. I'm sure they had some advances but overall it's a very ugly UI.
It inspired Win95. It inspired the original Netscape browser's UI (toolbar etc is very NeXTSTEP-inspired, not surprising because it was developed on a NeXT box). It inspired the Mac OS X and the iPhone, although both have degraded since then. As things exist today, NeXTSTEP from 40 years ago (!) looks much nicer - and way more usable - than today's flat UIs.
LLM output comment
Windows 95/98 has a nice grey. That grey there is fugly.
But more toolbar.
The appeal of this UI can be boiled down to: form follows function + vintage rendering. Minus the vintage design it's basically isomorph to most common Linux window managers. Be it Cinnamon, xfce, KDE, mate ...
https://imgur.com/a/A3VfeSk
But if there was a good Windows 95 theme I'd probably use it.
Would you consider Chicago95 a good theme? https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
No, it's a love letter to windows and CDE. It's missing out on the features that made NeXT, BeOS, and other 90s operating systems interesting
Heck it doesn't even have windows shade mode, that Mac systems had
This is a very cool art project.
Is there a practical daily driver Linux that has this feel and vibe? Can I do this cleanly with GNOME/Debian or XFCE/Manjaro, or a bespoke OS with an underlying package manager?
The closest I know of is Blue95. I have only run the live environment but it worked pretty well and was impressive.
"Blue95 is a modern and lightweight desktop experience that is reminiscent of a bygone era of computing. Based on Fedora Atomic Xfce with the Chicago95 theme."
https://github.com/winblues/blue95
Depending on your chosen desktop and era, there are also things like TDE (trinity desktop environment) a fork (or spiritual successor) of the KDE 3.x environment: https://www.trinitydesktop.org/media/screenshots/large/tde3....
And if you like Gnome 2.x, there's MATE: https://mate-desktop.org/
https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 and https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-95 get quite close if you use them together. The B00merang one has presets for the GNOME/Cinnamon/MATE desktop and a GTK+4 theme (which adds terrible padding compared to the usual GTK+3 one, but at least it has visible and properly 3d-shaded widgets).
Most window managers will have a theme that looks like the old 90s. They're commonly named things like "Chicago," or "Redmond."
fvwm95, or newer: https://github.com/jcs/progman
I'd love a similar compositor for Wayland.
it's basically windows 95, there does not seem to be other influences?
Windows 96 I'd say
https://windows96.net/ - It's real!
and so is windows RG edition: https://demo.filestash.app/login?type=webdav&url=https://web...
Serenity is an amazing accomplishment. It’s odd to me though because I always hated the windows interface, even 3.11. It seems a lot of modern Linux desktops (I know serenity isn’t Linux) try to emulate the feel of modern windows but it ends up looking like a meh version of an already bad interface imo. I still prefer the look of enlightenment or motif+4dwm.
The classic Unix interface that always seemed nicest to me was Sun's OpenLook.
I'm concerned MS might enforce copyright over some of those UI icons.
They are quite different. The fear is unwarranted.
>They are quite different.
Are they? I'm pretty sure several of them are just stolen straight from older versions of Windows.
Neat. Reminds me of the KDE Classic interface. KDE 1.
I'm using a good replacement with my Plasma 6: Reactionary KDE1 window decoration, Reactionary theme, and MS Windows 9x Qt widget style.
The former maintainer published a video summary every month on YouTube about SerenityOS progress. And now it seems that anyone does it
If the font rendering seems bad in the screenshot right click on the image and open it in a new tab.
I think the screenshots are a bit squashed. When he was doing Andreas was doing streams the fonts looked fine they just wasn't using hinting/cleartype.
Would be cool if they could spin this out into a DE for other distros.
Oh wow, that looks a whole lot like windows 98, haha.
How’s SerenityOS feel as a daily driver at this point? Would it be much harder to use than, say, Linux 15 years ago?
Do I really need to set up a build environment to get this? Is there a release somewhere?
Let's go the whole way - TempleOS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS
It's honestly just straight up relaxing to look at, same with BeOS/Haiku. I need to escape GNOME and get a real UI like that.
KDE is that. The two things I don't like about it are: KIO integration with GTK apps even with kio-fuse installed, and not having dbus based configuration system like gsettings/dconf.
Not sure if it's a NixOS bug, but even other KDE apps have hit-or-miss KIO integration for me; e.g. Krusader cannot open my MTP devices, while Dolphin can.
> KIO integration with GTK apps even with kio-fuse installed
What do you mean? What's the problem?
I enjoy this as an art project, but it does frustrate me as a reaction against the chickenshit minimalism of UI today, because I think it's the wrong reaction. I don't want a "love letter to 90s UI", I want a UI that takes full advantage of the hardware we have now. Graphics processing is a million times more powerful than it was in the 90s, and I now have a monitor with 220 ppi and 5K of horizontal resolution, which was the stuff of science fiction then. Surely the best UI for such hardware is neither the shitty low-density Jony Ive suckoff of today nor a carbon copy of the world as it existed 30 years ago just for nostalgia's sake.
(This is ranty but isn't really directed at the SerenityOS devs, they've delivered exactly what they promised and done a good job at it. I just wish someone, somewhere was interested in functional UI design for the current era)
A "love letter" would be incorporating the best of those ideas and create a modern interpretation with improvements like vector scaling.
This is just copying.
I think there's nothing wrong with starting from a "last known good configuration" and iterating from there.