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Comment by mangecoeur | Hacker News Reader

> clean and neat

Really? You miss that special "concrete gray and primary blue" feel?

I think I used every MS operating system starting with DOS, and I miss exactly none of the "historic" interfaces. To the extent I get annoyed when institutional IT departments force you to use the "classic" theme on modern windows boxes ("It's faster!" - no, it isn't to any human perceptible degree, and I appreciate not having to stare at beige rectangles all day).

I think engineers have a lot of nostalgia for this old stuff, but it's misplaced - interface design has moved foward in huge strides in the last decades, learning from mistakes. We've given up excessive skeumorphism, but we've kept improvements in design, layout, graphics, and perhaps most importantly we've learned that you need someone with serious visual and UX design skills to make an interface.

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I'm not sure about the 'huge strides'. I feel nowadays with 'flat design' (is that the right term?) I don't know where I can click and what actions will be performed. It's like the UI is a bunch of text labels, but they may actually be links, but they may actually perform an action. Although there's no way to know, since the label doesn't say what action is performed, and since we don't have mice anymore, we don't have hover-hints.

Take as an example the calling apps in Android. It'll show contacts, with name, an avatar, maybe a phone number. Which of these are clickable? Which of these will result in the phone making a call, and which will result into going into looking at the contact? How do I send an SMS rather than call? How do I edit it? How do I get a call history? Every time I use it I click on things without being sure what will happen and I am always surprised at what happens.

Fair points. The lack of affordances is bothersome indeed, but presumably the UX design fashion will swing back in the other direction at some point in the near-ish future.

I think that apart from the specific problem of not knowing what's clickable and what's the consequences of clicking, which we have right now, there's the more general problem that we're having all the time and that is the random changing of shit for reasons which have little to do with improving anything.

Such as, you have to keep making new versions of things so that nobody clones your old stuff and takes some of your market share, and you kinda want to do everything in a new way so that cloning all those versions gets harder - and you know that users will be forced to upgrade whether they like it or not, or else they won't be able to interoperate with those who upgraded unwittingly, and/or those for whom you actually made the upgrade worthwhile.

Or you have so many people on your team and you need them to do something to justify the size of that team.

Or because you took over a project and you need to show how much should be done here and how great it is that you took over.

Or because you want to work around someone's UI patents, and maybe file your own while you're at it so that new competitors are forced to invent yet another kind of UI.

> Which of these are clickable?

All of them

> Which will result in the phone making a call

In the calling screen, each one. In the contacts screen, none.

> and which will result into going into looking at the contact?

In the calling screen, the three dots. In the contacts screen, each one.

> How do I send an SMS rather than a call?

Click the text balloon icon (in the detail view)

> How do I edit it?

Click the edit icon (in the detail view)

> How do I get a call history?

Scroll down a bit (in the detail view).

Have you actually used the thing you're complaining about?

> Have you actually used the thing you're complaining about?

But see, that's exactly the problem. In your answer to his comment (to which he asked plenty of questions almost facetiously to prove a point), you showed off all the inconsistencies. The actions taken by the symbols are different depending on the context.

Why? I should know what clicking will do BEFORE I do it. I shouldn't have to have used it before.

I have used pretty much all MS operating systems as well, except windows 10, and I remember how windows XP felt "too colourful and distracting" when it first came out (with those very bright green grassy hills wallpaper, along with green and blue taskbar), how Vista's start menu was so slow when compared to XP, how windows 7 grouping of programs in the task bar, showing only the program's icon, was painful, or how terrible windows 8 entire user experience was.

While many engineers have a lot of nostalgia for old stuff, much of it is not displaced. Interfaces got a lot better, for those people who are not completely acquainted with computers. But power users, such as many engineers, still use terminals and other tools that while less intuitive, are much more powerful.

"Really? You miss that special "concrete gray and primary blue" feel?"

Yes. I also miss being able to do everything with a keyboard shortcut. This is a much-overlooked feature of the Windows UI that I think is not given enough credit.

I did it all in Windows - from 3.1 to NT3 to NT4 to XP - and I learned to hate hate the Windows OS and registries and so on ...

But I always liked the UI and given the choice between the Mac UI (not the OS) and ... say ... NT4 or XP ... I would choose Windows as the UI.

(FWIW, I do prefer a minimal ratpoison/ion UI over all of them)

I prefer the modern flat design, but that's subjective. I agree with you about they keyboard shortcuts. I hate using a mouse it trackpad, it always feels slow and clunky. I recommend the vimium browser extension of you aren't already using it. Let's you navigate browsers better with your keyboard. Works best on chrome but there's a ff extension too.

But.. OS X has tons of hotkeys. You have 3 modifier keys, and the apple extended keyboards are symmetric around the space bar, which for some reason nobody else understands.

Admittedly, ctrl+shift+f2 to get into the menu bar is a bit clunky, but you can change that to something simpler.

It's Ctrl-F2 for the menu bar isn't it? Ctrl-F3 for the dock, something obscure to reshow a hidden window, no idea about restoring a window from maximised state hence after-market ShiftIt installation.

But in Windows you could really do everything with the keyboard, tabbing between controls, pressing shift-tab to go back. Oddly they went overboard in Windows 7 (or Vista?) and made the headers of list views in Explorer tabbable-to, which greatly slowed down Windows-E, tab tab tab tab to get to the pane on the right. F4 for the address bar, F2 to rename etc. etc. all good fun

> interface design has moved foward in huge strides in the last decades, learning from mistakes

Windows's UI has changed little in two decades, and some of the changes have actually made things worse.

Windows 95 was the first and the last Windows version where Microsoft poured millions into making a super-accessible, usable and intuitive user interface based on actual user studies, and it showed.

Windows 98 brought totally-not-product-bundling "web integration" to try and convince the US Government that Internet Explorer was a feature, not a product. This is where the scourge of Active Desktop, HTML Help, the bloated 98+ shell and other things came from. The change in Windows Explorer paradigm might have been good, but it was also a "web integration" change and Microsoft's own research from 95 showed that the 95 model was the most intuitive, so I doubt the change would have helped usability.

ME/2000 (the desktop was the same) changed very little UI-wise. They gave things a nicer coat of paint, though.

XP added the Luna theme and a second column to the start menu. Vista made everything glossy and added search to the start menu. 7 reorganised the taskbar. These were improvements overall.

Windows 8 came along and added an entirely new desktop environment and very poorly connected it to the existing one, creating a frankenstein UI.

Windows 10 now fixes a little of the Windows 8 mess, but it's still a mess. There's several different popup menu styles. There's multiple scroll bar styles.

And in Windows 10 there is still different tab styles, even on the same page (go to Explorer's options/preferences dialog and note how the first tab is themed and the second tab page IS NOT themed).

MMC has different icons to Windows Explorer. Different parts of the tree view in Windows Explorer have different icons for other parts of it.

Nothing matches. It's a mess.

In Windows it is a bit odd anyway, as anything drawn using GDI or GDI+ goes through the CPU. This includes the "classic" interface. For accelerated interfaces (Aero), the GPU is involved (but don't ask me how - perhaps someone could elaborate?), so on rubbish GPUs it may be slower than going through the CPU, perhaps? Windows should tell you that your computer is rubbish so won't attempt to use the Aero interface.

If you elect to not use the Aero interface, it'll then attempt to mimic the Aero interface entirely in software using GDI+. This is indeed far slower, as the command to draw a series of lines and bevels obviously means more CPU calls than a single "draw grey rectangle" command. The interface is not drawn using precached bitmaps, but is done by software commands. More complicated drawing = more CPU = slower

Windows gives the option to turn off effects like shadows and transparency, window contents whilst dragging etc. in "performance" options in Control Panel, as these would mean more CPU calls (there's more drawing going on). If it wasn't faster, why would it be under "performance"?

But as you state, to a human perceptible degree it may not be noticed. I find that opening Windows Explorer on Windows XP is a far faster drawing experience than opening it on Windows 7, where it needs to fade into view and then redraw the tree on the left, the pane on the right, the toolbar with gradients (gradients are not free!), the "places" tree above the tree on the left (how confusing), and the giant blue panel that sits at the bottom to draw a picture of a computer in addition to the status bar.

File Manager on Windows 3.1 was really fast by comparison.

EDIT: Actually, on OSX I am left with "whitewashed concrete grey" with "primary pre-school colour" red orange and green. Full circle really!

> but don't ask me how - perhaps someone could elaborate?

From Vista onwards, GDI draw calls are executed on the GPU on a per-window basis, then the individual windows are also composited together on the GPU.

It's entirely possible that in this time period and for the hardware in question (aging corporate workstations), there may have been very poor to nonexistent GPU support in the onboard video chipset. If the choice is rendering 2D in the CPU, or rendering 2D with 3D assist using a GPU which doesn't exist and is emulated on the CPU, the first is most likely faster and uses less memory.

That said, it's entirely possible that this policy persisted after it no longer made sense.

It's definitely noticeable. I disabled the fancy UI on a cheap little HP laptop I bought a year ago, and it runs way faster. Maybe it has a crappy GPU, but turning off all that extra visual stuff definitely makes a huge dent.

I still think that Windows NT 4 was the best Windows OS ever. And may be the best GUI ever. I always switch to classic theme, if I have to use Windows. In last versions it's not very classic, though.

For me, it was W2K. It has the stability of NT series better usability, drivers and it was quite fast. Windows XP made simple things a lot harder and slower :)

Yep. Win 2k will always hold a place in my heart. My family bought a computer that came with Windows ME, and of course it crashed constantly. After getting incredibly frustrated with this my friend had a copy of this bizarre OS called Windows 2000. It took a long time to get all the drivers for everything initially, but it was stable. Damn stable.

I honestly had a server running Windows 2000 untill about 4 years ago. In that time, it was only really rebooted for system updates. It's sitting in my spare room.

I always liked 2k as well, and it was a good halfway point if you wanted to play games on Windows but not be stuck with a completely crap OS. It was relatively stable, as anyone who also admin'd Unix/Linux boxes at the time could tell you. It crashed just infrequently enough to be forgivable, which was a new thing for MS in my experience (Win 95c was a not-so-close second).

I remember having competitions with classmates and such with several hundred days of uptime on Win2k :). We were rather chuffed with ourselves at the time. Those were the days.

2k was the first Windows version I remember that I didn't have to reboot daily. In my first proper job (a web developer, in 2000, writing what you'd now call 'single page applications' in DHTML) I'd go home at night and not even log out. The next day, it'd be waiting for me. At most I'd reboot weekly.

I also loved the workstation-y, crisp UI that would let me drag a window with its contents around the screen. My computer wasn't even all that powerful by the standards of the time.

As someone who traditionally has not been a Windows user, W2K is by far my favorite Windows release (7 is probably second). When I was young my house had a Win98SE box that crashed constantly and loved to run ScanDisk at startup. Updating it to Windows 2000 was nothin short of a revolution — the machine suddenly became usable! And even better, it didn’t have any consumer-oriented junk clogging it up. It was what Windows should’ve been from the start.

Someone told me that the classic theme went away in window 8/8.1/10, made me kind of sad because I too always changed to the classic theme.

The "best GUI ever" can't possibly have such a horrid overlapping mishmash of methods for accessing various control panels and system settings.

Back in the day, I really liked the NT4/95 UI. Although I think that Windows 7 was a real improvement. Otherwise, I grew to really hate NT4. During my training, I used a desktop running it for a couple of months, and the complete lack of USB support was a real pain.

During my training, I worked - for a couple of months - on a web application where the test/development environment ran on a Sun machine running Solaris 8, and eventually I install Cygwin/X on my desktop (which ran, can you dig it, Windows 2000!) to start a CDE session and work from there. That grey/pink look somehow looked both butt-ugly and incredibly stylish. ;-)

Interface design has certainly taken huge strides, but I don't think they're in a good direction. UIs are increasingly trying to be "pretty", which is in the eye of the beholder, but not useful.

I think most of the UI on the Mac is really pretty and tasteful with it's low-key grayscale icons, but not very functional. The icons tell you nothing; I'd rather have simple english words. I have to use iTunes to put (lots of) files on an iPhone, and it's a ridiculous chore involving lots of clicks and dismissing pointless dialog boxes.

As the population gets better at navigating UIs, UIs have become increasingly silly and even perverse to compensate. (Or rather, because they can.) XCode, for instance, has some ridiculously hidden features. Without google you could never get the thing to work.

> The icons tell you nothing; I'd rather have simple english words.

Gmail is also guilty of this crime, although at least you can configure it to use text labels. No, I don't want to learn your particular abstract iconography just so I can read my frickin' mail.

And don't get me started on the unholy abominations that are the new iPhone Music and Podcast interface workflows. Wtf.

I think some sort of "Iron Law" is at work here - a company never does better than needed.

Apple has such vast lockin and momentum that they can make bad UI decisions and probably suffer no consequences.

>Really? You miss that special "concrete gray and primary blue" feel?

At least it was easy to read. Nowadays I often can't really focus on UIs because of lacking contrasts.

While now everything looks more "nice" the usability (as in how easy it is for the eyes to focus/find something) often is worse than it was some time ago.

> "It's faster!" - no, it isn't to any human perceptible degree

MS uses it as the default on server systems because it is faster and IT departments are often forced to make the best of aging hardware, and sometimes turning off the effects can, in combination with a lot of other little tweaks, contribute that little bit needed to make a system useful for another budget period.

I always thought that it was because servers tend to be used via remote desktop, and the classic UI compresses better and feels faster across a network connection

The classic Windows UI was exceptionally customizable. I often configured inverse color schemes that worked better in dark rooms. At one point I even edited some of the core OS binaries to change the text on the Start button, get custom logos and messaging, etc. Classic Linux and Windows desktops were all about customization, so the defaults don't really matter. Last time I checked, it wasn't even possible to set a custom solid color background on OSX without using a transparent PNG image.

Just now I checked the background settings under OS X (you got me curious), and thankfully you can set a custom color without setting a transparent PNG (see screenshot). I think it’s been this way for several major releases now, but it wasn’t always true.

http://f.cl.ly/items/1p0k2k0x403q192F1Q0s/Screen%20Shot%2020...

> You miss that special "concrete gray and primary blue" feel?

Compared to aluminium-gray-and-no-blue OS X? I don't think mainstream UIs have much to boast about in terms of the evolution of colour palettes.

There's a lot of subtlety in choosing colours and feels, not all greys are the same. I mean think of how many premium devices come in grey aluminium finish - there's lots and they look great. No one has ever made a "concrete finish" device, because that would be horrible.

Likewise, you can't put OSX and win95 next to each other and say "they're both grey, therefore they are basically the same" because that's obviously rubbish - the shading, layout, spacing, and shapes of osx are much more pleasing because they benefit from years of refinement by people who are visual designers rather than engineers.

> No one has ever made a "concrete finish" device,

Most hand-held plastic devices of the 80s/90s were hair-cell finish, emulating the texture of leather. Engineers knew that smooth plastic will scratch and show scratches. Also the hair-cell feels better to hold.

Think of a Motorola pager for instance.

Hair-cell is kind of a micro-concrete.

Heh, since we're stuck on Windows 7 I still use classic mode despite having a very capable machine, out of preference. I also use fluxbox when on *nix.

All Linux desktops are themable. Gnome1 and Sawfish has hundreds of nice themes.

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