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1996

I absolutely love the idea (fitting more data on the screen, ala Tufte), the execution (brings back memories of trying MacOS on an emulator) and the design (flat!! yes!!)

I don't understand why flat design gets such a bad press.

One of the best thing I have ever used was a classic windows phone. Efficient, organized, straight to the point.

Maybe it is just part of a retrocomputing trend, but I really like that.

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> I don't understand why flat design gets such a bad press.

Classic MacOS isn't flat design, there are hard borders all over the place and (by today's standards) subtle cues of dimension throughout.

Flat design gets bad press because when it is done poorly, usability suffers greatly. I love the iPhone—and I like many aspects of its current UI aesthetic—but the UX design is woeful in many places, with countless problems that arose when the dumped the "classic iOS" appearance.

Most critically is that unless you're an experienced user of iOS, it is no longer obvious what (or where) is tappable. Buttons used to be obvious through design, now they are just text on the screen, sometimes in a different colour. Sometimes they're on the bottom, sometimes they're top-left, sometimes top-right. This all used to make sense when there were title bars and arrow-shaped back buttons that visually reacted when touched; now it is an ambiguous mess.

I fully agree on how UI have become "harder to guess"

Most of the current interfaces require too much learning. It seems to come with a cognitive load.

Fun thought: I can still use a windows phone after a few drinks. With an android device, not so, while I have used androids for a longer time.

I don't know what causes it, but usability seems to suffer inded.

I wonder if they do it on purpose to create a “moat”. The more time you've invested learning what's clickable, where to force-touch, etc., the more resistant you'll be to leaving the platform.

When you say "Classic MacOS", this is what I remember and to me that's quite flat.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/50/Apple_Macinto...

https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/12/69888558_ee83d000f9.jpg

https://www.macobserver.com/imgs/tmo_articles/20140124-01-Re...

I think you're using "flat" here to refer to an absence or rarity of fake 3D effects. Today's flat user interfaces go far beyond just eschewing those visual effects and remove almost all visual cues about what elements are interactive, what kind of interaction they support, what state they are currently in, and what the borders are between active and passive parts of the screen. Classic MacOS doesn't have those problems.

The screenshots you link to are flat in the sense of lacking 3D effects - I only see a single pixel wide dropshadow around windows. But they're not flat in the sense of being lifeless and unhelpful: There's clear highlighting of the active window and selected desktop item. The scrollbars in the first screenshot are not flat by nature, but flat because the content they enclose is currently entirely visible and consequently scrolling is disabled. The large blank spaces on the screen are accurately conveying what you can do to them (nothing), and they avoid cluttering the display to the point that everything else would need extra highlighting and color to be distinguishable as something that can be interacted with.

my favorite example of this is Outlook showing the attachments to an incoming email in a tiny little window that is kind of invisible, with a scroll bar that is also kind of invisible, so its hard to tell if you have one attachment, or two, or three, or whatever. just by glancing, you would not know.

if you work in a job where you go through 500 emails a day, this can be a problem.

If I may, I wrote something a few years ago about why flat design is detrimental to user experience. A lot of folks have told me that they've found it helpful in gaining some perspective.

https://medium.com/theories-of-form/frame-of-reference-eeb32...

Thanks a lot, a very interesting read. I agree with you, affordance is a problem as different generations use different tools.

There is also a cultural aspect to it. Recently, I had to find icons to represent the concepts numerical minimum and maximum. This was hard, and not just because the space was limited. I settled on Chevrons (like v ^ ) while fully aware it was not standard.

It is just a way of setting a convention, and hoping your users will catch up to it.

That's interesting. I hadn't considering the cultural aspect in the context of icons. It's often a frame of reference when color is being decided, but icons—that's a good one. Thanks for expanding my brain here.

And thanks in return for this great article that helped me understand better the problem I had faced with the chevrons!

I wouldn’t call OS9 or before flat—sans compositing, sure, but the interface is skeuomorphic and textured: the file icon still has a corner bent, the window has a rough texture to indicate draggability.

Note, I’m not a designer, Skeuomorphism is probably not the right word, but it’s certainly not flat.

Not a designer either, but except the titlebar MacOs classic look flat to me. A bit like BeOS, but I have never really used either of them - only on emulators.

> but except the titlebar MacOs classic look flat to me

Classic MacOS didn't have the gratuitous visual noise you may be used to from the Windows Vista school of design or even the Windows 95 faux 3D borders on everything, but it's hardly flat, except for the stuff that you actually can't interact with. And that's the stuff that is supposed to be flat looking. The button outlines in classic MacOS are always obvious, even when they're only a single pixel thick, and things that aren't buttons never look like buttons.

Neither is flat - they have shadows and 3d effects in the title bars. System 6 title bars are flat.

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