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Comment by qubex | Hacker News Reader

Bless his soul for making this. It really brings me back.

For me, NeXTstep is still the high water mark of GUI design and usability.

I used to work on a next-ish GUI toolkit (in plain C though, not Objective C) - http://runtimeterror.com/tech/lforms/ - which i mainly used under Window Maker (though it also has a Win32 backend) and my biggest issue UX-wise was how alien it felt in anything else outside Window Maker... especially the floating menus.

I like the look myself but i don't even use Window Maker itself that much nowadays (it is still my #1 WM for Linux, i just use Windows more).

As a person who has fond memories of Solaris CDE and and Irix, I can sympathize with you.

However, overlapping windows and toolbars and launchers and mousey-mouse-mouse for everything ... it's bad usability and very inefficient.

The high water mark for GUI design is something like ion3/ratpoison, xterms running screen/tmux and a "desktop" that you never see ...

What you describe as a "high water mark" is only optimal for a very limited set of use cases. Overlapping windows with toolbars, launchers, and mouse control is on average superior for the total set of use cases especially for non-expert users.

The usability is perfect for me, but I recognise that different use-cases may vary.

It forged my sense of aesthetics, though (alongside BeOS).

""However, overlapping windows and toolbars and launchers and mousey-mouse-mouse for everything ... it's bad usability and very inefficient.""

Citation needed.

""The high water mark for GUI design is something like ion3/ratpoison, xterms running screen/tmux and a "desktop" that you never see ...""

Says who? Again citation needed.

Have you ever used desktop solaris? it was terrible. I'll vouch. resize a window in the file manager, and every single item would need to be reprocessed and the entire system would lock until 1 by 1 they re-spawned. It was infuriating.

For me, the high water mark is Snow Leopard. I don't think I remember any single operating system iteration for which I held such little contempt. I only have fond memories of it.

(Second place is probably a tie between Windows 2000 and Windows 7 depending on how nostalgic I'm feeling.)

Windows 7 in classic mode?

I was perfectly happy with the default/native skin for Windows 7, either with or without its transparency effects.

Like most people I greatly preferred Windows XP in its classic mode because XP's default "luna" skin was so hideous. Whereas the Windows 7 classic mode felt slightly broken and abandoned—new UX behaviours didn't quite line up with expectations set by the traditional interface design. A change of appearance is appropriate when there is a change of behaviour.

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