Windows NT/9x/2000 represented the high point for aesthetics.
Light grey, rectilinear, clear delineation, all contributed to being easy on the eye and functional.
Glad to see it make a comeback.
Light grey, rectilinear, clear delineation, all contributed to being easy on the eye and functional.
Glad to see it make a comeback.
I never liked Windows NT aesthetics-wise. Personally I find the Windows Explorer ugly and I don't like the Start menu either.
I was hoping Serenity looked a bit more like Macintosh System 7 [0], NeXTStep [1] or BeOS [2]. So I was kinda disappointed when I visited the site.
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[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7
It's a good idea to keep the chrome be chrome-like so color can be reserved for meaningful elements (like red for warning, green for safe, blue for selection etc.).
Notice that although end-user apps are all colorful and fancy these days, that most pro apps have remained very conservative, erring to light or dark gray and using color semantically only (think photoshop, 3dsmax, autocad etc.). This tells us something.
Microsoft is trying to be quirky, same with Office, and I don’t know how well it’s working.
Windows until recently could be reskinned to look like Win2K, though I doubt that Windows 10 still can.
I had genuinely freaked out when I rebuilt the system just after Andreas moved it to be more Windows-like: I ran Serenity browser and in the first moment it looked eerily like an old-school Internet Explorer.
Win2k brought the NT kernel to the masses, which was a huge improvement. True multi-user support, for starters.
Versions 8 and 10 may be even better, engineering-wise -- 10 certainly crashes or hangs even less frequently than 7 -- but since they won't let you you fix the crappy GUI any more, their usability suffers much more than the increased stability can compensate for.
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[1]: Pretty much like Vista, with that super-annoying "Glass"(?) transparency bumf as default... I think.
[2]: This, too, was whittled down over time. In XP, and I think in Vista too, you could set window border width to any value down to and including 0 in TweakUI. By W7, you needed to edit a Registry value to get this below 1.
But no, alas, the old UI seems to have been permanently deleted from Microsoft's own repertoire; at least I can't find it.
I hope you are aware, that this is highly subjective?
(and maybe nostalgia related?)
Because I don't know any person who likes it, who didn't use it back then a lot.
edit: unsurprisingly notaware it seems. I advice to make a test : ask any person who did not use this aesthetic back then, and see if you find anyone who likes it
otherwise each to his own