Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

The nostalgia from those images was more than I expected. XP was "Windows" for me by and large. I used Windows 7 (skipped Vista after trying early versions) a little bit but most of my Windows knowledge came from messing around with XP. I reinstalled XP more times than I can count both for myself and for friends/family and I'll always look fondly back on it.

View on HN

The Visual C++ screenshot [0] took me back. The clean and clear UI, much simpler times.

[0] https://milen.me/images/writings/windows-xp-on-macos-arm64/v...

What I love is that Winamp has not changed one bit for the version that is on my Windows laptop.

Yup, and I find this air of nostalgia amusing since I still use Winamp everyday.

What's even funnier is mIRC, though. Unlike Winamp, mIRC is still actively developed and it still looks more or less exactly like it did back in the Windows 3.1 days.

I love the mIRC design and would still use it but the developer rugpulled the ‘lifetime’ licences and requires you to beg him to give a free one or buy again.

I have no idea why they thought that a good idea.

I mean, I wouldn't like it either, but if I really had to I would buy it again seeing as I use mIRC every single day. The RoI on that is massive, certainly better than just buying another game on Steam.

Incidentally, when did he nix the lifetime licenses? I bought one over a decade ago and I used it to activate mIRC on my Windows 11 machine last year just fine.

Sometime in the last few years, for licences older than 10 years.

I’d have renewed it too if he had done it by request - but it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth to have it unilaterally changed and Khaled can go jump. I installed mIRC… and found my licence didn’t work.

Oh, man, BEGIN_MESSAGE_MAP eye twitch

By the way, I loved that movable "toolbar menu" design. It seems to have been forgotten in the move to "modern" but think it was the best one so far.

You could put it inline with other toolbars so it didn't waste vertical space. The full menu was very discoverable, like a table of contents for a featureful app. It could even be hidden completely if wanted.

None of the newer designs—obliterate in favor of titlebar buttons, or hamburger, are a such a great combo of power and friendliness. The traditional permanent menu is not very flexible.

Toolbar customization (ability to modify their contents) was nice too. Firefox still has it (for now) and you still find the occasional Mac app that has the old native customizable toolbar intact but even those are becoming uncommon.

The first place I saw both fixed toolbars and hamburger menus in desktop apps I think was probably in Chrome, which due to its popularity no doubt had a strong normalizing effect on both.

So true, that was once something you could count on from any mature application that had much of any UI to speak of. We took for granted that because it was a computer, of course almost everything can be customized. That was a lot of what was exciting about computers.

Today everything (web, mobile app, desktop) is converging toward "One lazy UI, optimized for aesthetics, riddled with junk drawers ( ••• buttons) and static" -- except not really static since the whole UI is ripped and replaced every 18 months or so to capitalize on some trend or because a new "UX designer" came to power.

^also Marketing Department.

Also GTK 1.0, which let you pull out a toolbar into its own separate miniwindow. And IIRC you could also do that with menus.

The Excel VBA editor still looks like this!

Lazarus still looks like the classic versions of Delphi, albeit with the version of Windows you run it on's UI elements. So something a little more modern looking for Windows 10/11:

https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/images/5/5d/Windows_10.p...

and classical on Windows Classic:

https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/File:Windows_2000.png

Visual C++ still looks basically the same though? There's (by default) another column on the right now, and I guess a few more toolbar buttons, but really it's extremely similar.

So. Many. Colors. I miss color so much, today's interfaces are downright depressing to look at :-(

But now you have dark mode and fancy flat design languages that enhance your "corporate image". /s

Similar experience here. Nostalgia from XP days is so strong I forget the monstrosity the OS became from every release from 8.1 onwards.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com