Frutiger Aero
aesthetics.fandom.com
aesthetics.fandom.com
I still have some websites live (and untouched) from the period if you want to see some...evocative but rather unrefined examples: http://www.biotechgaming.com/software.php (left nav buttons, for example)
Homepage is offline because it has code expecting PHP5 (and Flash); deeper pages mostly work though!
I've been reliving it on my Wallstreet Powerbook https://old.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/15s67e8/266_m...
I hate the future we inhabit compared to what could have been.
The seeds of the current world were already being sown some 20 years ago.
Probably because there was yet not that much weaponized targeted advertising, brain rot content, and social media designed to make you consume content all day that gives you non-stop dopamine, then makes you feel depressed about yourself.
Tech was more of an extra tool to aid life IRL, and hadn't yet completely absorbed and replaced IRL entertainment and interactions. It was easier to separate and limit your on-line activity from your daily life than today without the feeling that you're missing out.
The online presence was all about niche online communities, games, forums, bulleting boards, and chat groups, instead of all being absorbed into Subreddits that gamify your engagement for upvotes to sell it to investors and advertisers.
Consumer PC hardware at that time was mature and reliable enough to not require a PhD or make you hate using it, but still progressing quite fast to make you excited about the next OS, video games, CPUs and GPUs(back when people could actually afford them).
It was a wild transitional period for tech, from 32bit CPUs to 64bit, DirectX 8 to 9 to 10, single core CPUs to multi-core, some of the best movies, videogames and franchises launching in that period, instead of all being sequels, rehashes, reboots and remakes of old franchises like today. It was a great time to be alive and whatness all that, hence the optimism you mentioned.
Oh, and all videogames (and SW in general) shipped as "Gold" on discs, fully finished, tested and patched, no bullshit broken preorder cash-grabs needing the famous zero-day patches to work as advertised, treating their customers as beta-testers, plus half the game being sold to you as an extra DLC six months later.
Not even close to the huge shift from 1989 to 1999.
Yes hardware progress was fast, but it was also quite expensive and difficult to set up and use, a lot of the times buggy and with compatibility issues, and it would get outdated far too quickly[1] to the point you'd spend a fortune on a new GPU which would be obsolete in a year and the company would go bankrupt in 2 years, leaving you with no games that would support it anymore, turning you expensive GPU in a worthless paperweight.
It was rough being a a consumer back then unless you were loaded to afford keeping up with the upgrades and stomaching the teething issues and quick obsolescence.
Nowadays you need a Core Duo as a bare minimum for JS ridden sites in order to read something if Lynx/Linsk doesn't work with a fake UA like the PSP one in order to enforce the basic article mode for some overused CMS.
The mid-to-late 90's also had a high level of techo-optimism, but I feel there was still a lot more mainstream skepticism that this all this technology would actually be useful which had mostly gone away by mid 2000. I just saw a bit with Bill Gates on Letterman about early Internet audio streaming where the reaction was "have you heard of radio?"
The big problem is the Internet was a reflection of real life, now it's largely just a reflection of more internet. Scroll all day, post, sleep, repeat... Doesn't leave much time to create anything worth scrolling, and the stuff that is gets lost in the sea of low effort shit posts.
The software doesn't help, but mostly because of the UX. The actual tech is fine. Stuff is fast and batteries last 12 hours. We don't need simple lightweight versions of what we have, we need pagination, proboards-style UIs with large signatures and avatars, and to go do more stuff aside from endless fussing with tech stacks.
[0]: Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute, https://cari.institute/
The odd thing is they're so popular among production businesses that it's unclear if they're predicting trends, or setting them.
Though from a hobbyist perspective I probably own more interesting designs falling under Y2K. Transparent PDAs, game systems, etc. have always been cool in my book!
One thing I noticed when building my new CSS framework is that skeuomorphic design is less forgiving of deeper UI issues. You can just skim over badly organized form controls when everything looks like just a run of text with big spaces and the same 2 colors.
When you do skeuomorphic design, that button nobody uses that really belongs in a separate tab really stands out.
And if it's cluttered with 20 inputs and they're all equally important, it makes the need for deeper UI changes to the whole workflow really obvious. Some stuff can be automatic, some stuff can be done with more advanced controls, maybe some stuff should be a guided dialog rather than 10 scattered inputs you have to hunt for and know which ones to use in which cases...
Modern UI practices in a lot of apps are really good. They're instantly usable, with most things automated and uncommon stuff in hamburger menus. We also have high res displays. It's easier than ever to do skeuomorphic stuff!
Can anyone account for them?
They had real talent. But I think at some points the devs must have gotten tired of "designed UI" and the inter-relationship with web designers, and said the hell with this, we can do design too! Woo all I need is bootstrap right?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I7FnBHrJSao&t=2s&pp=ygUPbG9uZ2...
If not the .NET explorer frequent crashes, it would have been my most exciting OS experience to date
Which was cool for show but apparently turned Longhorn into "the car Homer Simpson designed"[1], being plagued by endless cost overruns, constantly changing requirements, deadlines missed, a release date with no end in sight, and a codebase nobody could prune to turn into a solid shippable product, forcing Microsoft to scrap it completely and start over from scratch to create Vista in a ungodly short amount of time just to have something to ship to replace the now ageing Windows XP.
As what was supposed to be Longhorn was schedules to release just 1-2 years after XP but due to the Longhorn development fiasco, a half-baked Vista launched a whopping 6 years after XP, which was an eternity in tech back then.
Yeah, Microsoft really blew it with Longhorn and Vista, they tried to kill too many birds with one stone and ended up loosing all the birds and the stone. One wonders what Longhorn could have been if they hadn't messed it up from the start.
edit: clarity
[1] This phrase has never been used before.
... which would be about as frustrating as trying to create a meeting in outlook or ms teams.
Well, maybe not viral. I never heard of it until now.
Seems wrong to put the start of this in the early 2000s. The fish, bubbles, birds, and greens & blues brought me straight back to the demo images on every color CRT monitor throughout the 90s.