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Comment by sksksk | Hacker News Reader

I genuinely think that Windows 2000 was the perfect aesthetic.

It had just the right amount of skeuomorphism, without going overboard; probably because of hardware limitations.

What I think happened is that as computers and phones got more and more powerful, developers and designers wanted to use the UI to show off a bit. Culuminating in mad animations like a shredder destroying your old boarding pass in Apple Wallet.

Then there was a complete rejection of skeuomorphic design with iOS7, and it's just got more and more extreme since then.

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Win2k is pretty good, fixing the one big problem with Win9x, which was its dreary darkish gray base color.

Personally I’m a bit more fond of the Platinum theme from Mac OS 8 up through 9.x, though. Similar color scheme and principles, but it uses rounded corners and soft shading in a few places Win9x/2k doesn’t which makes it feel a bit more warm and accommodating without negatively impacting usability.

Windows 95 ran on a lot of systems with 4 bit colour displays. It was 320x200x256 or 640x480x16 back then. Gray was great with that limitation.

Name one.

I had a Trident 9660 with 1MB VRAM and I never had to use a 4bit mode.

> dreary darkish gray base color

It's a matter of taste and back then, you could change it to whatever color you liked. For me, it that darkish gray was too light and I switched it to an even darker gray.

I didn't delete old passbook entries enough in Passbook (now called Wallet) that I ever minded the animation, I kinda miss stuff like that!

Its nice to add whimsy to traditionally under-used features of a platform IMO.

Though I suppose if I was deleting passes all the time I might find the delay a little frustrating, but that could be solved by allowing multi select and delete right?

I fully agree. Even in the XP days and after 2k was EOL-ed I would regularly opt for 2000. XP started a trend of "shiny" UI, for lack of a better description.

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