Virtual Windows 3.11 Computer
pieter.com
pieter.com
Accessibility -> Display:
- Reduce Motion
- Increase contrast
- Differentiate without color
- Show window title icons
- Show toolbar button shapes
- Show scrollbars: always
- Keyboard Navigation (use space, tab, enter)Hell no:
I can't tell what is and isn't a button.
I can't tell specific areas apart from others (no borders/shading).
I can't see or use the scroll bar, assuming one is even present.
I can't tell where a window begins and ends.
I can't tell which window is active.
I can't tell what a window is for.
I can't tell what the fuck these Nouveautian Hieroglpyhs from Uranus (aka icons) mean.
I could go on, but I digress: Are we in a pretty good place? Hell no.
On both Windows and macOS, windows are clearly delimited by drop shadows. You have to go out of your way as a malicious app developer to explicitly disable that.
I haven't interacted with a scrollbar in decades. Its purpose in 2024 is a visual cue.
As for Powershell/Terminal, assuming the screenshot wasn't timed deliberately, there is no caret which implies it's not the active window.
It's shading, but the worst kind of shading.
I disable window shadows with extreme prejudice because I find them visually painful. They obscure something I should be able to see without meaningfully highlighting what I want to see, which instinctively strains my eyes.
What the sincere hell was the problem with a simple, thick window border?
>Its purpose in 2024 is a visual cue.
Yes. They are practically non-existent in most environments.
So, I'm not denying that the situation on Windows is inconsistent when you factor in UIs that Microsoft is trying desperately to update, but the design language around scrolling in modern UIs just doesn't seem to be a real problem (outside of accessibility, obviously, which needs special attention regardless).
This is another difference between the mentality today vs. the mentality back then. Accessibility should not need "special" attention. It should be baked into the product. Enough users lack the ability to comfortably drag while clicking, that you don't want to first release a product that doesn't work for them, and then later fix it as a bug. You need to consider Accessibility from day one, during the early design. Just like you need to consider security vulnerabilities and user privacy from day one. They're not things that get tacked on at the end.
But this example isn't even about considering Accessibility holistically. The devs just flat out -removed- the scroll end caps from the product! This wasn't an oversight or some UX over-eager designer accidentally going overboard. They deliberately went out of their way to remove a standard control.
Someone at Google, and someone else at Microsoft, probably think this is good UX. I beg to differ.
I spent hours in QBasic when I was a teenager. Damn, that's ages ago!
but ... real pro's were using GW Basic! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW-BASIC
LOL
That's interesting. For me, it's green or amber terminals - perhaps it's like music where the genre of your teens defines the best music for the rest of your life. Were you a teenager in the Win3.1 era?
in the old days you had to pack your 17inch screen into your car, drive to your friends house, plan to game Doom or Quake, but in the end you were configuring network drivers etc. the whole weekend instead of playing: including features like countless reboots and reinstalls because something was crashed during "optimizing" the memory configuration for whatever driver<->game combo.
and if you set a wrong/not supported screen resolution in NT4, you had to set off power to reboot the computer because resolution back-switching was not available back then.
REAL computing also in the sense that a 500kb wordfile could crash your machine, if it loaded at all - because it took 1 min to load the bytestream from disk :)
yes, good ol days :-D
but i agree: that we do not have these hardware issues anymore was huge driver in getting mass adoption of home computing & internet and the ecosystem as a whole - i remember 1994 when i needed a graphic driver update for some niche SVGA card, i had to go to the store, give them 4 x 3.5inch disks, wait one week and then i could get the disks back :-D
today, the normal DAU is able to buy a super powerful computer in a discount store and have it running with some games 1h later.
Think how many man years were wasted trying to configure autoexec.bat and config.sys.
The first decent OS that I came across was SGI's IRIX. Unlike every other OS GUI you could focus on your work, in your applications, and not be concerned with the OS. There was nothing to battle against. Operating systems should be invisible and enable you to do more important things, not an end to themselves.
> The simplest API to run DOS/Win 9x
It makes me wonder if adding something akin to the script editor you had in mIRC to for instance a game such as minecraft would serve as a good way to introduce people to programming, similar to how mIRC might have..
I can't believe how poorly it plays at "Master" setting now that i know some strategy.
It also could have been an Adobe flash imitation which is probably more likely.
JavaScript/VBScript didn't have enough control to pull it off and Java was way too slow back then. It used to be a real dog - probably still carries some of that baggage albeit undeservedly (Android for instance, runs things just fine)
Also the Windows 95 version of EDIT.EXE is in there for some reason, rather than the actual edit.com (which is a frontend for qbasic /edit) For some reason, edit.exe has a com file extension.
The 90s web page is a really nice touch, especially with the modern touches like the Perplexity.ai searchbar. Definitely meant to take you back to simpler tech times.
I deliberately put in the wrong answers there, figuring they were probably scoring me on rebelliousness or impulsiveness or whatever... but I just had to do it.