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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

I remember when people would vigorously complain that Toolkit X was simply unsuitable for any task because it did not conform to the operating system's standard visual appearance.

Now I struggle to even define what an "operating system's standard visual appearance" is. Apple's still the best but not what they used to be on that front even so.

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I'll still die on this hill, but I think that the reason there's a computer literacy problem is because we moved away from following OS conventions (when they existed) and into bespoke, branded UIs for everything, and then eventually to web where every site and webapp behaves differently.

In the early days, if you learned the OS, those usage patterns and skilled transferred to every app on that OS. They all looked roughly the same, shared the same menus, shame shortcuts, same icons, etc. You didn't have to learn how to use Apps x, y, and z. You just had to learn Windows (to an extent).

Then marketing got involved, and then the web, and then suddenly every piece of software had to stand out and look and behave as unique as possible, throwing years of HIG research out the window.

Notice that several examples in the Claude Design demo video are typing in English things that could be accomplished through UI controls, if the user only knew where to find them.

All I saw was chaotic high speed zooms and jump cuts.

Not all OS's, unfortunately. I'm on the boat that says conforming to Gnome HIG's is a bad idea.

Just today I had the disk usage analyzer (baobab) open and I was navigating inside directories so I want to go up a directory and clicked on the "<-" left arrow in the headerbar, which went "back" a screen, discarding all the work done scanning the filesystem.

If this app had a traditional menubar and a toolbar this wouldn't have happened.

This is a common type of experience I have every time I use a Gnome app. It almost feels like someone deliberately researched how to make desktop apps as counter-intuitive as possible and implemented that as the policy for some reason.

I have the opposite experience. I have no trouble navigating Gnome apps, and now when selecting an application for a task, I'll choose a Gnome or GTK4 one first. Other apps implement odd controls that don't mesh with the rest of the system.

omg yes, I felt crazy the first time I experienced this "feature"

To me Gnome mostly feels like someone deliberately researched how to make desktop apps as intuitive as possible and implemented that as the policy. And I guess that's what they did, and they did a good job.

> In the early days, if you learned the OS, those usage patterns and skilled transferred to every app on that OS

And locked your thinking into the OS' way of thinking. Every software vendor had to do their application a few times over with a different release for each OS, because the design is completely different.

As someone who uses multiple OSes (work macOS and iOS, home Windows and Ubuntu, Android) I hate nothing more than apps that behave differently on the different OSes, with different logic or features.

I miss the days when there was no "standard visual appearance" for the OS (e.g. DOS). I liked the diversity of interfaces.

Years ago, I remarked to a friend that I'd spent half of my (computing) life post-high speed Internet, yet almost all my happy memories are from before that. It was the same for him, and we both explored why that was.

The homogeneity of interfaces was actually one of the reasons we came up with on why doing work at a computer is a lot less appealing.

Everyone remembers fondly the time they were young, I believe it is more about that then everything else.

I understand your feelings but it is extremely tipical in human history to keep remembering "the good old times"

That may be true, and had you asked me half a lifetime ago, I would have likely said "The old days were better".

But:

I would have still said I enjoyed using computers. And I wouldn't have said "Today's interface sucks" (well, other than my HW not being able to keep up with eye candy...)

I simply don't enjoy using the computer these days. And I do think the interface sucks. Pretty much anything that involves using the web browser sucks - be it a local app or a web app.

I don't either, but I really think Im just burnt out. The simplest things piss me off.

I don't remember people complaining about Winamp being a non-standard UI, but if it were slow then there'd be tons of complaints - and many of the "fancy" UIs were terribly slow (or the programs were, hard for a user to tell the difference).

> I don't remember people complaining about Winamp being a non-standard UI, but if it were slow then there'd be tons of complaints - and many of the "fancy" UIs were terribly slow (or the programs were, hard for a user to tell the difference).

Wasn't Winamp 2 the gold standard? I remember plenty of music lovers switching to foobar2000 when Winamp 3 came out, because it was, as you said, slow(er).

That is in large part because there was no uncanny valley, so to speak. Where it was different, it was different with a purpose and was intentional about it. Where there was no purpose, like in secondary menus, it still used native widgets like users expected.

The parent is talking about toolkits like Swing where things looked[1] almost, sort of, but not quite like the native system. That wanted to be native, but for technical reasons fell short. These are what many considered to be completely unfit for use. Whereas today, designers wouldn't think twice about applying the same kind of almost-native-but-not-quite theme to match their arbitrary whims and think they are doing the world a service by doing so, the UI conventions (to the extent that there remains any) of the host system be damned.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Gui-widg...

I still cringe every time I get Minecraft to pop up a generic Java UI window on a Mac (of course it now even looks out of place on Windows).

Quite the opposite, people worked very, very hard to make Winamp even more non-standard via skinning.

Winamp been really unique, probably because they able to combine that unique design with very practical UX. Even when better players released a lot of users got hard times to switch because of UI, visualizations, skins...

It was also much "bigger" on the earlier screens, because the resolution just wasn't there (I remember finally getting a 1024x768 screen for Windows 95).

didn't winamp look like an... amp?

Skeuomorphism at its prime.

I'm not saying iTunes (Music.app bleh!) would be better reimagined as Winamp 2 but I'm not not saying it.

https://webamp.org

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