Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

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Frankly, I don't care about the look of the icons (these should be theme-able anyway), but I do care a lot about the actual application user interface, and for this, flat design is a step back into the 80's.

Flat design is good as long as there are no important visual cues lost what elements can be interacted with and which are just passively displaying information. I really do still have problems in iOS7 to separate passive text elements from interactive text elements (formerly called "buttons"). Examples are the contacts list or the famous shift-button of the onscreen keyboard.

Thankfully in OSX 10.10, buttons are still recognizable as buttons, and I like that less radical flatness much more then iOS7. Although, in the current state the UI looks a lot like a Gnome skin which tries to mimic OSX though, I hope that improves until release.

It's not a jump back to the 80s exactly. For example, here is an old NT screenshot: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/ca/Windows_NT_3.1...

A lot of it is flat, but they use simple bevels for buttons and other clickable elements, and its reuse on, for example, the buttons in the file manager window, looks tacky because it appears cluttered and overused. Also, excessive lines (e.g. for the window borders), high contrast colors, and small color pallet makes the overall appearance not nice to look at. Also the icon set suuuuucked.

The Windows 3.x UI was always ugly and didn't make any sense ;) But that's the 90's, I'm talking about the 80's.

For instance: AmigaOS 1.3 (notice in the bottom-most screenshot how the buttons don't have '3D edges':

http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga1.html

'3D' UI elements were introduced later in AmigaOS2.0, and I remember how the user interface style guide made a big fuzz about how UI elements that appear raised are supposed to be clickable while flat or recessed elements shall be used for non-interactive or disabled UI elements which cannot be interacted with.

Actually this site is a pretty awesome collection of operating system UIs. BeOS still looks nice, almost like retro-modern pixel-art.

Everyone knows the early 90s was part of the 80s!

Older UIs like the Amiga OS one suffered from an even more limited pallet, and even worse typography.

I used BeOS as my main OS for a while and really liked it - it was very snappy and felt more "homey" (that is, more like classic MacOS) than early OSX versions did. (The browser, NetPositive, was absolutely awful though).

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