It's the elimination of window borders. Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window in the background, it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window.

It's the overloading of the title bar with so much shit like search boxes and extraneous buttons that a user has almost no place to grip to move the window.

It's the way that tabbing between text boxes either doesn't behave the way you'd expect, or doesn't work at all.

It's all the tooltips that interrupt and litter the interface and, at times, block out things that you are looking at. And 95% of the time, the information provided in these tooltips are redundant or useless.

It's amazing how much damage these cargo-cult UI/UX morons have done in the past ten years. They threw out several decades of usability pioneered by real HID experts for something that looks pretty but doesn't fucking work for a lot of people.

Applications like Postman, Teams (and pretty much all of MSFT's applications these days), Chrome, and Insomnia should be case studies on how to not design user interfaces. They are about as bad as desktop software gets.

The biggest sin is that this would be a non-issue if these things were configurable at the windowing system level and could not be overriden by app developers. But the trend has gone in the opposite direction; instead of providing more configurability, Windows and Gnome/GTK are actually taking away options that have existed before.

A lot of people working at Microsoft/Apple/Google are bad their jobs and should feel bad.

Maybe two-odd decades is about the time it takes for enough people to have forgotten the reasons and decide to just remove Chesterton's Fence[0] because, despite the fact that screen area is at an all time high, we still need to squeeze more shit in around the edges.

I've already whinged about both scroll bars[1].

I'll also whinge about "dead space" rarity on UIs like DevOps and Jira. "No, i want out of all contexts! Did I accidentally switch that slider by clicking like 10cm to the right of it?" (actual example from within DevOps right now).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37774322

The one benefit I can see is to gain some extra vertical space on the skinny 16:9 screens, especially now that the task bar in windows 11 got thicker and can no longer be moved to a side. They, of course, still haven't gotten around to fixing the auto-hide behavior, so that's still not an option.

The rare times I have to use windows, I use edge and I quite like the vertical tabs. This allows for a usable title bar, too.

Windows was perfectly usable on 15" 4:3 screens. The first iMacs were 15" 4:3.

So that as such probably wasn't the issue.

http://www.displaywars.com/24-inch-16x9-vs-15-inch-4x3

What might be an issue though is the use of laptops.

http://www.displaywars.com/15,4-inch-16x9-vs-15-inch-4x3

Only to waste it on the ridiculously big search ribbon. See the current Thunderbird.

Works really well when the window's title bar has been moved offscreen for some reason.

IBM's CUA for the win. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

> There's no benefit gained, whatsoever, from moving content to the title bar.

But also: > Chesterton's Fence >>The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, 'I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away.' To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: 'If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.'

There are always pros and cons to every design decision. As technology develops, we create new tools to interact with an ever-expanding content base. By moving things to the title bar, you gain back some real estate that you can dedicate to this ever expanding set of other tools and content.

There are other design paradigms that can be used for this, but it's a fairly simple (and naive) implementation / solution to this problem to move some of the stuff to the title bar which (visually) appears to be wasted space. But visual space != interactive space, so

But the loss of the title bar causes actual pain and interferes with practical use. It's hard to imagine any tools/content that would be worth that loss.

Maybe the addition of dedicated Move button next to the minimise, maxmimise and close button would be a reasonable compromise?

That would provide a consistent target to click on with your mouse. Obviously a button is a lot smaller than the entire titlebar for clicking on, so there would be some efficiency loss for people that regularly move windows (I am one of them). Getting move use out of the titlebar space would be worth the minor inconvenience of a more accurate click-drag to move operation.

document-name-dropdown, search-box, username, user-icon.

Elements that do not allow dragging the window, because they react to mouse-down, include:

application-icon, quick-access-toolbar, notifications-bell-icon, and the standard titlebar icons.

This does become more problematic when there are so many tabs they become tiny and the whole title bar of the browser is taken up by tabs so that there's no dead-space to drag the entire browser window to another screen. I try to keep minimal contexts (due to personal brain capacity issues), so I don't run up against this very often - I manage links that I want to keep and go back to using other means, or if I forget them then they weren't very important in the first place.

There is: more space for content, e.g. websites while not removing directly accessible functionaly

But title bars are mandatory, so that's why not.

"Real" title bars can be removed if not needed (e.g. by switching to another windowing manager like dwm on Linux with X11; not sure how it's done in Wayland or in Windows but there must be a way).

"Crowded" title-bar from Gnome can't be easily removed, because they are not managed by the window manager.

They're mandatory because they're the way to move the window with your mouse. So fucking them up with a bunch of stuff that hinders that is just as bad as not having them in the first place.

Congratulations, you've circumvented the mandatory requirement!

Which is just as bad as disregarding it in the first place.

What does that even mean? That's the whole point of the discussion - standard UI elements have been bastardized so much, might as well just keep the trend going.

If there is a clean way to get rid of it, then sure that's a good option for some programs. (But there are a couple bits that you need to keep.)

But to ask "why even have it" is to fall into a discussion more about backwards compatibility than design.

No, it is a question about design. Window environments like Windows 11, macOS, Gnome or lots of other Linux window managers are designed for desktop PCs, not tablets. I would include Laptops under desktop PCs for this discussion, since most people -- that are working the whole day on their laptop -- add one or more screens to it. And on those large modern displays, it is more effective than ever to use overlapping non-fullscreened windows. Then it is absolutely necessary to have good standardized UI components to manage those windows. But those customized title bars break that standardization and customization. On modern Gnome I often have to search for the window that is in focus. It used to be clearly visible with a significant color difference in the titlebar. Today, there is slight difference in gray shading. That is ridiculous. And half of modern programs redefine the colors of their title bars, so you have to know for earch application which shade of gray stands for focus and which stands for not in focus. This is fucking stupid.

First and worst offender against this basic Windows guideline: Microsoft Office.

https://github.com/StackWM

Then why can't they make Teams not terrible?

That's the thing, I don't think they feel bad at all. Their UX departments exist solely to justify their own existence and are increasingly distant from the opinions and issues facing actual users using their products. They're still well paid, so they have no reason to feel bad.

Thin scrollbars and window borders are pretty. Mobile buttons with only icons but no text are pretty. Hiding functionality is pretty.

Going back a long way, this is what always bothered me about UI efforts in the Linux world like the Enlightenment window manager. It seemed like the very definition of “nice house, nobody home.”

The problem boils down to allowing aesthetics to dominate over functionality - form supersedes function. There are plenty of people happy to inflict that on others. I sometimes wonder what they use themselves.

Good to know!

> Meta+Right-click resizes the window by the way.

Yep, I use it all the time, killer feature!

If my former self, that was forced to use Internet Explorer, would defend its UI in the future, it would rotate in the grave.

I don't know about MacOS and Windows nowadays but most linux/BSD window managers + Haiku allows one to move or resize a window using a keyboard shortcut so that you can do it regardless of where you put the cursor.

It is a must have to know because there is inevitably moments where you have a window showing at the wrong place. I remember back in the days I was using windows sometimes when switching from multiple screens to single screen a window would start/appear out of the frame so you'd have to move it using one of those shortcuts.

I would be surprised Microsoft and Apple have removed these. Someone to confirm?

Except this is an X11 feature, and they're all frantically switching to Wayland... Which probably doesn't have that feature, right?

never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice

if they don't break things how can they fix them next year and add it as "new look UI"

Are you sure you’re not accidentally opening the old Teams application? When you update to new Teams it leaves the old version in place so you have both, and if you open Teams with the new shortcut/application you won’t get prompted to switch back.

[0] this is definitely true for Windows. All subsequent versions of Windows have had worse UX.

Windows 7, which was Vista's equivalent to SP2 also has some fans. Heck, I'd even personally argue that Windows ME has some niceties not seen in subsequent releases, particularly when combined with Active Desktop (which I'm pretty sure did not survive the transition to XP).

I wonder if/when some subset of users will prefer a more controlled window layout engine, one which always opens windows into their own "space" on the screen. To that end, I don't actually mind how iPad does its window layout, I just wish iPad had all the features and openness of macOS to install your own drivers, background apps and virtual devices/mixing. A simpler UI can actually be a good thing, but you shouldn't lose functionality when making things simpler. A simpler UI doesn't necessarily mean less complex operating system...

SP2 was fantastic. For me personally, Windows XP means XP SP2. Anything before that wasn’t worth using.

That is because Microsoft had its own versioning system:

- RC was alpha quality.

- Releases were betas.

and then starting with SP2 one can talk about a released product. NT had 6 SPs, 2000 had 4, XP had 2. Even in Windows 11 they fixed things (taskbar) after release.

This really tells a not so nice story about engineering and quality at Microsoft.

That’s more of a truth universally acknowledged. XP was goofy then, it’s goofy now, and it was goofy at every instant between.

It's what the general public needs that us nerds can least relate to.

The best-looking Windows UI, IMO, was Vista.

Well, are you sure which of those groups you belong to? At least as far as Windows is concerned? Because:

> It would have been much better if they had had selectable themes.

It did. One click in the right place in the Control Panel and it looked like W95/NT4/W2K. (So did Windows 7, and therefore I must assume Vista, too. [Skipped that one myself.])

But, hey, brand-new users and children couldn't be expected to find that, right?

Plus, W2K was ugly too, just in a different way.

Then why spend time commenting -- ERRONEOUSLY -- on them now?

> Plus, W2K was ugly too, just in a different way.

Über den Geschmack streiten sich selbst die Götter vergebens.

Anyway, point stands:

> > It would have been much better if they had had selectable themes.

> It did.

Only if you didn't/don't know how to use it. Like, for instance, where to click to make it look like W95/NT4/W2K.

You are describing tiling window manager users.

I use XFCE btw

No offense, but I cannot possibly trust your judgement when you use a DE that, by default, is the classic example of no window borders for the mouse to grab onto.

I do not remember how I have configured it, perhaps the window border width is determined by the window theme (I use Chicago95), but I have also been using XFCE for many years and I have decent-sized window borders on my 4k monitors and my mouse theme (Hackneyed 48x48) has extremely obvious mouse cursor shape changes whenever you touch the window borders, so they are easy to grab.

The default theme that XFCE ships with has a 1px grabbing area set. So it's not that the cursor doesn't change, it's just you have to be very precise.

There are "fixes" where people hack the theme to increase the size of some transparent images to force a larger grabble area or telling people that they are holding it wrong.

Also I use i3 so my windows are tiled most of the time.

Anything else is a work around poor UX.

The fact that decades later it is still an issue is really disappointing.

Like Windows, from at least 3.1 (ca 1987?) to at least mid-life of Windows 7 (ca 2012-14?). The item under discussion, window border width, used to be settable from 0 up to... Pretty much all of your screen. (But from some update somewhere halfway through W7, it defaulted to at least one pixel however hard you tried to set it to zero.)

I don't "agree to disagree", they offer a function that's unusable.

It would be the equivalent of MacOS breaking the ability to double click on an app.

But it's okay because you could use Spotlight.

That's great and all, but if everything else allows double clicking and MacOS allowed double clicking but only on the absolute centre pixel, we would all consider it broken.

On newer bikes if the starter fails or the battery dies you need to unceremoniously push the bike to speed, jump on and put it on first.

AFAIK quite a lot of 21st-century motorbikes still have that. (Some of them probably still only have that.)

In a world without borders, there would be no problem of Gates.

Yeah, most people apparently never noticed the Control Panel setting in XP where you could with one click activate the W95/NT4/W2K interface in stead of the "Fisher-Price" one. Worked in Vista and Windows 7 too, but there they started to remove ever more of the detailed UI customisation settings from the Control Panel. (For a while, you could change them by editing the Registry, but towards the end of W7's lifetime, at least some of those didn't take effect any more.)

Just the other day i was trying to do sone simple file search in Mint and oh god the GUI search function is completely useless. I had to jump around installing 3 "file search" programs, none of them really worked and at the end I settled with some console bash magic. ... its 2023 people.

Don't give them ideas, they'd find some way to ruin it.

Firefox currently has about 20x20 pixels next to the tabs to grab and move the window, and "always show scrollbars" is off by default. This would be reasonable on a phone, but not on any kind of machine with a mouse.

I'm not really defending firefox UI to strongly here, I use it every day as my browser of choice and I find the defaults wonky but at least customizable.

FF has a great compromise setting, keeps the menu bar hidden by default but it appears when you press (the CUA standard keys) [Alt] or [F10]. (At least on Windows, that is.)

Yup. Until some point midway through its lifetime, when they started disabling (at least some) detailed UI settings even via the Registry.

Hence why it was worse.

It is interesting that modern UIs keep removing agency from the user. There is very little space in the system that feels mine because I am the sole owner of it. On Windows 3.1 I managed everything in the program groups. It was not too convenient (compared to that Dashboard shell or Mac), but still, if the system added a group now and then, I could always take it apart and rearrange to my liking.

Now the Start menu is completely taken over. The ability to manually arrange things in a folder is taken away. The folders that should be rightfully mine (such as Documents) are constantly invaded by every program that feels entitled to put things there. As a result “we do not go there anymore.” The only places that are left for me to manage are: the area to the right of the start menu and the desktop. But I do not like the start menu and do not like cluttering the desktop, so the only place I still govern is a tiny custom toolbar I added to the taskbar.

[1] https://winworldpc.com/product/dashboard/30

Which brings this conversation full circle.

The Windows 10 Start Menu scrollbar is unclickably skinny.

It is supposed to expand when you stop your workflow to undertake the Hover-Your-Pointer-Tip-Over-The-Miniscule-Scrollbar Ordeal. If you win, the scrollbar will typically expand to something less difficult. But expansion doesn't happen so reliably that it has your full trust.

All you had to was set shell=progman.exe in (I think) win.ini. Or maybe in the other .ini but it was possible.

WTF are you on about?!? There still is!

Source: Just clicked on the top-left icons on a few programs in Windows 10. Not guideline-defying shit like Microsoft Office / Outlook / Edge / Teams, of course, but programs that follow the Windows developer guidelines display the standard menu just like they've always done: Restore, Move, Size, Minimize, Maximize, Close (usually also displaying the shortcut key, [Alt-F4]). Notepad++ does, WinSCP does, 7-Zip does, PuTTY does, SAS client software does, Teradata client software does... Seems most built-in Windows utilities do, too: File Explorer does, Task Manager does, Command Prompt does, Notepad does, Paint does, Snipping Tool does...

[Edit:] And even in Word / Excel / Edge / Outlook / Teams, at least that menu appears up in the top-left corner when you press the age-old shortcut [Alt]-[Space], even though there is no icon for it. (That was what the W3.x icon was supposed to depict, BTW: The space bar, not a hyphen or minus sign.) [/Edit]

Seems you have to go out of your way to build a Windows app that doesn't have a system menu up in the top-left corner. (Start building a Windows application in most IDEs I've used, and unless you change the default settings it sure gets one automatically.) So why do you spout such drivel, when you obviously have no idea what you're talking about?

Interestingly though, I don't have the same impression when looking at the old Apple OSes. To me, Mac OS 9 looks old, but not ugly.

For me, I grew up on Amiga Workbench 2.0 and MS-DOS, so Windows NT/2000 felt like a good evolution from it's User Interface. Very functional, for sure.

100% agree on Classic MacOS. As outdated as the tech was, it was beautiful because it was elegant without being distracting.

    C:\Windows\System32\control.exe

    C:\Windows\SysWOW64\control.exe

That said, doing so would basically require creating everything from the ground up, because merely theming some existing toolkit and window manager to look like XP is not at all the point. And frankly, there HAVE been SOME useful UI/UX improvements in the past couple decades, like, FTA, minimaps. But can you imagine a much more conservative desktop, with highly integrated apps, based on the "good old days" of desktop design with just a touch of modern elements when they improve on things?

... Truth told, the closest thing in existence is probably SerenityOS... but it really would be more practical if there was a Linux desktop for this. Every so often I fantasize about how I might start such a project. It's been like that forever now.

XFCE with Chicago95 already exists (and so does Q4OS with XPQ4) as proof of concept that the window manager and toolbar side can be replicated.

The problem is that important pieces of software are not relying on any toolkit directly, but implementing their own version, so even if you support qt, gtk2 and gtk3+ applications with 3 different themes, there will be software running under electron or implementing their own client side decorations and breaking all the rules.

I think the easiest way to start would be to simply collect and maintain existing themes with a unified look and make a distro based on Ubuntu LTS or even RHEL to avoid breaking changes at maximum. This distro would have pre-selected software that behaves well with the selected themes, and need to have at absolute minimum a working browser with extensions following that theme.

If implementing from the bottom up, then something similar to helloSystem could also be a way, but I do not see it working in practice due to the time it would take.

It's does not seem well known but it looks and works very closely to old Windows.

I have a side project plan to take this, combine it with a decent laptop, pre install libreoffice and a browser and sell it as "Stable OS" with a long term "no-change" policy to anyone who just needs a basic computer where not everything changes at the whim of someone looking for a item on their resume.

I also tried LXDE and LXQt as well. I actually thought LXQt might be the one for me, but it was a bit buggy and lacked a lot of much-needed maintenance.

Also, although I'm glad Linux developers don't always make a habit of just simply throwing out ideas and code that works fine, it does bother me how antiquated some things have gotten. DBus is the best desktop IPC option on Linux, and that's not really a great thing in my opinion. Likewise, it sucks that most file archivers still work by popening some command and parsing its output, occasionally breaking on edge cases, usually having limited support for the kinds of advanced functionality you'd get in Windows archive tools. I do understand that making actually-good applications takes time, but over the course of the past couple decades it doesn't feel like much progress has been made here. I mean hell, speaking of archive tools... FreeBSD has been working on libarchive for ages and it'll likely be integrated with fucking Windows before it's integrated with common Linux desktops, which will probably mostly farm out to CLI tools like unar and zip directly. This is the same approach, with the same exact problems, that I remember being used as far back as when I started using Linux, in programs like Xfe.

Needless to say... my feelings are complicated.

Vista eliminated the Fisher Priceness of XP but added a whole bunch of glowing and reflective stuff, which Windows 7 toned down dramatically.

I don’t remember if Win 7 still allowed you to have the classic start menu, but I do believe I was ok with what it did have.

It's Windows 8 that wrecked things, by making the two-way correspondence between the start menu and a folder of icons basically void.

I stopped using windows after Using Win10 for a short time, but ClassicShell was always maintained and worked flawlessly... oh, dev stopped in 2017. oh well.

the source was released and there is a fork that has recent changes https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu

Nothing. Those are just touch ups of the Win95 UI. Smoother color gradients from using more colors and smoother animation.

XP was the next big change. Never liked it. Felt like I was dragging around bitmaps. It’s “heavily” for no reason - no usability improvement nor does it even look that good.

Edit: Oh right I forgot about Active Desktop and MS’s attempt to turn Windows Explorer into Internet Explorer. Not a fan of it but at least it didn’t impair usability that much. Visually it still use the same “language”.

But also, generally, the difference is that Windows 95 still feels like a "workstation" computer, designed for maximum readability and clarity, while staying in the background and not drawing any attention to itself.

With Windows 98, the OS begins trying to look pretty, which means having more elements and style choices which take attention away from the work.

And I think this is exactly what many people's complaints are in this thread: an interface that is faulty out of the box that needs to be "tuned" in order to change it from an entertainer back into a workstation.

I haven't played with Windows 98 and Windows 2000 in a while, but I remember all sorts of "improvements" over Windows 95, such as sliding menus, "shiny" icons that draw attention to themselves, "shiny" gradient title bars, and so on.

The article complained about things which were not configurable or not easily configurable. So did many comments.

Judicious animation has well studied benefits. I do not see how Windows 98's icons were more attention grabbing. Gradient title bars help locate the buttons in my experience.

Windows 98's icons look very similar to Windows 95's. Windows 2000's look better and more consistent to me.

Muahaha... Heh. Please don't say stuff stuff like that, kid.

Because if you are "old", then... What are many of the rest of us, antique?

From Windows 95 to Windows 7, the UI fundamentally stayed the same, with a few details here and there, including, scroll bars, window title bars and borders.

Essentially, what changed is just cosmetic and mostly as a result of better hardware. Earlier versions of Windows were designed for 256 color displays, Windows XP fully embraced 24-bit color, and Windows 7 was designed with GPUs in mind. That's how we got from pixel art to shading to semi-transparency.

And I must admit I liked Windows 7 because it was both functional and pretty. A nice, modern for the time skin on top of tried and tested UI core concepts.

Windows 8 broke everything as an attempt to unify the desktop and mobile experience, and we haven't recovered since then. In fact, I think mobile killed desktop usability. We are in a conundrum that we didn't find a way to resolve: desktop and mobile are fundamentally different platforms, so they would need different UI paradigms, but there is an overlap functionality as many apps are present on both platforms, so it would be nice to provide the same experience on both.

To that, add the fact that the web is often third or a fourth option (mobile and desktop web), and the ability to use native controls in web browsers is rather poor, so people make their own, but then, you want the website to look like the desktop app. Same kind of problem.

E.g. booting up 2000 by itself it absolutely sucks. I mean, it looks great... but you can't tile windows, you can't resize the command prompt dynamically, you don't have DPI support, a lot of the little victories like pinning and grouping aren't there, the way it draws often causes ghost trails, virtual desktops aren't a thing, a surprising number of things were modal when they didn't need to be. It has great parts but the problem isn't newer versions threw them all away with no improvement it's that not every change was an improvement.

Mac is all secret handshakes, nothing discoverable, terrible af keyboard-primary work. Windows was very good at letting you stay on the keyboard.

In the spirit of scroll bar discussion, the standard of Ctrl-Home, Crtl-End, Shift-Ctrl-Home and Shift-Ctrl-End are so good. No such "begin of doc" and "end of doc" on a Mac except if an app wills it.

Incidentally, I still use it in Windows 10. Probably more out of habit than anything else.

I use it because it rocks more than anything else :)

That doesn't mean that XP was perfect. There are still faults with it.

But if fixing those faults means iterating on it more, then I'm happy with not.

Things can be imperfect and still better than everything else.

Does that make sense?

But yeah.

No need to throw insults. I love HN because it's one of the few places where civil debate trumps the hateful tone of all other platforms.

I fundamentally agree with usability being more important than aesthetics. But I don't know what you mean by UX/UI cargo-cult morons.

I'm a UX/UI leader with 20+ years of experience. To me, the main culprits of crimes against usability are business leaders and marketers, not designers (although these do bear some of the blame). Yes, there are designers who think form is more important than function and push for small scrollbars. However, when you explain the issues they often back down and create usable designs. I wish the same was true for C-level leaders, marketing leaders and managers. In UI terms they're both ignorant and opinionated. A dangerous combination. Their demands are typically "I like the scrollbar of this website", " the design doesn't look modern" and similar. The amount of fighting that takes to push for usability and accessibility is excruciating. We need some roles and ranks to act more professionally, and trust the experts. And yes, we also need some designers to think usability first.

These are the UX/UI cargo-cult morons you're looking for.

It seems in the software world we've yet to establish our own version of industrial design[1] so "regular" designers gets used. And leaders who decide aren't technical so they don't get usability.

I think the lack of competition also make the terrible designs seem successful.

I'm not using Teams because it looks great. I'm using it because my org uses it for chat and meetings. It's not like they let people try a few different looks for Teams and then see which people like the most.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_design

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human%E2%80%93computer_interac...

Honestly, my experience is the opposite. It is almost always designers who push for what they consider aesthetically pleasing with very little regard to usability.

Yes, when you push back a lot, you sometimes win. But it takes too much fighting, you need to be at powerful position to have the chance to win and they simply do not seem to care about usability.

All the settings menus are a nightmare of lists upon lists and each app has a completely random layout for it's menu-ing, often with links to external sites, for what could be set locally.

It is geniunely confusing to try and understand the designers intent. I can never tell if I missed a setting, or if it was never meant to exist in this menu at all.

The amount of times I've had to Google how to change basic settings is way too high, even for Games where the experience is half the ticket value.

CS2 has a settings menu with text buttons at the top (like a tab) that drag you down to an arbitrary point in a long list of settings. There is no tabs, it's impossible to mentally separate what the text button represents mentally, from every other option, because they all point to the same page anyway. Why bother with the buttons?

The semantic meaning of concepts don't relate to each other and are not structured accordingly. It is waaay too unnecessarily difficult to navigate around computing.

I miss Macromedia Flash's UI. I didn't use the program much, but it was so simple and easy to use.

One my biggest drives for privacy and self made solutions, is to get away from the experience and knowledge pollution we've been seeing lately.

Not many companies and people developed for Mac OS X, but the ones that did pretty strongly adhered to Apple’s design guidelines, partially because it just made dev live easier and partially because your application would stick out like a sore thumb if you didn’t.

At least the global menu still lives on macOS. I’m sad Gnome 3 didn’t pilfer it from Unity.

Anybody else remember the UI from the Photoshop plugins from Kai[0]? You clicked the plugin, and then you were looking at some alien organic texture full screen with a few adjustment sliders. That was someone that said, "I see your UI suggestions, but I have other ideas"

[0] https://mprove.de/script/99/kai/

Edit: Holy shit, Bryce! I think I had that on my family PC. We were really into Myst and Riven at the time and I guess someone thought it would be fun to try to make our own 3D worlds. It turns out that making digital art actually requires art skills and I don't think I ever created anything with it.

it used to. now, you're only skills in art need to be to properly describe the scene and let some generative model do the work for you. i hope we continue to have distinctions made from digital art created by a generative model and not actually give the artist title to the people driving the prompts. to me, that's no different than me telling Bob Ross that I want a painting with a happy little bush in the left corner, a waterfall in the right, with a nice cabin in the woods in between them and then saying I was the artist because I was able to describe the scene.

AI can't do it, doesn't understand it. Generative art makes excessively beautiful wallpaper, right now.

There, FTFY.

When I first had to use one for work I thought it was buggy and defective and losing data. Turns out it was just hiding it because scrollbars were entirely hidden and disabled by default. They also hid a lot of other stuff. What kind of idiot created that design guideline?

Then there's the fact that the editing keys don't work at all consistently or correctly (and sometimes just don't work at all).

And nowadays they like to hide functionality behind obscure multi-finger touchpad gestures.

Their 'magic' mouse was a magic louse, that didn't work very well, ate batteries like they thought they were in a hotdog eating contest, and just randomly did stuff you didn't want based on where your finger happened to touch them.

I hope someday they hire a designer that has used a computer before and can upgrade their UI/UX standards to at least the Windows 95 level.

¹ https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/573097

They are if you use the touchpad, and appear whenever you scroll. The logic is that as you are scrolling with the touchpad, you will not click on the scrollbar, so in that case it is a useless appendage.

> Then there's the fact that the editing keys don't work at all consistently or correctly (and sometimes just don't work at all)

I am not sure what you mean by “editing keys”, but Apple takes painstaking effort to make sure most shortcuts are global, and in text entry fields, Emacs shortcuts always work.

> And nowadays they like to hide functionality behind obscure multi-finger touchpad gestures.

Sorry but this is just a laughable complaint. Apple’s touchpad and accompanying gestures are considered best-in-class and have been so for more than a decade. Microsoft and various Linux distributions have tried to catch up during that decade+ and still aren’t close.

There are many things one can complain about with macOS ever since Lion started the iOS-ification, and I’d be right with you, but saying the old Mac OS X UI was lower standards than Windows 95 (and I assume XP) is a supremely contrarian statement that few people of that era would have made.

> Mac apps that are unapologetically _Mac_ apps. They’re platform-specific and they’re not trying to wow us with all their custom not-Mac-like UI (which often isn’t very accessible).

I wonder if there's a directory of such applications somewhere, actually.

[1] https://inessential.com/2020/03/19/proxyman

This is what the resize box is/was for. (It's actually draggable edges with no "meat" to them, which introduce the conflict by overloading an element, which is also just a pixel wide.)

*) The resize box used to sit below the very bottom of the vertical scrollbar, just below the down arrow button, as a distinct and dedicated handle for resizing windows. Mind how this is in the direct vicinity of any scroll buttons which may be used to see more than what is exposed by the initial view. It's the quasi "natural" origin and anchor of any basic interactions with the viewport. (Somewhat ironically, while the resize box has mostly vanished from application UIs, it is still rendered by web browsers in certain circumstances. E.g., with textarea elements with scrollbars and resize enabled. With most UIs, there will be no related scroll buttons anymore, though.)

I'm pretty sure this had a button there in like Windows 3.11 or 98, that I think was later hidden so you'd just click the title bar to get it?

Edit: https://www.functionx.com/windows/Lesson06.htm

You'd click the application icon in the title bar, then in WinXP you could reach it by right-clicking anywhere in the title bar.

And in the Windows 3 era, it was an actual button (IIRC the minus on the left wasn't minimize, it was this menu, and the down arrow on the right was minimize): https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/w/win3x.htm

ALT+SPACE, M, arrow keys is forever in my brain due to so many poorly behaved programs which would open their window somewhere off-screen, and that was the way to move them back onto the screen.

Happens quite often with dialog boxes that pop up to inform you of some error. Particulalrly if you're working on multiple screens and have moved the application off your main one. (Which is what at least I tend to do when working on a laptop attached to one or more external screen/s.)

[1] http://the_messenger3.tripod.com/refwine1.html#ControlMenu Behold Ye Olde Intrrnet haha

Still there, even in Windows10. (And AFAICR even W11; only used that a couple months last year.) It's called the System Menu, IIRC. If you see nothing to click, try pressing [Alt]-[Space] -- even MS Office apps, which have gotten rid of the icon, still pop up the menu.

> And in the Windows 3 era, it was an actual button (IIRC the minus on the left wasn't minimize, it was this menu,

I also called it "the big fat hyphen" when I first started using Windows 3, but AIUI now, that was actually supposed to be a picture of the space bar. As in, you know, [Alt]-[Space].

A pic of the old Windows 3.x Program Manager with its Program Groups within the Multiple Document Interface, linked somewhere in this thread, reminded me: Sub-windows within an MDI had a shorter bar for an icon, and IIRC you got the system menu (document menu?) for the focused one by pressing [Alt]-[hyphen] (or [Alt]-[minus]).

At the intersection between the vertical and the horizontal scrollbar, if both were present. Or below them both, at the right end of the status bar, if the app has one (which many did, back in the day). Still there in f'rinstance Notepad++ 8.5.4, from June this year.