I often think old GUIs have a nice, functional look to them. This one is no exception. I notice (what I assume is) the shuffle toggle looks unfamiliar. This is from way back before that UI became a convention! I see the repeat icon has stuck around. So interesting!
Functionality isn't hidden and buttons looked like buttons (instead of the modern trend of having unstyled text or tiny icons having a 50-50 chance of being a button).
The flat design trend really confused me. It really took off when high resolution screens started getting popular too, really made no sense. Wish we'd bring back Skeuomorphic design. Bring back that wood grain and metal textures. Bring back the fun UI's and app themes. Bring back real buttons!
Microsoft (and Apple) poured a ton of money into usability research in the early 90s and it showed. I vaguely remember the story through how many versions of the trash icon Microsoft went for Windows 95 to get it right.
For me it was a bit sad to see the mad and creative UX world of the homecomputer era being bulldozed over with the minimalist uniform results of the scientific usability research.
Little did I know that a mere quarter century later we are back were we once started and everyone as clueless as we were in the 90s goes overboard everywhere as if there was no tomorrow.
Yeah, and it sadly makes me miss the nicely ordered and easily usable world - I'm gettin' old I guess.
From the article, the time to beat is November 16, 1992. This might be possible on one of the BSDs, as FreeBSD and NetBSD both document support for running a.out executables with the 4.3BSD ABI. I guess it would depend on whether anyone had ported X11 to run on a BSD on i386 before then. Alternatively, maybe you'd be able to get something running on SCO OpenServer (if you count that as a current OS, it IS still getting security patches). It documents support for XENIX x.out binaries ( https://www.scosales.com/ta/kb/126704.html ) so you might be able to run software compiled in the late 1980s for XENIX/386.
NetBSD has excellent binary compatible with 80s "unix", the problem is most (all?) of the 80s unix platforms it supports aren't x86.
Current NetBSD still has good support for running SunOS binaries, though, including graphical ones. I'm certain you could get a SunOS 4.x binary from pre-1992 to run on NetBSD/SPARC. I've no idea how far back you could potentially go on NetBSD/m68k -- probably quite a ways, especially if the binaries are statically linked. SunOS pre-1988 was all static linking!
(Running "real" 4.3BSD binaries might be hard -- I think NetBSD/VAX defaults to ULTRIX compat, which is an either/or thing versus strict Berkeley Unix compatibility. Same binary format, similar but incompatible syscalls/data structures.)
I can't even run a binary from one Linux distro to the other, let alone one from a random Unix from the 80s. If a rebuild from source is allowed (which would need to allow modifications to the build system) that's a completely different game.
It depends. I've found for example, if i compile on Ubuntu or Debian, it will probably work on any Ubuntu, Debian, or Debian-based distro released at or newer than the one I compiled it on. There are other cross-compatible examples.
More broadly, there are things like manylinux and MUSL which allow cross-distro applications.
I agree - the model I use for why containers (Docker etc) exist is to abstract over Linux ABI incompatibility. I don't think they're a great solution, as it complicates software distribution. I should be able to distribute an executable and have it just work.
Hah well yes for Windows. This is a mercy, but my mindset is still "Works on Windows, Linux and Mac". (The last being dropped for anything that requires Cuda...)
Linux isn't the source of the incompatibility. The kernel itself is very strict about not breaking userspace. Your userspace is breaking compatibility on its own, containers fix it by shipping the userspace components within the container, which only works because the kernel maintained compatibility. If the kernel broke compatibility you would need to use a VM so you can run a different kernel version.
Many programs are dynamically linked to at the very least, libc. If the system libc is older than what the binary was developed for, it will often fail. Failures going the other direction are less common, but can and do still happen. If the binary was statically linked with everything it needs, you've got a pretty good chance it'll work, but that's a bit harder to do with GUI programs that need to interact with X or Wayland.
I had to run a Linux binary compiled for Ubuntu 10.something a few years ago. I couldn't get the drivers to work properly in libvirt and getting the binary to run on modern Linux was practically impossible, even with 32 bit support installed.
The downside of dynamically linked binaries: every tool of medium complexity needs a close-enough version of a common library, and once those get upgraded, the tool dies.
Most statically compiled version should work with a compatible enough libc, but I haven't seen many old programs like that.
Wine, on the other hand, runs tools from the 90s just fine, as long as they're 32 bit.
You don't need to go full static linking. Just bundle every library that doesn't have string backwards guarantees or rather bundle everything except base system libraires. The same is also how things work on Windows (and thus Wine really). Wine won't be able to run a binary that links to some random libpng or whatever that the compiler found in your System32. The only difference is that Microsoft makes an SDK that gives your some idea of whats a system library you can rely on as well as the ability to target older versions than the system you are building on. The latter can be done on Linux as well but there is no-pre made SDK so the easiest solution ends up being a VM or chroot with older libraries.
> Just bundle [...] everything except base system libraires
That means everything above libc. There are no "base system libraries" in the Linux world for GUI. Not even libX11, that has been deprecated in favour of libxcb, which has been deprecated in favour of not having X11 and running Wayland. Some days I am amazed that the ELF binary format hasn't been deprecated yet...
LibX11 is still alive and kicking. It is however possible to bundle libX11 and/or libxcb (libX11 today sits on top of libxcb) because the wire protocol between them and the X server is also backwards compatible.
And of course Wayland has XWayland to continue compatibility. This doesn't give you access to new toys but neither does restricting yourself to a 30-year old Win32 API.
And beyond libc/libX11/libxcb, libasound has also provided good backwards compatibility with newer systems implementing shims to make it work. You can also use libpulse directly if you don't care about old/opinionated systems though.
The oldest web app code of my own that I still maintain/evolve turned 20 this year, so yours is older than mine. I think it's largely a Ship of Theseus at this point, though I did just remove some code the other day that was absolutely untouched since 2008.
I was the system tester for "a modern Internet-based application" in 1996 used by a global logistics company. Fast forward 25 years and I went to local logistic branch to ship out some packages. Out of curiosity, I peeked over the desk to look at what software they were using. It was the same 25-year old "modern Internet-based application".
At one tine, Slackware Linux would not recompile binaries unless the program was patched. So there was a time you could find rather old binaries on Slackware, and maybe still on other distros.
I wonder what the oldest unchanged source/program running on Linux or BSD ? My vote goes to cat(1) :)
Source compatibility is surprisingly good, binary compatibility is surprisingly awful, even with Slack.
I have some old Linux CDROM games from ~2000 that are nigh impossible to run, and even a lot of really old software fails to run on old (2.x) kernels without recompilation. But Slackware 4.x wasn't particularly good at this in my testing (i started on a slackware-based retro computing distro[0] but my HDD died with no backup before i finished it)
I mean, other than installing an old distro in old hardware, which i do enjoy. I got a CD copy of Mandrake Gaming Edition on eBay with a bundled port of SimCity 3000 that's very good at running old commercial Linux games.
I think there's people shipping ancient glibc with flatpaks to accomplish this today
I deplore the day we lost the menu bar and replaced it with "mobile first" designs. The desktop UI was perfected around the time of Windows 95 and has gotten worse with every iteration since then. That, and the increased reliance on non-native frameworks and libraries instead of working with directly with the Windows API in C.
> Well that can't be entirely true, the desktop experience on Windows 10 improved on Windows 8 by leaps and bounds.
In large part, windows 10's ui is more like that of windows 95 because it undid the changes away from the windows 95 paradigm that windows 8 did. Furthermore, those changes away from windows 95 in windows 8 were the exact kind of thing that might be called "mobile first".
The thing is one could argue most of the improvements were regressions to previous paradigms. Windows 10 was improved by being less like Windows 8 and more like the classic desktops of the 90s.
In other words, change for the sake of change does not an improvement make.
But they were not too far removed from how the standard Windows buttons looked. Office had its own look in a lot of ways back then, e.g. with the extra handles on the toolbars.
Now, if I take a couple of current applications, the differences are much bigger: from the top of my head, Explorer, Settings, Edge, Office, Steam, Spotify all have much more unique UIs.
They had a different look, but usage and UI conventions including keyboard navigation worked basically the same. Since the mixing of mobile and desktop with web technology, it’s the Wild West.
- Internet Explorer (frequently introduced new toolbar designs not available to apps via API until later)
- Encarta (custom dark mode-ish theme)
- Netscape Communicator (custom toolbars)
- RealPlayer
- QuickTime
- MSN Messenger (custom theme)
- Every video game ever
... UI inconsistency didn't arrive with the web. Even macOS has always been a patchwork. Apple couldn't stop introducing new themes over time and there were always apps that didn't quite follow. Brushed metal!
Kai's Power Tools / Power Goo / Bryce took the custom interface stuff to the most extreme lengths - people genuinely loved it at the time but I think most would be horrified if anything went that far today.
Ha! I forgot about those. Man I loved playing with Bryce back in the day, what a magical program that was. And yeah the UI was gorgeous for its time. Heck it still looks great even today, tbh.
There was a short period of time around Windows 95-XP where application developers really wanted to try to use the "latest and greatest" because if they didn't they really stood out as being "last year's tech".
Then XP kind of broke that as so many started not bothering and then it all went sideways.
Agreed. Note the increased spacing to separate the generic "Help" button from the others that are specific to the dialog box. Aligning the buttons to the text input fields would break this separation and it could also give the false impression that the buttons were related to the input fields.
Ironic to say on hackernews which shows massive whitespace in the margins-- and if I try to widen my tab sidebar it actually indents the margin rather than eating into it.
One can look across the computing space as a whole and see that, it is surely not the case that we're "maximizing screen space".
Totally agree. But this does not take away from his point that maximizing screen space is the motivation in Firefox. In fact, all you have done is demonstrate why they are driven to do so.
It should have said maximizing screen height, not space (on desktop not mobile), in these modern days of widescreen monitors. If we have title bars, menu bars, toolbars etc, while using the full screen width, we're peering through a letterbox. (Fixed headers on websites contribute too.) Line length needs to be kept shorter for readability, leading to wasted space at the sides.
Perhaps, if you're not using a sidebar for bookmarks or vertical tabs or whatever, it suggests something ought to have changed in UI design back when widescreen monitors became the norm?
> Some apps eschew it, like browsers, but not because they are “mobile first”, but because they are trying to maximize screen space.
I don't think this is true. If anything, we see more oversized buttons and empty space nowadays. It's as if developers forgot that PC users have keyboards and mice. Remember, display resolutions and monitors were a lot smaller back then, and making space count was arguably more important 20 years ago than it is today.
Two things can both be true. An app can create more space around controls and get rid of the menu bar to save space.
The space also really has nothing to do with “mobile first”. It’s for touch screens (and also modern aesthetic that avoids crowded controls).
To be clear, I am not saying that all apps are optimizing for saving screen space. I was specifically talking about browsers, which are broadly optimized to give as much area as possible to the content.
You’re getting closer… “crowded” and “cluttered” are the most taboo words in the “UX” charlatans’ holy book. It’s so scary to them that they’ll sacrifice anything to avoid even a possible accusation of “crowdedness.”
It was a mildly useful point of view when they were designing things meant to be the first computer program someone might ever use. Like Microsoft Bob or Apple “At Ease.” But it’s idiotic to have things following that dogma as the only interface to tools that people need to use daily and will become expert users of.
To think some of us nerds complained about the Luna theme of XP as too “Fisher Price.” Fisher Price products look like industrial control panels compared to today’s contemporary operating systems and apps.
Smaller screen also means your menu bar has to be larger relative to the total screen size to be readable though. Assuming something like the standard going from 15" or 17" CRT to 24" LCD
Oh really? I, sadly, use nearly none. Open on my desktop right now: Slack, Outlook, Zoom, Windows Terminal, Edge, Claude, Obsidian, whatever the Windows image viewer is called, Cursor, and VS Code.
Only the last 2 have menu bars. And I can’t be certain that I didn’t dig through the preferences of one or both of them when I first installed them to tell them to knock off the bullshit and give me back the menus. Once in a while, there is an option buried somewhere like that.
In fairness I did not do a full inventory of all the apps I use. I see Word and VS Code. It may be less than I thought if I inventoried every app I regularly use.
I see some have gone the “browser” direction with tabs folded into the title bar and the menu bar dropped. Windows Terminal, File Explorer, and Notepad are all that style now.
Edit: Actually Notepad has the tabs in the titlebar thing but retained the menu bar and folded it into the command bar.
I personally am pretty disgusted by ‘tabs in the title bar’ since really what that means is deleting the title bar. You can’t grab and move the freaking window because most of it is made out of a bunch of tabs or other widgets. I presume this is done because somebody’s research found that many people just do everything in maximized windows or the Apple “full screen mode.” As long as you don’t mind sacrificing the people who do use window managers to manage windows, likely the most sophisticated users, this seems like a great move. But I would argue it’s still stupid because I have plenty of screen real estate. Being able to read one additional line of text in my browser window or Slack conversation does literally nothing for me.
I love it. I can grab either end of the title bar just fine. I don't need to waste the entire middle. And if I have multiple windows I'm sacrificing more like 3 lines and it does start to matter.
It’s a tradeoff. I spend most of my time on a laptop screen (even when using an external monitor, the external is my secondary screen) and appreciate the reduction in screen waste. I don’t need or want a huge click area just for moving the window.
My favorite is 3:2 for laptops. 4:3 is a bit tall (screen is fine, but it makes the base much deeper as well). 16:9 is kind of crappy, especially if it’s a smaller screen.
I find that HP/Palm Pre with WebOS was best even if we ignore the physical keyboard (sliding left/right on the touch area below the screen or on the screen with a button pressed really made it easy to select text easily and precisely). Nokia N9 with Maemo/Meego was second best but it excelled in the cards interface for multi-tasking.
Some of those were taken into other OSes but nowhere were they implemented so smoothly.
Long-press and the ••• menu in the overflow is a far superior UI paradigm than having a purpose built menu button.
90% of the time, even in Android that was pre-Honeycomb, the menu ended up just showing what would have been in the overflow anyways.
Android really did end up doing a lot better on the UX side that iOS with the contextual action bar and long-press to select. The idea of selection mode on iOS is still a weird process, and it's been mostly worked around since with higher PPI screens and touch sensors, instead doing a small area to "select" items on iOS
For me, long-press is one of the most infuriating UX features of mobile.
Probably the top on the offenders list for me is the copy-paste with the handles (which of course relies on long-press to trigger).
Hard buttons beat soft buttons for UX any time. You can use them with a glove, you can feel where the are located and you don't accidentally click because your finger was close enough for the capacitive touch sensor to trigger.
I’ve replaced the android headunit with a buttons and segmented display one (kenwood) because it was just horrendous. Now, it’s easy to switch sources, skip back and forth, and adjust volume with minimal looking. Tactical feedback and location memory is great UX.
God, I hate copy/paste on android. tbh, I hate the whole 'gestures' thing where there never seems to be an actual 'instruction sheet' of what gestures are available. I wish they would make new apps provide a 'manifest' of gestures they support so your phone could have an up to date list based on which apps you have installed.
Worse, when I try to select text from whatever note with important data I have, the first option is "Cut", which means losing data (i.e., data is deleted from the source). "Copy" is hidden behind a hamburger menu. Who was the stupid person at Google who thought this would be good UX??
> Long-press and the ••• menu in the overflow is a far superior UI paradigm than having a purpose built menu button.
I disagree - long-press isn't intuitive or discoverable, and it's slow.
You could make a case that they're a good fit for mobile, but they're truly horrible on desktop.
IMO, the old Android menu button wasn't great UX. It ended up just being a miscellaneous laundry list of random functions, and the users would just need to learn "spam the menu button randomly on every screen just in case the needed action is hiding in there."
Isn't that the same as a win95-style menu? Whenever you want to do an action you have to look for it in the top menu and try right-clicking related objects on-screen.
Although I started with 98, I think Vista / 7 was the peak. It was user friendly enough for newbies but didn't sacrifice advanced controls. Just organized them better to bring focus to the more used parts.
I just learned that X Window System came out a year before the first Windows release. Interesting. Thanks for pointing out the compiz ripoff. It spurred me to look up the original release dates.
In terms of aesthetic, I love Windows 7-era Aero glass design (and to a lesser extent, Vista), but I also love the classic Windows 9x/2000 look. If I had to choose between the two, I'd go with Aero simply because of the start menu search bar.
In both Windows 7 and Vista you could change the theme engine to Windows Classic, which gave you the Windows 9x/2000 look AND the start menu search bar.
Exactly. Windows 7 plus the windows 2000 "classic" option was pretty awesome.
Win10 LTSC with the right options and limiting search to local only is pretty good also though. Insanely snappy on even crap systems (with really any SSD)
I found the transparency of windows in Vista and 7 to be a useless distraction. Found Windows 8.1 to be refreshing in that respect, although the menuless apps were poor.
Maybe on the OS side. However, Vista coincided with the release of Office 2007. That release of Office introduced the dreaded Ribbon, which made functions much harder to find.
I actually like Ribbon and I disagree. It made functions easier to find, for people who didn't have a muscle memory of those functions. It actually taught them how to use the program and exposed conditional menus like picture options better than the toolbars that appear and disappear.
Of course people who got used to traversing 3-level menus got annoyed but they still have all the same keyboard shortcuts. However, spending enough time, you also get used to Ribbon and it usually requires fewer clicks not more.
I still find a tastefully done Ribbon is better than a menu and a toolbar combination. The problem is, not everybody has put the same effort that Microsoft did which created monstrosities like Solidworks Ribbon.
I actually find it difficult to scan for a specific function since the most of the text in the ribbon is centered and may have multiple lines. With the current design, I am expected to look up top to check what tab I am on, then look down bottom to find the container that might have my desired functionality, and then finally scan the middle text (which may be one or two lines) for the button.
When Office 2007 was released, they made a lot of noise about how the ribbon was easy to use. One of the key functionality was Preview - that when the mouse cursor moves inside a button, the change is immediately applied to the content and when the cursor moves outside a button, the change was undone.
They never bothered to implement this Preview functionality on the Web version of office, and I bet only a few ever noticed this inconsistency.
I agree with you generally but I don't think desktop UI is remotely close to perfected. Unless you mean the desktop as a skeumorphic concept than maybe.
I think we've actually completely stagnate on the human interaction side of OSes and only emacs has made any progress and then only for those willing to put the work in, not as a vanilla user ui.
For me it was a bit sad to see the mad and creative UX world of the homecomputer era being bulldozed over with the minimalist uniform results of the scientific usability research.
Little did I know that a mere quarter century later we are back were we once started and everyone as clueless as we were in the 90s goes overboard everywhere as if there was no tomorrow.
Yeah, and it sadly makes me miss the nicely ordered and easily usable world - I'm gettin' old I guess.
https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/cdplayer/
I always liked the look of the more complicated ones like this:
https://ctrl-alt-rees.com/2021-09-29-media-rack-download-win...
Current NetBSD still has good support for running SunOS binaries, though, including graphical ones. I'm certain you could get a SunOS 4.x binary from pre-1992 to run on NetBSD/SPARC. I've no idea how far back you could potentially go on NetBSD/m68k -- probably quite a ways, especially if the binaries are statically linked. SunOS pre-1988 was all static linking!
(Running "real" 4.3BSD binaries might be hard -- I think NetBSD/VAX defaults to ULTRIX compat, which is an either/or thing versus strict Berkeley Unix compatibility. Same binary format, similar but incompatible syscalls/data structures.)
More broadly, there are things like manylinux and MUSL which allow cross-distro applications.
As long as the container bundles the right libc, the program should work.
The downside of dynamically linked binaries: every tool of medium complexity needs a close-enough version of a common library, and once those get upgraded, the tool dies.
Most statically compiled version should work with a compatible enough libc, but I haven't seen many old programs like that.
Wine, on the other hand, runs tools from the 90s just fine, as long as they're 32 bit.
That means everything above libc. There are no "base system libraries" in the Linux world for GUI. Not even libX11, that has been deprecated in favour of libxcb, which has been deprecated in favour of not having X11 and running Wayland. Some days I am amazed that the ELF binary format hasn't been deprecated yet...
And of course Wayland has XWayland to continue compatibility. This doesn't give you access to new toys but neither does restricting yourself to a 30-year old Win32 API.
And beyond libc/libX11/libxcb, libasound has also provided good backwards compatibility with newer systems implementing shims to make it work. You can also use libpulse directly if you don't care about old/opinionated systems though.
The other way around works fine, though, and you can avoid it by statically linking the binary when you build it.
One of the recent efforts completed was removal of support for Ubuntu 24.04. That part I remember exactly :\
And if you want to run them on Wayland, Worg will do that for you. https://github.com/jmalcolm137/Worg
Either the repo doesn't exist or it's private
Pointing this out without a trigger warning is just rude ;-)
Some of us are older than we think, yo.
The oldest web app code of my own that I still maintain/evolve turned 20 this year, so yours is older than mine. I think it's largely a Ship of Theseus at this point, though I did just remove some code the other day that was absolutely untouched since 2008.
If it ain't broke I guess. Long live ELMO!
At one tine, Slackware Linux would not recompile binaries unless the program was patched. So there was a time you could find rather old binaries on Slackware, and maybe still on other distros.
I wonder what the oldest unchanged source/program running on Linux or BSD ? My vote goes to cat(1) :)
Otoh, /usr/bin/true has only minor changes since initial import (1994) https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/commits/main/usr.bin/...
/usr/bin/false is similar
I have some old Linux CDROM games from ~2000 that are nigh impossible to run, and even a lot of really old software fails to run on old (2.x) kernels without recompilation. But Slackware 4.x wasn't particularly good at this in my testing (i started on a slackware-based retro computing distro[0] but my HDD died with no backup before i finished it)
I mean, other than installing an old distro in old hardware, which i do enjoy. I got a CD copy of Mandrake Gaming Edition on eBay with a bundled port of SimCity 3000 that's very good at running old commercial Linux games.
I think there's people shipping ancient glibc with flatpaks to accomplish this today
[0] https://github.com/queenkjuul/basiclinux-lcars
Well that can't be entirely true, the desktop experience on Windows 10 improved on Windows 8 by leaps and bounds.
In large part, windows 10's ui is more like that of windows 95 because it undid the changes away from the windows 95 paradigm that windows 8 did. Furthermore, those changes away from windows 95 in windows 8 were the exact kind of thing that might be called "mobile first".
In other words, change for the sake of change does not an improvement make.
This precisely coincides with the web developers being allowed to wrap stuff into "apps" in Electron and the like.
Now, if I take a couple of current applications, the differences are much bigger: from the top of my head, Explorer, Settings, Edge, Office, Steam, Spotify all have much more unique UIs.
- Office (custom widget toolkit, menus, toolbars, etc)
- Internet Explorer (frequently introduced new toolbar designs not available to apps via API until later)
- Encarta (custom dark mode-ish theme)
- Netscape Communicator (custom toolbars)
- RealPlayer
- QuickTime
- MSN Messenger (custom theme)
- Every video game ever
... UI inconsistency didn't arrive with the web. Even macOS has always been a patchwork. Apple couldn't stop introducing new themes over time and there were always apps that didn't quite follow. Brushed metal!
https://mprove.de/script/99/kai/index.html
Then XP kind of broke that as so many started not bothering and then it all went sideways.
Wow, you unlocked a memory. In case somebody doesn't remember, or doesn't know, the style of Borland buttons, here's a screenshot: https://sourceforge.net/p/owlnext/wiki/Replacing_usage_of_BW...
Some more screenshots on this page: https://www.drbob42.com/delphi/findmapc.htm
(Look at all those misaligned icons/labels in the Tool Options screenshot!)
What does this mean? I use lots of apps that still have a menu bar.
Some apps eschew it, like browsers, but not because they are “mobile first”, but because they are trying to maximize screen space.
If that was the case they wouldn't put giant margins around every UI element and dead space everywhere.
Ironic to say on hackernews which shows massive whitespace in the margins-- and if I try to widen my tab sidebar it actually indents the margin rather than eating into it.
One can look across the computing space as a whole and see that, it is surely not the case that we're "maximizing screen space".
The key element missing from this thread is that the Internet going from a text based to a multi-media (and increasingly video-centric) experience.
A lot of Internet users, at this point, do as much reading on their phone or laptop as I do reading on my TV (almost none).
Perhaps, if you're not using a sidebar for bookmarks or vertical tabs or whatever, it suggests something ought to have changed in UI design back when widescreen monitors became the norm?
I don't think this is true. If anything, we see more oversized buttons and empty space nowadays. It's as if developers forgot that PC users have keyboards and mice. Remember, display resolutions and monitors were a lot smaller back then, and making space count was arguably more important 20 years ago than it is today.
The space also really has nothing to do with “mobile first”. It’s for touch screens (and also modern aesthetic that avoids crowded controls).
To be clear, I am not saying that all apps are optimizing for saving screen space. I was specifically talking about browsers, which are broadly optimized to give as much area as possible to the content.
It was a mildly useful point of view when they were designing things meant to be the first computer program someone might ever use. Like Microsoft Bob or Apple “At Ease.” But it’s idiotic to have things following that dogma as the only interface to tools that people need to use daily and will become expert users of.
To think some of us nerds complained about the Luna theme of XP as too “Fisher Price.” Fisher Price products look like industrial control panels compared to today’s contemporary operating systems and apps.
Oh really? I, sadly, use nearly none. Open on my desktop right now: Slack, Outlook, Zoom, Windows Terminal, Edge, Claude, Obsidian, whatever the Windows image viewer is called, Cursor, and VS Code.
Only the last 2 have menu bars. And I can’t be certain that I didn’t dig through the preferences of one or both of them when I first installed them to tell them to knock off the bullshit and give me back the menus. Once in a while, there is an option buried somewhere like that.
I see some have gone the “browser” direction with tabs folded into the title bar and the menu bar dropped. Windows Terminal, File Explorer, and Notepad are all that style now.
Edit: Actually Notepad has the tabs in the titlebar thing but retained the menu bar and folded it into the command bar.
The Wells Fargo website screams this for me - it used to be dense and packed with info, now it's got large elements and wasted space.
Still the best navigable phone I had when coupled with the Nova Launcher gestures.
Some of those were taken into other OSes but nowhere were they implemented so smoothly.
90% of the time, even in Android that was pre-Honeycomb, the menu ended up just showing what would have been in the overflow anyways.
Android really did end up doing a lot better on the UX side that iOS with the contextual action bar and long-press to select. The idea of selection mode on iOS is still a weird process, and it's been mostly worked around since with higher PPI screens and touch sensors, instead doing a small area to "select" items on iOS
Hard buttons beat soft buttons for UX any time. You can use them with a glove, you can feel where the are located and you don't accidentally click because your finger was close enough for the capacitive touch sensor to trigger.
I disagree - long-press isn't intuitive or discoverable, and it's slow. You could make a case that they're a good fit for mobile, but they're truly horrible on desktop.
UX being copied by OSes from each other is a good thing.
If you're a tachyon I guess linux is ripping off osx :)
Win10 LTSC with the right options and limiting search to local only is pretty good also though. Insanely snappy on even crap systems (with really any SSD)
Of course people who got used to traversing 3-level menus got annoyed but they still have all the same keyboard shortcuts. However, spending enough time, you also get used to Ribbon and it usually requires fewer clicks not more.
I still find a tastefully done Ribbon is better than a menu and a toolbar combination. The problem is, not everybody has put the same effort that Microsoft did which created monstrosities like Solidworks Ribbon.
I actually find it difficult to scan for a specific function since the most of the text in the ribbon is centered and may have multiple lines. With the current design, I am expected to look up top to check what tab I am on, then look down bottom to find the container that might have my desired functionality, and then finally scan the middle text (which may be one or two lines) for the button.
They never bothered to implement this Preview functionality on the Web version of office, and I bet only a few ever noticed this inconsistency.
https://www.softpedia.com/get/Desktop-Enhancements/Themes/Mi...
https://images.sftcdn.net/images/t_optimized,f_auto/p/5c889a...
I think we've actually completely stagnate on the human interaction side of OSes and only emacs has made any progress and then only for those willing to put the work in, not as a vanilla user ui.
We could even have unified desktop.mobile codebases, with different GUI layouts. 280 North's objective-J/Cappuccino proved this.
IDK what we're even doing anymore.
I would say people are just disagreeing with you that the situation is actually so black and white.