13 ms·

ClassicKit – A collection of UI components for iOS influenced by Windows 95

236 points by prithvi24 8y ago

evo_9 8y ago
Pretty cool, is there a 90's era Mac pre-OSX version somewhere? Would be pretty rad (ha) to do a UI in both and allow the user to pick their 'platform'. Nifty stuff.
jgtrosh 8y ago
The IE copycat is really asking for an MSN/Yahoo toolbar.
- Clubber 8y ago
  And some remote system script execution.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    > some remote system script execution That's how you get pulled from the App Store.
speps 8y ago
Mods please remove "Came Across", this isn't Reddit. The guideline is to use the page title or the project name and a short explanation.
zydeco 8y ago
I did something similar as an easter egg, but with classic black and white Mac UI, but I never thought to publish it as a library.
- ygra 8y ago
  I've recently devoted half a weekend to implementing the Windows 3.1 style as WPF styles. There's something about taking a modern UI toolkit and making it look like the old days :)
- bangonkeyboard 8y ago
  Classic Note [0][1] ran with the classic Mac aesthetic and was very well done, but is unfortunately no longer in the App Store. [0]: http://www.digitalworlds-ent.com/classicnote/ http://www.digitalworlds-ent.com/classicnote/ [1]: https://appadvice.com/app/classic-note/628565312 https://appadvice.com/app/classic-note/628565312
jordansmithnz 8y ago
Nice, there’s some great stuff here in something that originated as a fun/joke project: - it might not look ‘pretty’, but heck, the Windows 95 UI sure is intuitive. Buttons are very apparent, icons make sense, and what was never meant as a touch UI translates across to one incredibly well. - at a glance, code looks clean and pretty readable. @IBDesignable support too (if only Xcode wasn’t so sluggish compiling/rendering IBDesignables...). Well done to the author for not only making a fun/cool project, but for doing it well.
2ion 8y ago
Reverting to the classic Win9x/2000 style is what I do still immediately when using a Windows computer. As opposed to the horrible flat/white/modern design that govers Windows 10 and the web, it makes using the UI easier: Elements have clear boundaries; it is immediately obvious what role an UI component has (link? label? button? text field?); there is very little ambiguity; typography is simple and inobstrusive. The Luna and Aero styles were actually not much worse than the classic Windows style but interesting and usable evolutions of it as they retained the properties listed above. I am not entirely sure whether this perception stems from the fact that the classic style is objectively "better" suited for a GUI or from the fact that the Windows UIs were so predominant in the PC market at the time and left a lasting impression on people's understanding of what a GUI is/was. Perhaps it goes both ways.
- Synaesthesia 8y ago
  I find it's just a bit small on modern high-resolution displays, it was built for an era of 800x600 - 1024x768 and it shows.
  - saiya-jin 8y ago
    Win 7 style seems perfect on +-fullhd displays, it might be too small on some tiny 4k display (probably anything below 30"). but as far as I remember windows since at least 95 allowed to change size of fonts of many UI elements (popups, menus etc)
    - digi_owl 8y ago
      Sadly MS having been hiding those tweaks in Win10 for some reason. The registry keys are still present though, so with the right third party tool i can still crank them up to make using explorer with a touch screen that much better.
      - mrguyorama 8y ago
        A lot of that seems to just come from the fact that the new settings system is not "done" as made obvious that it can't replace the old control panel yet. The lack of consistency in pretty much everything is the main reason I'm still on Windows 7. Every time I look at that end of support milestone I shed a tear. I WANT the Kernel other improvements that 10 offers, but dear lord does it come with significant downsides
panic 8y ago
If you could get this working with the Win32 API and Wine, you'd have a true cross-platform app solution!
gjmacd 8y ago
why...
apazgo 8y ago
But does it support iPhone X notch? :)
- rimliu 8y ago
  You ar probably jesting, but the serious answer: there is no reason for it not too. The notch itself has nothing to do with UI elements, just with their positioning. As long as you respect safe area guidelines in view you are good.
  - leviathan 8y ago
    Only in theory. Even if you do respect the layout margins and safe area, there design needs to accommodate the change, so where the status bar was only 20 pixels, there's now a lot more space to deal with and the design needs to adjust.
userbinator 8y ago
I like the fact that it's drawing the edges as vectors, just like how Windows itself renders classic style: https://github.com/Baddaboo/ClassicKit/blob/master/Components/CKButton.swift https://github.com/Baddaboo/ClassicKit/blob/master/Component... IMHO much better than the trend of making every single UI element a huge bitmap image (in multiple resolutions), such that a simple app contains dozens of images of buttons and the like which consume more space than an entire Win95 installation...
- derefr 8y ago
  I’m curious whether vector controls result in less or more GPU texture-memory usage, once you take into account that you need to render them as textures in order to get the compositor to work efficiently on them. Raster images, after all, are usually loaded into VRAM by a library that converts them to some native packed texture format that are especially low-memory to hold and low-time-cost to render. Do baker vectors end up in the same format, or in the less efficient format used for expected-to-update pixel buffers (i.e. the format used for the renderings of compositable layers)?
  - tinus_hn 8y ago
    High DPI displays require pretty enormous icons to look good. And you can of course also cache the results of rendering a vector image at exactly the size you need.
  - pcwalton 8y ago
    It's pretty much the same either way, because vector images are always rasterized on CPU before being uploaded to GPU in popular OS stacks. This may change with GPU rasterization of vectors (disclaimer: that's what I work on). I don't know of any major OS vendor that's actually publicly planning to ship this anytime soon though.
    - derefr 8y ago
      I mean, sure, they’re rasterized—but are they rasterized to the same native texture format as bitmaps are? I know that for assets in games, the “read-only” assets loaded from disk come with rasterization metadata (or are already transcoded to the native texture format, depending on architecture) such that you get more efficient VRAM consumption at the expense of loading time (this being why games can take so long to load a scene when GPUs have even more PCI-e lanes than NVMe memory does.) Whereas I’d expect that texture-elements rendered during a scene, which might potentially stick around for only a few frames, would load to the GPU “uncompressed”, loading faster (less driver delay despite the increased size) but then taking more cycles of each texture-unit to process on each frame, thus taxing the GPU more. I definitely know this was true back in the 90s in game consoles—data streamed from disk was optimized for the GPU; while compositing in data held as a raw pixel field in VRAM (because it was e.g. a minimap texture you were redrawing or somesuch) left much less GPU available for anything else to use.
asbc 8y ago
Is there an equivalent for Android? Asking for a friend...
digi_owl 8y ago
Windows PocketPC comes to mind...
- heywire 8y ago
  Yeah, it reminds me of Windows CE for sure
mhd 8y ago
That could be a good basis for a NeXt-alike, which is after all a direct ancestor.
ksherlock 8y ago
Story time... when NeXT pivoted away from hardware, they ported OpenStep to Windows NT 4. Since they needed to look like Windows NT, they included MS Windows UI images. Those images are gone now but were still present in OS X as of Snow Leopard. (And now the show is on the other foot with Microsoft/WinObjC) http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/02/mac_images/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/02/mac_images/
petilon 8y ago
Keep in mind that the distinctive 3D look of Windows 95 UI was inspired by NeXT. If you like how controls look in Windows 95 then what you really like is NeXT.
StavrosK 8y ago
Oh man, this gives me fuzzy feelings. I remember developing my first applications in VB 4 back in 97 or so, I had so much fun. I remember when IE 4 came along, with its flat icons and Active Desktop and things. My 100 MHz Pentium couldn't even run it well, what with the 16 MB of RAM.
gwbas1c 8y ago
Back when I had Windows 95 I was obsessed with text mode.
zokier 8y ago
> The assets and design metrics were (for the most part) taken from an actual installation of Windows 95 DMCA pulldown in 3.. 2.. If you are thinking of using this, consider the fact that any assets ripped from Windows are copyright infringements.

236 points by prithvi24 8y ago

Pretty cool, is there a 90's era Mac pre-OSX version somewhere? Would be pretty rad (ha) to do a UI in both and allow the user to pick their 'platform'. Nifty stuff.

jgtrosh 8y ago

The IE copycat is really asking for an MSN/Yahoo toolbar.

Clubber 8y ago
And some remote system script execution.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > some remote system script execution That's how you get pulled from the App Store.

speps 8y ago

Mods please remove "Came Across", this isn't Reddit. The guideline is to use the page title or the project name and a short explanation.

zydeco 8y ago

I did something similar as an easter egg, but with classic black and white Mac UI, but I never thought to publish it as a library.

ygra 8y ago
I've recently devoted half a weekend to implementing the Windows 3.1 style as WPF styles. There's something about taking a modern UI toolkit and making it look like the old days :)
bangonkeyboard 8y ago
Classic Note [0][1] ran with the classic Mac aesthetic and was very well done, but is unfortunately no longer in the App Store. [0]: http://www.digitalworlds-ent.com/classicnote/ http://www.digitalworlds-ent.com/classicnote/ [1]: https://appadvice.com/app/classic-note/628565312 https://appadvice.com/app/classic-note/628565312

jordansmithnz 8y ago

Nice, there’s some great stuff here in something that originated as a fun/joke project: - it might not look ‘pretty’, but heck, the Windows 95 UI sure is intuitive. Buttons are very apparent, icons make sense, and what was never meant as a touch UI translates across to one incredibly well. - at a glance, code looks clean and pretty readable. @IBDesignable support too (if only Xcode wasn’t so sluggish compiling/rendering IBDesignables...). Well done to the author for not only making a fun/cool project, but for doing it well.

2ion 8y ago

Reverting to the classic Win9x/2000 style is what I do still immediately when using a Windows computer. As opposed to the horrible flat/white/modern design that govers Windows 10 and the web, it makes using the UI easier: Elements have clear boundaries; it is immediately obvious what role an UI component has (link? label? button? text field?); there is very little ambiguity; typography is simple and inobstrusive. The Luna and Aero styles were actually not much worse than the classic Windows style but interesting and usable evolutions of it as they retained the properties listed above. I am not entirely sure whether this perception stems from the fact that the classic style is objectively "better" suited for a GUI or from the fact that the Windows UIs were so predominant in the PC market at the time and left a lasting impression on people's understanding of what a GUI is/was. Perhaps it goes both ways.

Synaesthesia 8y ago
I find it's just a bit small on modern high-resolution displays, it was built for an era of 800x600 - 1024x768 and it shows.
- saiya-jin 8y ago
  Win 7 style seems perfect on +-fullhd displays, it might be too small on some tiny 4k display (probably anything below 30"). but as far as I remember windows since at least 95 allowed to change size of fonts of many UI elements (popups, menus etc)
  - digi_owl 8y ago
    Sadly MS having been hiding those tweaks in Win10 for some reason. The registry keys are still present though, so with the right third party tool i can still crank them up to make using explorer with a touch screen that much better.
    - mrguyorama 8y ago
      A lot of that seems to just come from the fact that the new settings system is not "done" as made obvious that it can't replace the old control panel yet. The lack of consistency in pretty much everything is the main reason I'm still on Windows 7. Every time I look at that end of support milestone I shed a tear. I WANT the Kernel other improvements that 10 offers, but dear lord does it come with significant downsides

panic 8y ago

If you could get this working with the Win32 API and Wine, you'd have a true cross-platform app solution!

gjmacd 8y ago

why...

apazgo 8y ago

But does it support iPhone X notch? :)

rimliu 8y ago
You ar probably jesting, but the serious answer: there is no reason for it not too. The notch itself has nothing to do with UI elements, just with their positioning. As long as you respect safe area guidelines in view you are good.
- leviathan 8y ago
  Only in theory. Even if you do respect the layout margins and safe area, there design needs to accommodate the change, so where the status bar was only 20 pixels, there's now a lot more space to deal with and the design needs to adjust.

userbinator 8y ago

I like the fact that it's drawing the edges as vectors, just like how Windows itself renders classic style: https://github.com/Baddaboo/ClassicKit/blob/master/Components/CKButton.swift https://github.com/Baddaboo/ClassicKit/blob/master/Component... IMHO much better than the trend of making every single UI element a huge bitmap image (in multiple resolutions), such that a simple app contains dozens of images of buttons and the like which consume more space than an entire Win95 installation...

derefr 8y ago
I’m curious whether vector controls result in less or more GPU texture-memory usage, once you take into account that you need to render them as textures in order to get the compositor to work efficiently on them. Raster images, after all, are usually loaded into VRAM by a library that converts them to some native packed texture format that are especially low-memory to hold and low-time-cost to render. Do baker vectors end up in the same format, or in the less efficient format used for expected-to-update pixel buffers (i.e. the format used for the renderings of compositable layers)?
- tinus_hn 8y ago
  High DPI displays require pretty enormous icons to look good. And you can of course also cache the results of rendering a vector image at exactly the size you need.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  It's pretty much the same either way, because vector images are always rasterized on CPU before being uploaded to GPU in popular OS stacks. This may change with GPU rasterization of vectors (disclaimer: that's what I work on). I don't know of any major OS vendor that's actually publicly planning to ship this anytime soon though.
  - derefr 8y ago
    I mean, sure, they’re rasterized—but are they rasterized to the same native texture format as bitmaps are? I know that for assets in games, the “read-only” assets loaded from disk come with rasterization metadata (or are already transcoded to the native texture format, depending on architecture) such that you get more efficient VRAM consumption at the expense of loading time (this being why games can take so long to load a scene when GPUs have even more PCI-e lanes than NVMe memory does.) Whereas I’d expect that texture-elements rendered during a scene, which might potentially stick around for only a few frames, would load to the GPU “uncompressed”, loading faster (less driver delay despite the increased size) but then taking more cycles of each texture-unit to process on each frame, thus taxing the GPU more. I definitely know this was true back in the 90s in game consoles—data streamed from disk was optimized for the GPU; while compositing in data held as a raw pixel field in VRAM (because it was e.g. a minimap texture you were redrawing or somesuch) left much less GPU available for anything else to use.

asbc 8y ago

Is there an equivalent for Android? Asking for a friend...

digi_owl 8y ago

Windows PocketPC comes to mind...

heywire 8y ago
Yeah, it reminds me of Windows CE for sure

mhd 8y ago

That could be a good basis for a NeXt-alike, which is after all a direct ancestor.

ksherlock 8y ago

Story time... when NeXT pivoted away from hardware, they ported OpenStep to Windows NT 4. Since they needed to look like Windows NT, they included MS Windows UI images. Those images are gone now but were still present in OS X as of Snow Leopard. (And now the show is on the other foot with Microsoft/WinObjC) http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/02/mac_images/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/02/mac_images/

petilon 8y ago

Keep in mind that the distinctive 3D look of Windows 95 UI was inspired by NeXT. If you like how controls look in Windows 95 then what you really like is NeXT.

StavrosK 8y ago

Oh man, this gives me fuzzy feelings. I remember developing my first applications in VB 4 back in 97 or so, I had so much fun. I remember when IE 4 came along, with its flat icons and Active Desktop and things. My 100 MHz Pentium couldn't even run it well, what with the 16 MB of RAM.

gwbas1c 8y ago

Back when I had Windows 95 I was obsessed with text mode.

zokier 8y ago

> The assets and design metrics were (for the most part) taken from an actual installation of Windows 95 DMCA pulldown in 3.. 2.. If you are thinking of using this, consider the fact that any assets ripped from Windows are copyright infringements.