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I don't know if this is nostalgia talking but there is something particularly attractive about the BeOS and Haiku desktop both in terms of design and aesthetics

I don't know if this is nostalgia talking but there is something particularly attractive about the BeOS and Haiku desktop both in terms of design and aesthetics. The interface actually has a certain depth and this is consistent across icons, windows, dialogs, menus, buttons, etc. It's a shame that interfaces nowadays are completely flat. They are almost... expressionless and with the exception of the odd drop shadow they completely lack a third dimension. When I first learned of Haiku (and BeOS), back when Gnome was in the 2.x days, I was so impressed by the interface that I installed a look-alike desktop and icon theme. I used it for quite a long time until GTK+ 3.x eventually became prevalent.

agumonkey 8y ago
All 90s GUIs have something that I miss[1]. I think the flat movement was a desire for hyper genericity .. but turns out that a bit (just a bit) of visual signal and faux skeumorphism (some widgets emulated actual LED keys found on hardware) is good. ps: also, flat came after both the aqua trend where effects were everywhere and skeumorphism was pushed higher. Not that surprising in a way. [1] beos, win311, macos classic, win95 (office97 era) and nt5
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  I mis those from the 90's GUIs: - Standard interaction widgets. There was no breaking the scroll, there was no button that you can't discover how to press. - Expert oriented interfaces. There was no action without a shortcut. The most complex software always had some CLI or an API (optionally with an intepreter). - Discoverability features. The sortcut descriptions were embedded on the same places you had to click to get the functionality. Buttons were clearly marked. There was almost always some text area telling you what was happening. I don't miss skeumorphism, but it was often used to mark real features, and those features were gone with the arbitrary skeumorphisms. Current GUI trends were created by people with no interest on making their software useful, instead they only keep an eye on showroom conversion rate. (Whether they are right or not on doing so, it's a problem nonetheless.)
  - api 8y ago
    It seems like today there is no thought put into interfaces at all beyond just what they look like.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      In my experience, today's recipe is "follow the trends of market leaders" (see e.g. everyone jumping on Material Design), and after that perhaps "optimize for conversion". Listening to UI/UX people, I often hear about not confusing the user, not burdening the user, removing obstacles. What I never hear is empowering the user, providing value to the user, enabling the user to fulfill their goals (as opposed to leading them through the path to monetization).
      - snazz 8y ago
        Although you call into question Material Design, I’ll argue that it was a force for good since it added consistency among apps and moved a lot of app-specific functionality within the central left-side menu, making features and settings more discoverable.
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
        I'm not really criticizing Material Design per se here, just people jumping to it (especially on the web) regardless of whether it makes sense for a particular product.
    - agumonkey 8y ago
      I do believe css + web magazine envy shifted everything into ~presentation and not tool/use
    - marcosdumay 8y ago
      Oh, there's a lot of thought there. Back then, people didn't bother thinking about the interface at all, and just pushed the lib provided widgets on the same place they were everywhere (there were plenty of bad metaphors that became prevalent, there were many stuff that research showed that it shouldn't be done, but everybody did anyway). Today people are always optimizing (for the showroom), always redesigning. That's part of the problem, not of the solution.
- int_19h 8y ago
  I would dare say that CUA was the peak UX on the desktop, once it was fully fleshed out (roughly early 00s). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
- qwerty456127 8y ago
  Haiku has the most cozy UI skin I can name (I have also seen some even prettier but that was something completely exotic and I don't even know what OS that was), another one of this kind was QNX 6.0 Photon desktop. An the same time when it comes to icons - I enjoyed Windows 3.11 the most (Windows 98 was not bad too).
erikpukinskis 8y ago
You’ve got it exactly backwards: todays “flat” UIs are actually many layers deep. If you look at the styleguide for Android or iOS they have like 6 different UI depths and thicknesses that can be at play at any time. What’s refreshing about Be is that it only goes like three deep. Button and not button, and... desktop? It’s because the Be UI is so shallow that it is charming. If you allow 6 different types of every UI thing like Google and Apple do, your UI designer has no chance of getting everything correct. There’s just too many combinations of widget states. Only by limiting UI depth can you get that Nintendo-Esque complete feeling, like everything is there for a reason. And Be does.
- em-bee 8y ago
  this is interesting. could you point to some additional resources on this topic?
ChuckMcM 8y ago
I don't think it can all be attributed to nostalgia. I have read papers on HCI that show this effect exactly, too much ornamentation to to little. The big thing is consistency though. You can adapt to pretty much anything apparently if it the same everywhere, tougher to do if it is only "similar" everywhere. Or worse, the same but different. I've got an old Celeron system I was going to throw away but because of this I just installed the 32bit version of Haiku on it and have been enjoying its simple style.

agumonkey 8y ago

All 90s GUIs have something that I miss[1]. I think the flat movement was a desire for hyper genericity .. but turns out that a bit (just a bit) of visual signal and faux skeumorphism (some widgets emulated actual LED keys found on hardware) is good. ps: also, flat came after both the aqua trend where effects were everywhere and skeumorphism was pushed higher. Not that surprising in a way. [1] beos, win311, macos classic, win95 (office97 era) and nt5

marcosdumay 8y ago
I mis those from the 90's GUIs: - Standard interaction widgets. There was no breaking the scroll, there was no button that you can't discover how to press. - Expert oriented interfaces. There was no action without a shortcut. The most complex software always had some CLI or an API (optionally with an intepreter). - Discoverability features. The sortcut descriptions were embedded on the same places you had to click to get the functionality. Buttons were clearly marked. There was almost always some text area telling you what was happening. I don't miss skeumorphism, but it was often used to mark real features, and those features were gone with the arbitrary skeumorphisms. Current GUI trends were created by people with no interest on making their software useful, instead they only keep an eye on showroom conversion rate. (Whether they are right or not on doing so, it's a problem nonetheless.)
- api 8y ago
  It seems like today there is no thought put into interfaces at all beyond just what they look like.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    In my experience, today's recipe is "follow the trends of market leaders" (see e.g. everyone jumping on Material Design), and after that perhaps "optimize for conversion". Listening to UI/UX people, I often hear about not confusing the user, not burdening the user, removing obstacles. What I never hear is empowering the user, providing value to the user, enabling the user to fulfill their goals (as opposed to leading them through the path to monetization).
    - snazz 8y ago
      Although you call into question Material Design, I’ll argue that it was a force for good since it added consistency among apps and moved a lot of app-specific functionality within the central left-side menu, making features and settings more discoverable.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        I'm not really criticizing Material Design per se here, just people jumping to it (especially on the web) regardless of whether it makes sense for a particular product.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    I do believe css + web magazine envy shifted everything into ~presentation and not tool/use
  - marcosdumay 8y ago
    Oh, there's a lot of thought there. Back then, people didn't bother thinking about the interface at all, and just pushed the lib provided widgets on the same place they were everywhere (there were plenty of bad metaphors that became prevalent, there were many stuff that research showed that it shouldn't be done, but everybody did anyway). Today people are always optimizing (for the showroom), always redesigning. That's part of the problem, not of the solution.
int_19h 8y ago
I would dare say that CUA was the peak UX on the desktop, once it was fully fleshed out (roughly early 00s). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
qwerty456127 8y ago
Haiku has the most cozy UI skin I can name (I have also seen some even prettier but that was something completely exotic and I don't even know what OS that was), another one of this kind was QNX 6.0 Photon desktop. An the same time when it comes to icons - I enjoyed Windows 3.11 the most (Windows 98 was not bad too).

erikpukinskis 8y ago

You’ve got it exactly backwards: todays “flat” UIs are actually many layers deep. If you look at the styleguide for Android or iOS they have like 6 different UI depths and thicknesses that can be at play at any time. What’s refreshing about Be is that it only goes like three deep. Button and not button, and... desktop? It’s because the Be UI is so shallow that it is charming. If you allow 6 different types of every UI thing like Google and Apple do, your UI designer has no chance of getting everything correct. There’s just too many combinations of widget states. Only by limiting UI depth can you get that Nintendo-Esque complete feeling, like everything is there for a reason. And Be does.

em-bee 8y ago
this is interesting. could you point to some additional resources on this topic?

ChuckMcM 8y ago

I don't think it can all be attributed to nostalgia. I have read papers on HCI that show this effect exactly, too much ornamentation to to little. The big thing is consistency though. You can adapt to pretty much anything apparently if it the same everywhere, tougher to do if it is only "similar" everywhere. Or worse, the same but different. I've got an old Celeron system I was going to throw away but because of this I just installed the 32bit version of Haiku on it and have been enjoying its simple style.