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The desktop app scene is so different today with more and more apps moving to SaaS. In the 90s, they were so many interesting and well-made desktop apps that we

The desktop app scene is so different today with more and more apps moving to SaaS. In the 90s, they were so many interesting and well-made desktop apps that were full of interesting ideas. Lotus Improv was certainly one of them. ( A 1990 video demonstration can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsYsZmhnXR4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsYsZmhnXR4 ) Lotus Word Pro also took a refreshingly different UI approach to MS Word. Long before Microsoft introduced the Office 'ribbon', Lotus Word Pro essentially had the same idea with their floated tabbed property box. The low resolution of screens at the time meant the design of the property box was a bit cramped. But it was still much better designed and organised than the Office 'ribbon' that would come later. See the Lotus Word Pro example below: https://youtu.be/svijgsb2iLs?t=463 https://youtu.be/svijgsb2iLs?t=463

gecko 6y ago
WordPro was awesome. It came on my mom's ThinkPad back in the mid-90s (along with an optional partition of OS/2 that I immediately removed to make more room for Windows, and then restored, and then removed, each a half-dozen times), and I initially hated it because it wasn't WordPerfect, but I soon grew to really appreciate how carefully thought out their entire approach was. In my opinion, WordPro (and the other modern apps in that suite, notably not including 1-2-3) were just a great example of how really doing something right for the GUI was fundamentally different from doing it right for the CLI. Somewhere, in my office, is still a CD with Lotus 96 on it, but I've had no real desire to reinstall it in a VM.