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It's more, there's no attempt to structure information anymore. All the settings menus are a nightmare of lists upon lists and each app has a completely random

It's more, there's no attempt to structure information anymore. 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.

jorvi 3y ago
This was one of the biggest powers of Mac OS X, before Electron became big. 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.
- dylan604 3y ago
  >your application would stick out like a sore thumb if you didn’t. 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/ https://mprove.de/script/99/kai/
  - fingerlocks 3y ago
    That article is excellent. Fascinating history and a great trip down memory lane. Thanks for sharing.
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    This is the most intensely 90s software aesthetic I have ever seen. 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.
    - dylan604 3y ago
      >It turns out that making digital art actually requires art skills 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.
      - barrysteve 3y ago
        One of the first drawing skills people traditionally learn is perspective. Bob Ross knows it. AI can't do it, doesn't understand it. Generative art makes excessively beautiful wallpaper, right now.
      - CRConrad 3y ago
        Let some degenerative model do the work... There, FTFY.
- xp84 3y ago
  Seriously. When I think of my daily tools I’m not sure I have even one application with a standard UI. Not one. JetBrains IDEs may be the closest, but I’ve already seen their UI reboot coming (soon mandatory I assume) and it’s disgusting.
- bithaze 3y ago
  Reminds me of Mac-assed Mac apps[1]: > 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 https://inessential.com/2020/03/19/proxyman
- Falkon1313 3y ago
  Alas, Mac is one of the biggest offenders of crappy design and anti-usability. 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.
  - jorvi 3y ago
    > Turns out it was just hiding it because scrollbars were entirely hidden and disabled by default 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.
  - kps 3y ago
    Old MacOS was good, until they started gradually making it phonelike. The original Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines¹ was solid work. (The big flaw, as usual, forced on the professionals from above: the form-over-function one-button mouse, requiring the undiscoverable double-click — it's almost forgotten now, but originally people had to be trained to double click ‘correctly’.) ¹ https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/573097 https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/573097
- troupo 3y ago
  Unfortunately modern-day Apple is taken over the same shitty "designers" that have taken over every other company.
fijiaarone 3y ago
Flash invented tiny scroll bars
- hulitu 3y ago
  That is not an excuse to use them.

jorvi 3y ago

This was one of the biggest powers of Mac OS X, before Electron became big. 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.

dylan604 3y ago
>your application would stick out like a sore thumb if you didn’t. 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/ https://mprove.de/script/99/kai/
- fingerlocks 3y ago
  That article is excellent. Fascinating history and a great trip down memory lane. Thanks for sharing.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  This is the most intensely 90s software aesthetic I have ever seen. 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.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    >It turns out that making digital art actually requires art skills 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.
    - barrysteve 3y ago
      One of the first drawing skills people traditionally learn is perspective. Bob Ross knows it. AI can't do it, doesn't understand it. Generative art makes excessively beautiful wallpaper, right now.
    - CRConrad 3y ago
      Let some degenerative model do the work... There, FTFY.
xp84 3y ago
Seriously. When I think of my daily tools I’m not sure I have even one application with a standard UI. Not one. JetBrains IDEs may be the closest, but I’ve already seen their UI reboot coming (soon mandatory I assume) and it’s disgusting.
bithaze 3y ago
Reminds me of Mac-assed Mac apps[1]: > 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 https://inessential.com/2020/03/19/proxyman
Falkon1313 3y ago
Alas, Mac is one of the biggest offenders of crappy design and anti-usability. 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.
- jorvi 3y ago
  > Turns out it was just hiding it because scrollbars were entirely hidden and disabled by default 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.
- kps 3y ago
  Old MacOS was good, until they started gradually making it phonelike. The original Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines¹ was solid work. (The big flaw, as usual, forced on the professionals from above: the form-over-function one-button mouse, requiring the undiscoverable double-click — it's almost forgotten now, but originally people had to be trained to double click ‘correctly’.) ¹ https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/573097 https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/573097
troupo 3y ago
Unfortunately modern-day Apple is taken over the same shitty "designers" that have taken over every other company.

fijiaarone 3y ago

Flash invented tiny scroll bars

hulitu 3y ago
That is not an excuse to use them.