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Yeah. Back in the day, every application was expected to use the same common set of controls - which were well written by the OS vendor, well tested, well docum

Yeah. Back in the day, every application was expected to use the same common set of controls - which were well written by the OS vendor, well tested, well documented and well understood by users. Every button on windows 95 looks and behaves the same way. Every application had application menus that worked the same way, in the same font, and they all responded to the same keyboard shortcuts. These days every application reinvents its own controls for everything. For example, in a web browser the tab bar and address bars are totally custom controls. Electron apps like vscode take this to the extreme - I don't think vscode or spotify use any native controls in the entire UI. I blame the web in part. It was never designed as a system to build application UIs, and as such the provided UI primitives are primitive and rubbish. Developers got used to building our own custom elements for everything - which we build fresh for every client and style in alignment with the brand. UIs built on the web are inconsistent - so our users never get a chance to learn a common set of primitives. And for some reason, OS vendors have totally dropped the ball on this stuff. Windows has several competing "official" UI libraries. Every library has a different look and feel, and all are in various stages of decomposition. Microsoft's own software teams seem as lost as everyone else when it comes to navigating the morass of options - if windows 11 and MS Teams are anything to go by. Macos isn't quite as bad, but its still a bit of a mess. Every year I expect the people building xcode to know how to build and debug software on macos. And then xcode crashes for the 3rd time in a week. Xcode achieves the impossible of making the javascript ecosystem seem sane and attractive. I'd love a return to the halcyon days of vb6, where UIs were simple and consistent. Where there was a human interface guidelines document that UI developers were expected to read. I want users and developers alike to know how the platform works and what the rules and conventions are. F it. How hard can that really be to build?

pvg 3y ago
I think you're forgetting how much more dense and complex even a basic web ui is in controls. Every HN comment in the default story view has something like up to 10 clickable controls - a pair of vote buttons, username, timestamp, a bunch of nav links, a hide control, a reply button. HN, the famously minimalist, oldskool website. The web made new ui and even the back-in-the-day version of that ui is way more complicated than the back-in-the-day desktop app UI you're thinking of.
- josephg 3y ago
  Hm. I don't think it would be that hard it would be to remake HN's UI using an old school UI component library. The up/down arrows could use the up/down buttons on this screenshot from macos's old color picker: https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/interface/dialogs/colourselector/macos753-1-1.png https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/interface/dialogs/colo... ... But limited to only allow you up/downvote between -1 and 1. Everything else could be done with buttons and a TextField / Label for comments and replying. The web is a bit weird in that it taught us to build every UI as a giant scrolling document. And HN is no different. A more "classic" UI approach would be something like Thunderbird mail - with 2 panes: a "comments" tree on top and a "message body" down the bottom. That would be harder to read (since you'd need to click on the next message to jump to it). But it might encourage longer, more thoughtful replies. Thunderbird: https://lwn.net/Articles/91536/ https://lwn.net/Articles/91536/ Or you could reimplement HN with classic controls and something like TB 114's UI: https://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/account_mail_tab.png https://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/account_ma... Probably still worse that what HN is now though.
  - tomatocracy 3y ago
    A "traditional" UI for HN would surely look a lot like Usenet newsgroup readers. I think Thunderbird might even still support NNTP. Usenet had a much better model for discussion groups/forums like HN in my view, though crucially for the modern world it is missing some kind of "comment voting"/user-driven moderation. I wonder if there's an HN<->NNTP gateway around somewhere?
    - rbanffy 3y ago
      Voting could be handled with comments with specific content - wouldn’t even need to have a body, as everything could be in the headers. Totals could be computed at the server, unless we wanted real NNTP-style distributed discussions.
      - davidwritesbugs 3y ago
ReleaseCandidat 3y ago
> Every application had application menus that worked the same way, in the same font, and they all responded to the same keyboard shortcuts. My experience had been that most (almost all) of them _only_ worked with a single font in a single font size and a specific window size. If you did change any of these, it got unusable. About consistency: except for those that didn't, not even MS themselves were consistent. http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/shame.html http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/shame.html The 90s had been also the time of programs like Kai's Power Tools https://mprove.de/script/99/kai/ https://mprove.de/script/99/kai/ and Winamp. I'm sorry, but "interface consistency" is not something that comes to my mind when I think of 90s and early 2000s Windows programs (neither was Linux). Irix with 4DWM had been quite consistent at that time.
- Amezarak 3y ago
  I used Windows 98SE for eight years. I never saw any issue changing window sizes. I can't speak to font sizes since IIRC that was an option but I left it default.
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    For all my apps that had controls pinned to a specific coordinate, I made sure to make the windows fixed-size. I taught courses on VB from versions 3 to 6 and this was always something we went over.
- josephg 3y ago
  In the "hall of shame" you linked, they list applications which misuse radio buttons. Uh oh, call the police. Sure, there were a few inconsistencies. But honestly, up until the ribbon in Office, it was incredibly homogeneous compared to today. In comparison, modern windows doesn't even hide its inconsistencies. Try right clicking on the desktop in windows 11. You get a dropdown with large item spacing and rounded corners. But then if you click "Show more options", the dropdown is replaced with a different dropdown with subtly different menu items, small spacing and sharp corners. They aren't even pretending any more. This isn't Kai's photo goo we're talking about here. This is core windows. Unless you opted out, basically every application in the 90s and early 2000s was built using the core platform's UI library. There were a few exceptions, but the 90s were a golden age for platform consistency compared to today. Now its hard to find any 2 applications on windows which use the same UI style. Firefox and explorer? Nope - the maximise and close buttons have a different style. Spotify? Nah thats some custom webview. Visual studio? Nope, thats using an old windows library. Whatsapp desktop? Qt. Intellij? Some java thing. And so it goes. Its an absolute zoo.
wildrhythms 3y ago
I think about this every time I'm asked to build a custom dropdown menu. Can we just use a <select>? No- it must be 'branded'!
- wharvle 3y ago
  If you’re in a rare team doing agile halfway right, see if you can start providing separate level-of-effort for a feature with good UI that’s also quick, and the worse-for-the-user “on-brand” one. Part of what causes this crap is that the costs aren’t visible. If you can get it through stakeholders’ heads that they’re cutting the feature development rate in half (and making UX worse, and paying in maintenance time and a higher defect rate, but those are harder to make them understand) with their twee UI, some can be steered away from it, or at least convinced to tone down the most-harmful parts.
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    > Part of what causes this crap is that the costs aren’t visible. A billion times this. And this is when the next version of the design system isn’t incompatible with the previous one.
rbanffy 3y ago
> Windows has several competing "official" UI libraries. Every library has a different look and feel, and all are in various stages of decomposition I can’t fathom why they made the decision to push every style to a different rendering engine. Working on Windows gets you to see every look and feel and the deeper you go, the closer you get to Windows 2000.
lmpdev 3y ago
They dropped the ball because no major part of their current business model involves creating a better operating system for the sake of attracting new users They seem to aim at minimising users leaving and maximising the extraction of data obtained per user
norswap 3y ago
Hasn't there been a set of web components that tries to reproduce this?

pvg 3y ago

I think you're forgetting how much more dense and complex even a basic web ui is in controls. Every HN comment in the default story view has something like up to 10 clickable controls - a pair of vote buttons, username, timestamp, a bunch of nav links, a hide control, a reply button. HN, the famously minimalist, oldskool website. The web made new ui and even the back-in-the-day version of that ui is way more complicated than the back-in-the-day desktop app UI you're thinking of.

josephg 3y ago
Hm. I don't think it would be that hard it would be to remake HN's UI using an old school UI component library. The up/down arrows could use the up/down buttons on this screenshot from macos's old color picker: https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/interface/dialogs/colourselector/macos753-1-1.png https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/interface/dialogs/colo... ... But limited to only allow you up/downvote between -1 and 1. Everything else could be done with buttons and a TextField / Label for comments and replying. The web is a bit weird in that it taught us to build every UI as a giant scrolling document. And HN is no different. A more "classic" UI approach would be something like Thunderbird mail - with 2 panes: a "comments" tree on top and a "message body" down the bottom. That would be harder to read (since you'd need to click on the next message to jump to it). But it might encourage longer, more thoughtful replies. Thunderbird: https://lwn.net/Articles/91536/ https://lwn.net/Articles/91536/ Or you could reimplement HN with classic controls and something like TB 114's UI: https://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/account_mail_tab.png https://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/account_ma... Probably still worse that what HN is now though.
- tomatocracy 3y ago
  A "traditional" UI for HN would surely look a lot like Usenet newsgroup readers. I think Thunderbird might even still support NNTP. Usenet had a much better model for discussion groups/forums like HN in my view, though crucially for the modern world it is missing some kind of "comment voting"/user-driven moderation. I wonder if there's an HN<->NNTP gateway around somewhere?
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    Voting could be handled with comments with specific content - wouldn’t even need to have a body, as everything could be in the headers. Totals could be computed at the server, unless we wanted real NNTP-style distributed discussions.
    - davidwritesbugs 3y ago

ReleaseCandidat 3y ago

> Every application had application menus that worked the same way, in the same font, and they all responded to the same keyboard shortcuts. My experience had been that most (almost all) of them _only_ worked with a single font in a single font size and a specific window size. If you did change any of these, it got unusable. About consistency: except for those that didn't, not even MS themselves were consistent. http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/shame.html http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/shame.html The 90s had been also the time of programs like Kai's Power Tools https://mprove.de/script/99/kai/ https://mprove.de/script/99/kai/ and Winamp. I'm sorry, but "interface consistency" is not something that comes to my mind when I think of 90s and early 2000s Windows programs (neither was Linux). Irix with 4DWM had been quite consistent at that time.

Amezarak 3y ago
I used Windows 98SE for eight years. I never saw any issue changing window sizes. I can't speak to font sizes since IIRC that was an option but I left it default.
- rbanffy 3y ago
  For all my apps that had controls pinned to a specific coordinate, I made sure to make the windows fixed-size. I taught courses on VB from versions 3 to 6 and this was always something we went over.
josephg 3y ago
In the "hall of shame" you linked, they list applications which misuse radio buttons. Uh oh, call the police. Sure, there were a few inconsistencies. But honestly, up until the ribbon in Office, it was incredibly homogeneous compared to today. In comparison, modern windows doesn't even hide its inconsistencies. Try right clicking on the desktop in windows 11. You get a dropdown with large item spacing and rounded corners. But then if you click "Show more options", the dropdown is replaced with a different dropdown with subtly different menu items, small spacing and sharp corners. They aren't even pretending any more. This isn't Kai's photo goo we're talking about here. This is core windows. Unless you opted out, basically every application in the 90s and early 2000s was built using the core platform's UI library. There were a few exceptions, but the 90s were a golden age for platform consistency compared to today. Now its hard to find any 2 applications on windows which use the same UI style. Firefox and explorer? Nope - the maximise and close buttons have a different style. Spotify? Nah thats some custom webview. Visual studio? Nope, thats using an old windows library. Whatsapp desktop? Qt. Intellij? Some java thing. And so it goes. Its an absolute zoo.

wildrhythms 3y ago

I think about this every time I'm asked to build a custom dropdown menu. Can we just use a <select>? No- it must be 'branded'!

wharvle 3y ago
If you’re in a rare team doing agile halfway right, see if you can start providing separate level-of-effort for a feature with good UI that’s also quick, and the worse-for-the-user “on-brand” one. Part of what causes this crap is that the costs aren’t visible. If you can get it through stakeholders’ heads that they’re cutting the feature development rate in half (and making UX worse, and paying in maintenance time and a higher defect rate, but those are harder to make them understand) with their twee UI, some can be steered away from it, or at least convinced to tone down the most-harmful parts.
- rbanffy 3y ago
  > Part of what causes this crap is that the costs aren’t visible. A billion times this. And this is when the next version of the design system isn’t incompatible with the previous one.

rbanffy 3y ago

> Windows has several competing "official" UI libraries. Every library has a different look and feel, and all are in various stages of decomposition I can’t fathom why they made the decision to push every style to a different rendering engine. Working on Windows gets you to see every look and feel and the deeper you go, the closer you get to Windows 2000.

lmpdev 3y ago

They dropped the ball because no major part of their current business model involves creating a better operating system for the sake of attracting new users They seem to aim at minimising users leaving and maximising the extraction of data obtained per user

norswap 3y ago

Hasn't there been a set of web components that tries to reproduce this?