5 ms·

You would've really hated software in the early 90's -- every single thing had an aesthetic of its own. It was actually quite wonderful, and a lot of style/"per

You would've really hated software in the early 90's -- every single thing had an aesthetic of its own. It was actually quite wonderful, and a lot of style/"personality" embedded in these design choices.

ryandrake 1y ago
Yes, it’s wonderful having to figure out 50 different UIs designed by 50 different artists with 50 different ideas of what a drop-down should look like and how it should work.
- andsoitis 1y ago
  Do you have a solution in mind? While a platform (OS) can provide a UI toolkit and provide a HIG, one cannot stop language and programming tools vendors or programmers from doing whatever they like.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43762571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43762571 But realistically, you’re never going to stop a motivated app designer who is dead set on making their app an unique snowflake art project rather than a tool that users need to use.
    - andsoitis 1y ago
      There are also some classes of apps where the platform UI kit is insufficient. Immediate examples that come to mind are kiosk software, trading software, games, etc.
  - bunderbunder 1y ago
    I'm starting to think that it would take replacing basically everything that's happened on Web frontend development since XMLHttpRequest with an alternative system that's still standards-based, platform-agnostic and Web-centric, but designed from the ground up as a GUI toolkit instead of a markup language for hypermedia formatting. Because with the current status quo, the platform that dominates everyone's mindshare is HTML/JavaScript/CSS. Which has a really rudimentary concept of UI controls, and human interface guidelines that spend 90% of their effort on begging people to manually implement usability features that we used to get for free with native GUI toolkits. And I think that we might need to get away from that mess before it's possible for anyone to have any energy left over for worrying about HCI on the level that we used to in the late '90s and early '00s.
    - vbezhenar 1y ago
      As long as you can draw pixels, developers will create "unique" apps just to be different and stand out from the crowd. The only solution is heavy moderation. But very few players have market share to force developers to do what they say.
- pc86 1y ago
  The mental overhead from having slightly different drop shadows and button sizes is minimal, and I think pretty overblown by people who prefer identical UIs for everything regardless of form factor (which is of course a valid take). But someone could just as easily respond to today's UIs with "Yes, it's wonderful that every single app looks identical, as if it was all designed by one pretty boring artist with no creativity whatsoever" and that would also be a perfectly valid take.
  - regularfry 1y ago
    Predictability is a feature. That does include button sizes. To me that's where the asymmetry is. The "boring artist with no creativity" complaint is aesthetic, whereas predictability is a functional concern.
  - eska 1y ago
    It’s more like I have to actually think about where the program options are. Or that on firefox nowadays I have to snipe a tiny small spot on the title bar to move the window, instead of clicking some button that doesn’t look like one. When I first used MacOS I was surprised about tute consistency to access the settings of every program, even third party, with the same shortcut cmd+,
- RajT88 1y ago
  Maybe using computers is not for you.
bentcorner 1y ago
The utmost worst was software that had complete custom UI, filled with buttons that didn't really look like buttons. Media software and game launchers were usually the worst offenders.
- mvdtnz 1y ago
  Yet the Winamp UI gets more love than almost any software in history.
  - wink 1y ago
    Winamp only changed the colors, and the default wasn't too artsy. Try Sonique :P
mikepurvis 1y ago
Are you thinking here of pre-multitasking desktop usage, stuff like DeluxePaint, Scream Tracker, that kind of thing? Certainly the late 90s was the heyday of desktop consistency on Windows, in the 95/98/ME era, I think driven largely by the conventions Microsoft established in Office. And I believe Mac OS gave pretty good platform-level guidance then too, so things were generally okay with a few exceptions— stuff like media players that have always been more on the fanciful side.
- qw 1y ago
  It is my recollection as well. Most applications used VB, Delphi, MFC etc. that all had the "native" OS look and feel. There were some exceptions like WinAmp and others, but from what I can remember most applications were more consistent than today.
  - zozbot234 1y ago
    Those toolkits would usually reimplement the "native" look and feel from scratch, or nearly so. It was uncommon to rely directly on the basic OS widgets.
    - mikepurvis 1y ago
      MFC was Microsoft, so that was definitely native, and I think a lot of stuff used native even just for performance reasons. I remember getting very frustrated around then when something would want me to install the JVM and I knew I was in for a laggy mess of an application that would have bad font rendering, strange little buttons, and its own file picker.
      - zozbot234 1y ago
        > MFC was Microsoft, so that was definitely native Microsoft reimplemented this stuff from scratch all the time. Not just in MFC itself but Office too.
        1y ago
ferguess_k 1y ago
It's different that back in the early 90s everyone at least agrees that people don't want to disable certain important UI elements by default.
- bmicraft 1y ago
  I'll take hiding the scroll bar over not even handling mouse scroll events any day of the week

ryandrake 1y ago

Yes, it’s wonderful having to figure out 50 different UIs designed by 50 different artists with 50 different ideas of what a drop-down should look like and how it should work.

andsoitis 1y ago
Do you have a solution in mind? While a platform (OS) can provide a UI toolkit and provide a HIG, one cannot stop language and programming tools vendors or programmers from doing whatever they like.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43762571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43762571 But realistically, you’re never going to stop a motivated app designer who is dead set on making their app an unique snowflake art project rather than a tool that users need to use.
  - andsoitis 1y ago
    There are also some classes of apps where the platform UI kit is insufficient. Immediate examples that come to mind are kiosk software, trading software, games, etc.
- bunderbunder 1y ago
  I'm starting to think that it would take replacing basically everything that's happened on Web frontend development since XMLHttpRequest with an alternative system that's still standards-based, platform-agnostic and Web-centric, but designed from the ground up as a GUI toolkit instead of a markup language for hypermedia formatting. Because with the current status quo, the platform that dominates everyone's mindshare is HTML/JavaScript/CSS. Which has a really rudimentary concept of UI controls, and human interface guidelines that spend 90% of their effort on begging people to manually implement usability features that we used to get for free with native GUI toolkits. And I think that we might need to get away from that mess before it's possible for anyone to have any energy left over for worrying about HCI on the level that we used to in the late '90s and early '00s.
  - vbezhenar 1y ago
    As long as you can draw pixels, developers will create "unique" apps just to be different and stand out from the crowd. The only solution is heavy moderation. But very few players have market share to force developers to do what they say.
pc86 1y ago
The mental overhead from having slightly different drop shadows and button sizes is minimal, and I think pretty overblown by people who prefer identical UIs for everything regardless of form factor (which is of course a valid take). But someone could just as easily respond to today's UIs with "Yes, it's wonderful that every single app looks identical, as if it was all designed by one pretty boring artist with no creativity whatsoever" and that would also be a perfectly valid take.
- regularfry 1y ago
  Predictability is a feature. That does include button sizes. To me that's where the asymmetry is. The "boring artist with no creativity" complaint is aesthetic, whereas predictability is a functional concern.
- eska 1y ago
  It’s more like I have to actually think about where the program options are. Or that on firefox nowadays I have to snipe a tiny small spot on the title bar to move the window, instead of clicking some button that doesn’t look like one. When I first used MacOS I was surprised about tute consistency to access the settings of every program, even third party, with the same shortcut cmd+,
RajT88 1y ago
Maybe using computers is not for you.

bentcorner 1y ago

The utmost worst was software that had complete custom UI, filled with buttons that didn't really look like buttons. Media software and game launchers were usually the worst offenders.

mvdtnz 1y ago
Yet the Winamp UI gets more love than almost any software in history.
- wink 1y ago
  Winamp only changed the colors, and the default wasn't too artsy. Try Sonique :P

mikepurvis 1y ago

Are you thinking here of pre-multitasking desktop usage, stuff like DeluxePaint, Scream Tracker, that kind of thing? Certainly the late 90s was the heyday of desktop consistency on Windows, in the 95/98/ME era, I think driven largely by the conventions Microsoft established in Office. And I believe Mac OS gave pretty good platform-level guidance then too, so things were generally okay with a few exceptions— stuff like media players that have always been more on the fanciful side.

qw 1y ago
It is my recollection as well. Most applications used VB, Delphi, MFC etc. that all had the "native" OS look and feel. There were some exceptions like WinAmp and others, but from what I can remember most applications were more consistent than today.
- zozbot234 1y ago
  Those toolkits would usually reimplement the "native" look and feel from scratch, or nearly so. It was uncommon to rely directly on the basic OS widgets.
  - mikepurvis 1y ago
    MFC was Microsoft, so that was definitely native, and I think a lot of stuff used native even just for performance reasons. I remember getting very frustrated around then when something would want me to install the JVM and I knew I was in for a laggy mess of an application that would have bad font rendering, strange little buttons, and its own file picker.
    - zozbot234 1y ago
      > MFC was Microsoft, so that was definitely native Microsoft reimplemented this stuff from scratch all the time. Not just in MFC itself but Office too.
      - 1y ago

ferguess_k 1y ago

It's different that back in the early 90s everyone at least agrees that people don't want to disable certain important UI elements by default.

bmicraft 1y ago
I'll take hiding the scroll bar over not even handling mouse scroll events any day of the week