5 ms·

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 d

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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.
      - LoganDark 2y ago
        Don't modern versions of Windows contain at least 5 different widget frameworks? Like, Win32, Ribbon (I think engineered for Office as you said), WinForms, WPF, WinUI 1/2/3... I think Apple just has Cocoa (Carbon is long gone), AppKit, UIKit, and SwiftUI.
        bmicraft 2y ago
        You (rightly) forgot about UWP, "universal windows platform"
        LoganDark 2y ago
        Eh, I forgot if UWP was a widget framework, I thought WinUI 1/2/3 included the WinRT stuff.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - int_19h 2y ago
    MFC is a thin wrapper around Win32. Delphi's VCL is a much thicker wrapper but still using (mostly) native widgets; ditto for VB6. So, no, it was quite the opposite - it was uncommon to not rely directly on the basic OS widgets. Off the top of my head, the two toolkits that I remember that didn't do that were Borland's OWL (which quickly died out in post-Win16 era, since Delphi/VCL was strictly better), and Qt, which while not using native widgets tried to approximate that look and feel as much as possible. Even in Java land, their first take - AWT - wrapped native widgets. It wasn't until Swing that they moved on to rendering their own, and it was widely derided as looking inconsistent with other apps as a result of that.
mike_hearn 2y ago
Nah, the Windows ecosystem never even got close to being consistent. MS Office had its own UI toolkit and routinely invented new UI paradigms that weren't exposed in any Windows API, leaving people who wanted to look native scrambling to reimplement. This was particularly the case for toolbars. MS Office first invented the so-called "coolbar" and then the ribbon. Internet Explorer also rolled its own toolbar styles in ways not supported in the base Windows API e.g. toolbars with large icons and sliding sub-sections. Inventing custom toolbars was practically a sport on Windows; Netscape also did it. At the time the most popular media players were WinAmp (totally custom and themeable to boot), RealPlayer (custom UI https://andrewnile.co.uk/blog/remembering-realplayer/ https://andrewnile.co.uk/blog/remembering-realplayer/), Quicktime (custom UI) and Windows Media Player (mostly but not entirely native). Even the base utilities that came with Windows weren't consistent with each other. It wasn't uncommon in the Win 9x era to find programs still using Win3.1 style file dialogs ... a few are still buried in Windows today! The problem got worse when you examined the artwork. The stock icon library in Windows was anemic, so dev platforms frequently had to expand the core library with their own. Delphi apps could be easily identified by the distinctive icons in their buttons (https://zarko-gajic.iz.hr/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/delphi-buttons-high-dpi-aware.png https://zarko-gajic.iz.hr/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/delp...). Restyling window decorations was also very common. Microsoft themselves did it routinely, for example their flagship Encarta encyclopedia app had totally custom widgets and window styling: https://winworldpc.com/product/encarta/1999 https://winworldpc.com/product/encarta/1999 To get online most users were running something like CompuServe (custom web-style main UI https://thedayintech.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/compuserve-a.jpg https://thedayintech.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/0...), or AOL (custom UI https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/ehxb1g/the_aol_homepage_circa_1999/?rdt=37248 https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/ehxb1g/the_aol_h...), or MSN (custom UI https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6179a66d5f9cc70024c61878/6179a66e5f9cc70024c6cee8_what-happened-to-msn-messenger1%20(1)%20(1).jpeg https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6179a66d5f9cc70024c61878/...) Windows apps of this era were much like web apps are today: they shared some common code for things like rendering menus, buttons or widgets in their settings screens, but the main UI users interacted with were almost always custom widgets that were extremely varied between apps. Win32 was nearly impossible to style compared to HTML so this represented a large investment of developer time, but a custom branded UI was believed to be worth nearly any cost. This is something fundamental to how humans work and is pointless to fight, a lesson the web platform fully embraced giving it an advantage over other UI toolkits of the era.
btbuildem 2y ago
Early 90's, especially on Amiga -- where a proper windowing desktop env ("workbench") coexisted with the wildest custom UIs. Maybe it was the roots of the machine, heavily used as a games console and a demoscene workhorse? It seems like at that time there was so much creative design effort put into UX -- and it didn't seem to get in the way, maybe because each genre of software was kind of on the cutting edge back then, establishing what would eventually evolve into conventions. Mod trackers, image editing, disk copying, etc. Maybe it's a bit of nostalgia, but it felt really immersive to pull up a piece of software you were familiar with; each UI was so distinct and purpose-built, but it also had.. flourish? style? soul? Not so much now.

qw 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.
    - LoganDark 2y ago
      Don't modern versions of Windows contain at least 5 different widget frameworks? Like, Win32, Ribbon (I think engineered for Office as you said), WinForms, WPF, WinUI 1/2/3... I think Apple just has Cocoa (Carbon is long gone), AppKit, UIKit, and SwiftUI.
      - bmicraft 2y ago
        You (rightly) forgot about UWP, "universal windows platform"
        LoganDark 2y ago
        Eh, I forgot if UWP was a widget framework, I thought WinUI 1/2/3 included the WinRT stuff.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- int_19h 2y ago
  MFC is a thin wrapper around Win32. Delphi's VCL is a much thicker wrapper but still using (mostly) native widgets; ditto for VB6. So, no, it was quite the opposite - it was uncommon to not rely directly on the basic OS widgets. Off the top of my head, the two toolkits that I remember that didn't do that were Borland's OWL (which quickly died out in post-Win16 era, since Delphi/VCL was strictly better), and Qt, which while not using native widgets tried to approximate that look and feel as much as possible. Even in Java land, their first take - AWT - wrapped native widgets. It wasn't until Swing that they moved on to rendering their own, and it was widely derided as looking inconsistent with other apps as a result of that.

mike_hearn 2y ago

Nah, the Windows ecosystem never even got close to being consistent. MS Office had its own UI toolkit and routinely invented new UI paradigms that weren't exposed in any Windows API, leaving people who wanted to look native scrambling to reimplement. This was particularly the case for toolbars. MS Office first invented the so-called "coolbar" and then the ribbon. Internet Explorer also rolled its own toolbar styles in ways not supported in the base Windows API e.g. toolbars with large icons and sliding sub-sections. Inventing custom toolbars was practically a sport on Windows; Netscape also did it. At the time the most popular media players were WinAmp (totally custom and themeable to boot), RealPlayer (custom UI https://andrewnile.co.uk/blog/remembering-realplayer/ https://andrewnile.co.uk/blog/remembering-realplayer/), Quicktime (custom UI) and Windows Media Player (mostly but not entirely native). Even the base utilities that came with Windows weren't consistent with each other. It wasn't uncommon in the Win 9x era to find programs still using Win3.1 style file dialogs ... a few are still buried in Windows today! The problem got worse when you examined the artwork. The stock icon library in Windows was anemic, so dev platforms frequently had to expand the core library with their own. Delphi apps could be easily identified by the distinctive icons in their buttons (https://zarko-gajic.iz.hr/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/delphi-buttons-high-dpi-aware.png https://zarko-gajic.iz.hr/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/delp...). Restyling window decorations was also very common. Microsoft themselves did it routinely, for example their flagship Encarta encyclopedia app had totally custom widgets and window styling: https://winworldpc.com/product/encarta/1999 https://winworldpc.com/product/encarta/1999 To get online most users were running something like CompuServe (custom web-style main UI https://thedayintech.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/compuserve-a.jpg https://thedayintech.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/0...), or AOL (custom UI https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/ehxb1g/the_aol_homepage_circa_1999/?rdt=37248 https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/ehxb1g/the_aol_h...), or MSN (custom UI https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6179a66d5f9cc70024c61878/6179a66e5f9cc70024c6cee8_what-happened-to-msn-messenger1%20(1)%20(1).jpeg https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6179a66d5f9cc70024c61878/...) Windows apps of this era were much like web apps are today: they shared some common code for things like rendering menus, buttons or widgets in their settings screens, but the main UI users interacted with were almost always custom widgets that were extremely varied between apps. Win32 was nearly impossible to style compared to HTML so this represented a large investment of developer time, but a custom branded UI was believed to be worth nearly any cost. This is something fundamental to how humans work and is pointless to fight, a lesson the web platform fully embraced giving it an advantage over other UI toolkits of the era.

btbuildem 2y ago

Early 90's, especially on Amiga -- where a proper windowing desktop env ("workbench") coexisted with the wildest custom UIs. Maybe it was the roots of the machine, heavily used as a games console and a demoscene workhorse? It seems like at that time there was so much creative design effort put into UX -- and it didn't seem to get in the way, maybe because each genre of software was kind of on the cutting edge back then, establishing what would eventually evolve into conventions. Mod trackers, image editing, disk copying, etc. Maybe it's a bit of nostalgia, but it felt really immersive to pull up a piece of software you were familiar with; each UI was so distinct and purpose-built, but it also had.. flourish? style? soul? Not so much now.