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I agree. It is clear, functional, and reminds me of staged doctor’s offices in commercials for prescription drugs. Apple now is entering their Windows XP desig

I agree. It is clear, functional, and reminds me of staged doctor’s offices in commercials for prescription drugs. Apple now is entering their Windows XP design era. Once things get too gaudy they will introduce Flat Glass or pretend like they invented straight lines and sharp corners. But at least that seems to have a personality.

JadeNB 1y ago
> Apple now is entering their Windows XP design era. Is Windows XP universally understood to be bad design? I remember it as somewhere between blandly unremarkable and slightly pleasant.
- coredog64 1y ago
  The "Fisher-Price" design language was unpopular, but ISTR you could turn off most of the eye candy and get a the Windows 2000 design language. Pretty sure that was like the first or second thing I did with both XP and Vista.
  - derefr 1y ago
    And even then, people were never against most of it. Scrollbar thumbs with grip stipple? Checkboxes that fill in with a roundrect rather than a checkmark? Buttons and tabs that have an inline ring-highlight "intent" color to them, akin to the fill color on modern Bootstrap theme buttons? These were all parts of the Luna theme as well — and people liked them. (And, IIRC, they were often sad that these parts got deactivated when reverting to the Windows Classic theme, and often asked if there was some hybrid theme that kept these.) With Luna, I think people were mainly just reacting negatively to two things: 1. the start button being big and green and a weird blob shape; the start menu it opens having a huge, very rounded forehead and chin — and both of these having a certain "pre-baked custom PNG image 8-way sliced in Photoshop and drawn by parts" look that you'd see used on web pages in this era. This made the whole UI feel very "non-brutalist" — form not following function, the way it did in Windows Classic (where the theme was in part designed to optimize for as few line-draw GDI calls as possible.) 2. both the taskbar and window title bars being vertically thicker, and having a vaguely-plastic-looking sheen to them to "add dimensionality." And my hypothesis is that, of these, it was mainly the "vertically thicker" taskbar+window decorations that upset so many people. This was an era where many screens were still largely 1024x768, even as monitor sizes were growing; so "small was cool" [and legible!] Websites baked their text into images using 8x5 pixel fonts; Linux users used tiny fonts and narrow themes in fvwm/blackbox/fluxbox, etc. In that era, a title bar stealing thirty whole pixels was almost blasphemy. (Same problem with the Office XP ribbon. Microsoft's visual designers must have been too far ahead-of-the-curve in what kind of resolutions their graphics cards supported, I think.) I think, if there was an alternate version of Luna that also shipped with XP, that just narrowed the taskbar and window caption bar to the Windows Classic dimensions... then Luna would have been universally acclaimed.
  - JadeNB 1y ago
    > The "Fisher-Price" design language was unpopular, but ISTR you could turn off most of the eye candy and get a the Windows 2000 design language. Pretty sure that was like the first or second thing I did with both XP and Vista. Ah, it is very likely that that's what I did, and so why I don't remember anything notable about it.
- IgorPartola 1y ago
  I think any Windows GUI is going to be perceived with bias so I am not going to say that it was bad design, let alone universally bad. But it was bold, controversial, and short lived.
chasil 1y ago
You likely mean the "Aero" stage. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero While many express nostalgia for Aero in Windows 7, Microsoft dismissed it in fairly harsh terms: 'Microsoft called the Aero interface it once championed and poured so much love upon "dated and cheesy".' https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/21/windows_8_aero_dead/ https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/21/windows_8_aero_dead/ The thing with [Microsoft's] dictated GUIs is that they all end up on the trash heap. Some people have affinity for a GUI aesthetic. I liked Motif and CDE. Ripping them away for the garbage pile is a supremely foolish thing to do, as it can drive users away. Apple, and Microsoft, will surely add more to this pile shortly.
- Doohickey-d 1y ago
  There's also another version of the story of why they removed it: > So basically, Microsoft's claim of Aero being "cheesy" "and "dated" are just lies to cover up the fact where the original Surface RT is not powerful enough to handle them. https://old.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/38vyn7/the_true_reason_behind_aero_glasss_removal_from_a/ https://old.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/38vyn7/the_true_re...
  - chasil 1y ago
    Yes, it was obvious that the Windows 8 focus on tablets (and Windows phone) would not work well with Aero, since their GPUs were lacking.

JadeNB 1y ago

> Apple now is entering their Windows XP design era. Is Windows XP universally understood to be bad design? I remember it as somewhere between blandly unremarkable and slightly pleasant.

coredog64 1y ago
The "Fisher-Price" design language was unpopular, but ISTR you could turn off most of the eye candy and get a the Windows 2000 design language. Pretty sure that was like the first or second thing I did with both XP and Vista.
- derefr 1y ago
  And even then, people were never against most of it. Scrollbar thumbs with grip stipple? Checkboxes that fill in with a roundrect rather than a checkmark? Buttons and tabs that have an inline ring-highlight "intent" color to them, akin to the fill color on modern Bootstrap theme buttons? These were all parts of the Luna theme as well — and people liked them. (And, IIRC, they were often sad that these parts got deactivated when reverting to the Windows Classic theme, and often asked if there was some hybrid theme that kept these.) With Luna, I think people were mainly just reacting negatively to two things: 1. the start button being big and green and a weird blob shape; the start menu it opens having a huge, very rounded forehead and chin — and both of these having a certain "pre-baked custom PNG image 8-way sliced in Photoshop and drawn by parts" look that you'd see used on web pages in this era. This made the whole UI feel very "non-brutalist" — form not following function, the way it did in Windows Classic (where the theme was in part designed to optimize for as few line-draw GDI calls as possible.) 2. both the taskbar and window title bars being vertically thicker, and having a vaguely-plastic-looking sheen to them to "add dimensionality." And my hypothesis is that, of these, it was mainly the "vertically thicker" taskbar+window decorations that upset so many people. This was an era where many screens were still largely 1024x768, even as monitor sizes were growing; so "small was cool" [and legible!] Websites baked their text into images using 8x5 pixel fonts; Linux users used tiny fonts and narrow themes in fvwm/blackbox/fluxbox, etc. In that era, a title bar stealing thirty whole pixels was almost blasphemy. (Same problem with the Office XP ribbon. Microsoft's visual designers must have been too far ahead-of-the-curve in what kind of resolutions their graphics cards supported, I think.) I think, if there was an alternate version of Luna that also shipped with XP, that just narrowed the taskbar and window caption bar to the Windows Classic dimensions... then Luna would have been universally acclaimed.
- JadeNB 1y ago
  > The "Fisher-Price" design language was unpopular, but ISTR you could turn off most of the eye candy and get a the Windows 2000 design language. Pretty sure that was like the first or second thing I did with both XP and Vista. Ah, it is very likely that that's what I did, and so why I don't remember anything notable about it.
IgorPartola 1y ago
I think any Windows GUI is going to be perceived with bias so I am not going to say that it was bad design, let alone universally bad. But it was bold, controversial, and short lived.

chasil 1y ago

You likely mean the "Aero" stage. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero While many express nostalgia for Aero in Windows 7, Microsoft dismissed it in fairly harsh terms: 'Microsoft called the Aero interface it once championed and poured so much love upon "dated and cheesy".' https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/21/windows_8_aero_dead/ https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/21/windows_8_aero_dead/ The thing with [Microsoft's] dictated GUIs is that they all end up on the trash heap. Some people have affinity for a GUI aesthetic. I liked Motif and CDE. Ripping them away for the garbage pile is a supremely foolish thing to do, as it can drive users away. Apple, and Microsoft, will surely add more to this pile shortly.

Doohickey-d 1y ago
There's also another version of the story of why they removed it: > So basically, Microsoft's claim of Aero being "cheesy" "and "dated" are just lies to cover up the fact where the original Surface RT is not powerful enough to handle them. https://old.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/38vyn7/the_true_reason_behind_aero_glasss_removal_from_a/ https://old.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/38vyn7/the_true_re...
- chasil 1y ago
  Yes, it was obvious that the Windows 8 focus on tablets (and Windows phone) would not work well with Aero, since their GPUs were lacking.