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> If a PM tells you to shove a UI style More than likely designers are making up work to justify their jobs. Not good for your career if you admit the desktop
by xnx 10mo ago
> If a PM tells you to shove a UI style
More than likely designers are making up work to justify their jobs. Not good for your career if you admit the desktop interface was perfected in ~1995.
- drnick1 10mo agoThis. The Windows 95 interface was optimal in many regards. Given how much faster computers are now, every UI operation should just be instantaneous. It's ridiculous that desktop interfaces and Web pages became heavier as computers got faster, so that a heavy website today does not load meaningfully faster than a plain text webpage in 1995. Edit: On Linux, you have desktop environments like LXQt for this. Unfortunately, last time I checked, Wayland was not supported.
- RunSet 10mo agoWayland being as needful as Liquid Glass itself.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 10mo agoBeyond that, any lag from Win95 era was probably because of spinning hard drives. Running it on a SSD would be instantaneous. Also, file search might even work, instead of whatever we have now.
- xnx 10mo agoI don't know how I used Windows before I installed Everything.
- komodo99 10mo agoI can attest to this one, 6 months ago I had a vintage pc I needed to rehab due to the curse of the proprietary ISA card. Imaged the failing drive to an ssd, sata->IDE adapter. P3 733MHz, 128 mb ram, W98SE, its astonishingly fast and responsive. Boots nearer to my memories of MSDOS 6.22 firing up than anything else. Acrobat reader still performs like a lead balloon though, even a miracle can't fix that one.
- CapsAdmin 10mo agoThe responsiveness of windows 2000 in a vm is insane. It feels like every action happens instantaneously. Contrast this with the "os" of my LG oled monitor. It seriously takes 5 seconds to open the settings menu.
- userbinator 10mo agoContrast this with the "os" of my LG oled monitor. It seriously takes 5 seconds to open the settings menu. I'm not sure what they use these days, but 10-15 years ago the MCU in a monitor was likely to be a ~10MHz 8051.
- userbinator 10mo agoA whole installation of Win95 with Office95 is only a few hundred MB and would fit entirely in RAM on a modern system. You can run a VM of it like that to experience the extreme speed. Even a browser these days uses several times that.
- ChoGGi 10mo agoPersonally, I can't wait till we have webpages that load slower then windows 95 boots.
- msie 10mo agoLoved the win95 interface. I've always wanted it on new Windows box but the existing solutions out there seem lacking.
- ZoomZoomZoom 10mo agoWayland is supported with LXQt, labwc replacing openbox. If anything, UX is snappy.
- k4rli 10mo agoWayland with Sway feels toptier already. Tiling WM is just so simple, clean, fast, and perfect in every way.
- prmoustache 10mo agoEven Gnome and KDE can feel much snappier if you remove effects and animations.
- solfox 10mo ago100% this. I recall watching their launch video about Liquid Glass. It was filled with ego-driven "we're changing the world here" nonsense. They were designing in a bubble and wanted to do something different so they could justify the work. It was never about the user.
- Rumudiez 10mo agomarketers are not designers and vice versa. of course the press release is going to be melodramatic no matter what the designers thought, or were told
- gyomu 10mo ago“Marketers are not designers” is fine, except it was the designers themselves pushing the marketing drivel in those videos.
- acdha 10mo agoWho was driving that, though? If the project has high-level management buy-in, the people in the scripted videos are going to be on message if they want to stay employed.
- cyberge99 10mo agoYou’re not looking far enough ahead. Liquid glass isn’t about Mac. It’s about VisionPro and wearables. This is a strategic play by Apple.
- psunavy03 10mo ago. . . so other devices are required to have the same interface? No, they're not. Just because you want to share enough design cues to make people understand they're dealing with the same brand doesn't mean you have to hammer square pegs into round holes. Not to mention the fact that first, you have to get to a point where AR wearables are commercially viable, and we don't seem to have hit that point yet.
- staplers 10mo agoUber, Airbnb, Robinhood all took off because they created easy to use beautiful apps (compared to their predecessors). The anti-design bias in this forum is genuinely unhinged. I see some saying the entire destruction of the natural world stems from design lol.
- progbits 10mo agoNo they took of because they used illegal practices and VC money to undercut competitors.
- ethbr1 10mo agoBit of column A, bit of column B.
- oompydoompy74 10mo agoI think we can pretty safely assume that every large and successful company has done horrible and illegal things to get themselves there. That being said I think design and ease of use still play a significant part in Uber’s success.
- kjellsbells 10mo agoWell, I didn't have Balzac on today's HN bingo card, for sure! "Behind every great fortune is an equally great crime." https://www.britannica.com/biography/Honore-de-Balzac/La-Comedie-humaine https://www.britannica.com/biography/Honore-de-Balzac/La-Com...
- naikrovek 10mo agodesign for design's sake is bad, and that's what Liquid Glass is. There was no thought behind it. It is 2026 and UIs are still abysmally slow in many cases. How is that even remotely possible? Now, with that in mind, consider (just for a moment) why people might think that UX people don't know what they're doing.
- 10mo ago
- phantasmish 10mo agoNo kidding. “Reverting” to something pretty similar to Mac OS in the late ‘90s, as far as visuals and basic UI behavior (but not removing modern features) would be a big improvement. And once they did that they could just leave it that way. It’d be fine. UI churn sucks enough that it’s not worth it for users unless it’s a huge improvement, and nothing has been. Though if we could get the newer settings panel of macOS a few versions back, before they inexplicably ruined the best OS GUI settings interface I’ve ever used, that’d be great.
- krylon 10mo agoThis is the howling insanity that drove Microsoft to kill the start button, then reanimate it, then move it to the center of the task bar.
- reichstein 10mo ago... thus falling into the Pitt of failure, where every way out is just a little too far away.
- krylon 10mo agoWhen I started using Linux, I didn't do so because I disliked Windows so much, I just was an insatiably curious nerd. But since then, each new version of Windows has made me more and more grateful for not having to deal with that dumpster fire on my personal devices. The saddest part to me is that I have the strong impression it wouldn't take that much work to turn Windows into a much better system. But for whatever reason, Microsoft is not interested in making that happen. Maybe they are incapable of doing so. But the system itself not the reason.
- xenophonf 10mo agoThey also forced us to waste relatively valuable vertical screen space on the task bar, taking away our ability to move it to the left or right screen edges.
- nine_k 10mo agoSadly, the desktop interface was not perfect by 1995. It was visually near-perfect, but the UX, acutal ease of interaction, left much to be desired. Sadly, it's the visuals that make pretty screenshots. The actual UX of OSX is quite jarringly bad in many regards 30 years later :( But developing interactions is much harder.
- DenisM 10mo agoIt’s not just career. Any artistic endeavor suffers from competition with the past, which eventually becomes a guaranteed loss. Negating the frame becomes the primary way to leave a mark.
- vanviegen 10mo agoBut for actual art, such as music, constantly doing novel things is kind of the point. Every generation needs its own music that runs counter to what came before. User interfaces are not art.
- DenisM 10mo ago> User interfaces are not art. Do UI designers think that way? I imagine some see it as engineering - make things work efficiently for the users. Others see it as art. The outcome will depend on which group gains the upper hand.
- Terr_ 10mo agoThere's some linguistic ambiguity here if we just say "art", because it includes things we might divide into "artistic choice" versus "craftsmanship", ex: 1. "Picasso, that's the wrong way to depict a human nose." 2. "Picasso, that's the wrong material, that vibrant paint is poisonous and will turn to black flakes within the year and the frame will become warped." I interpret parent-poster's "interfaces are not art" as meaning they're mostly craftsmanship. It may not be quantifiable enough to be labeled "engineering", but it's still much less-subjective and more goal-oriented than the "pure art" portion. All these interfaces need to be useful to tasks in the long term. (Or at least long enough for an unscrupulous vendor to take the money and run.)
- 65 10mo agoYes this is always how it's been, especially if you're a front end developer. Changing designs every few months just for the hell of it is what designers do.
- TheCoreh 10mo agoThere have been many, many, desktop improvements since 1995, some of which came from the Mac, some came from Windows and some came from UNIX/Linux & friends. - Arguably the dock, though it's probably contentious - Ubiquitous instant search (e.g. Spotlight) - Gesture-based automatic tiling of windows to left/right side of the screen, tiling presets - Smooth scrolling, either via scroll wheel or trackpad - Gesture-based multi tasking, etc - Virtual desktops/multiple workspaces - Autosave - Folder stacks, grouping of items in file lists - Tabbed windows - Full-screen mode - Separate system-wide light and dark modes - Enhanced IME input for non-latin languages - App stores, automatic updating - Automatic backup, file versioning - Compositing Window Managers (Quartz, Compiz, DWM, modern Wayland compositors...) - The "sources bar" UI pattern - Centralized notification centers - Stack view controlelr style navigation for settings (back/forward buttons) - Multi device clipboard synchronization - Other handoff features - Many accessibility features - The many iteration of Widgets - Installable web apps - Virtual printers ("print to PDF") - Autocomplete/autocorrect - PIP video playback - Tags/Labels - File proxies/"representations" - Built-in clipboard management - Wiggle the mouse to find the pointer None of these can be said to be at their final/"perfect" form today, and there are hundreds if not thousand of papercuts and refinements that can be made. The real issue is probably due to management misunderstanding designer's jobs, and allocating them incorrectly. The focus should be more on the interactions and behaviors than necessarily on the visuals.
- schmuckonwheels 10mo ago> Arguably the dock The Dock came from NeXtSTEP circa 1989. It had square edges and no Happy Mac. (So did Mail.app, TextEdit, some of the OS X Finder, and a whole bunch of other things.) To the untrained eye it looks like an Apple innovation because most people couldn't afford NeXt computers unless you worked in a university or research lab.
- schmuckonwheels 10mo agoI would say, "Give me Mac OS 9, now" but smartphone-addicted brain-damaged zoomers don't understand what folders are or how file management works. I don't need or want art, eye candy, or animations. I need to get work done and the rest of the OS to stay tf out of my way.
- dlisboa 10mo agoStyle matters, maybe unfortunately depending on the point of view. Products like consumer electronics have a large amount of fashion to them. Just like the t-shirt was perfected in the 1950s people still make new ones with little style changes for no functional reason. Designers at Balenciaga don't have to justify their jobs when they make oversized t-shirts, neither do the ones at Apple.
- xnx 10mo agoFashion is a very appropriate place for style. Tools, less so.
- TeMPOraL 10mo agoCorollary: the extent of fashion-driven variability those "tools" support over generations tells us just how little utility those tools provide. In actual tools, the form and function are strongly connected. Tools of competing brands look pretty much the same, except for color accents, because they can't look any different without sacrificing functionality, performance and safety characteristics. You don't see power tool vendors trying to differentiate their impact drivers by replacing rubber handles with flat glass because it's more "modern", because it would compromise safety and make the tool unsuitable for most jobs its competitors fulfill. This happens in software mostly because the tools aren't doing much of anything substantial - they're not powerful enough for design to actually matter.
- vel0city 10mo agoI do see tool vendors often adding their own logos to the tools. They choose non-functional colors for styling. They'll make something more rounded or more squared for aesthetic reasons. For consumer-facing tools there are lots of little non-functional changes they'll choose to do for their own stylistic and branding purposes. They do want to ultimately differentiate their products from competitors, not just be the exact same as all the others on the shelf.
- buredoranna 10mo agoI wish I could remember where I picked up this quote > No project manager ever got promoted for saying "let's keep things the same".
- jbl0ndie 10mo agoI can't see how half of the icon choices made in the article would pass internal testing, let alone actual user testing. Maybe stakeholders were calling the shots and everyone was like, "Fine. If you want us to reuse the same icon for different purposes, you're the boss. We are done trying to explain why this is a bad idea."