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Comment by Xxfireman

1 year ago

Does anyone else miss simple gray GUIs? There is something in my brain that associates that style with “real” computing. I would love to have an editor theme for it (IntelliJ / vs code / terminal.app).

36 comments

Xxfireman

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bpye  1 year ago

I don’t know if I miss grey UIs, but I do miss the consistent design language and how easy it was to tell if something was a button, scrollable, etc.

  • jbverschoor  1 year ago

    My settings on macOS (and partly iOS):

    Accessibility -> Display:

      - Reduce Motion
  - Increase contrast
  - Differentiate without color
  - Show window title icons
  - Show toolbar button shapes

    Appearance:

      - Show scrollbars: always

    Keyboard:

      - Keyboard Navigation  (use space, tab, enter)

  • simonask  1 year ago

    Aren't we at a pretty good place with that stuff, though? It's rare to see the abominations that used to roam, especially in the Flash era. Web designers generally follow mostly the same principles and design language. Windows is the only place where it's still a bit wild west.

    • Dalewyn  1 year ago

      >Aren't we at a pretty good place with that stuff, though?

      Hell no:

      I can't tell what is and isn't a button.

      I can't tell specific areas apart from others (no borders/shading).

      I can't see or use the scroll bar, assuming one is even present.

      I can't tell where a window begins and ends.

      I can't tell which window is active.

      I can't tell what a window is for.

      I can't tell what the fuck these Nouveautian Hieroglpyhs from Uranus (aka icons) mean.

      I could go on, but I digress: Are we in a pretty good place? Hell no.

      13 replies →

    • RossBencina  1 year ago

      I don't think so. One example: on Windows, vscode changed the behavior of scroll bars -- something that has been a standard since the mid-80s. They changed the paging behavior and removed the end buttons. Unbelievable.

      3 replies →

    • phendrenad2  1 year ago

      I use Edge as my browser, but I think Chrome is the same: The scrollbar is hidden while I'm not scrolling. There's an option to always show the scrollbar, but it's still this tiny little sliver that doesn't match the system scrollbar.

      Someone at Google, and someone else at Microsoft, probably think this is good UX. I beg to differ.

drooopy  1 year ago

I sure do. Modern OS UIs might be visually rich and feature-packed, but this definitely came at the cost of clarity and efficiency. Because I do a lot of writing, I keep an old thinkpad and an old PowerBook running NT 4 and Mac OS 9 respectively. There's just something about those grays and the straightforward, no-nonsense UIs that allows me to work without distractions. I can't say the same thing about my macbook and all of its colorful superfluous features. Of course, since those OSes are ancient, it's more difficult to access the internet which also helps quite a lot with me being more focused on my work.

litenboll  1 year ago

Not even a little! I can get nostalgic, sure, but I wouldn't want it to be part of my everyday experience.

timthorn  1 year ago

> There is something in my brain that associates that style with “real” computing.

That's interesting. For me, it's green or amber terminals - perhaps it's like music where the genre of your teens defines the best music for the rest of your life. Were you a teenager in the Win3.1 era?

ta12653421  1 year ago

Ah, yes, "REAL" computing:

in the old days you had to pack your 17inch screen into your car, drive to your friends house, plan to game Doom or Quake, but in the end you were configuring network drivers etc. the whole weekend instead of playing: including features like countless reboots and reinstalls because something was crashed during "optimizing" the memory configuration for whatever driver<->game combo.

and if you set a wrong/not supported screen resolution in NT4, you had to set off power to reboot the computer because resolution back-switching was not available back then.

REAL computing also in the sense that a 500kb wordfile could crash your machine, if it loaded at all - because it took 1 min to load the bytestream from disk :)

yes, good ol days :-D

  • kchr  1 year ago

    While I appreciate the flashbacks you just gave me, I don't think the enshittifaction of GUI:s is orthogonal to the evolution in not having to deal with hardware issues any more.

    • ta12653421  1 year ago

      well, then we may have a different interpretation of "REAL computing" :-D LOL

      but i agree: that we do not have these hardware issues anymore was huge driver in getting mass adoption of home computing & internet and the ecosystem as a whole - i remember 1994 when i needed a graphic driver update for some niche SVGA card, i had to go to the store, give them 4 x 3.5inch disks, wait one week and then i could get the disks back :-D

      today, the normal DAU is able to buy a super powerful computer in a discount store and have it running with some games 1h later.