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It's genuinely hard for me to understand some of the UI/UX decisions made in the latest versions of Windows. Old versions of Windows seemed to be built in a intuitive way so even someone with no computer experience would have a chance at finding what they were looking for. Icons were designed to look like what they do. Things were labelled with text. The interface was predictable. Where as today everything just seems obscure and random...
For one, we don't have a "start" button anymore, we have a four square thing which you're suppose to just know to click. If I want to get to the control panel I have to erm... Search for it on the four squared menu thing? I'm not even sure there is a "proper" way to navigate there anymore, instead you just need to know there is a thing called the "control panel" and search for it. And even then you're never 100% sure if you want the "control panel" or "settings". And why do these two interfaces have completely different UIs? It's like the whole OS is designed to be as confusing as possible. If I didn't have experience with prior versions of Windows I'm not sure I'd even know how to do the most basic things.
Companies like Microsoft do their research. They interview the gen-Z'ers and get consistent feedback about the UIs HackerNews likes: "They're old. They're boring. They're dated. I don't like them. My grandma would use this."
Microsoft feels that it has no choice but to follow fashion trends and I am not sure that they're wrong to do so. Eventually minimalist UIs will go out of fashion and utilitarian evidence-based UIs may come back. But for now, the fashion is what it is and if companies want new users, they must follow the trend.
Regarding the hodge-podge of different UI designs, I think that that is just a function of UI/UX designers not being honest with themselves and others about whether they're doing engineering, psychology or fashion. Fashion must change for the sake of change but engineering and psychology do not. This creates inconsistencies.
> Companies like Microsoft do their research.
Having worked at many companies over the years I feel like you are giving Microsoft way more credit than it probably deserves.
Politics plays a huge role in decision making, and in my experience, when it comes to UI/UX, politics accounts for 80% or more of choices.
I find it really hard to convince myself that Windows' scatterbrain UX with layers of half done redesign on top of each other is the result of careful planning and research.
I'm sure they do the research, and look at feedback. I just don't think it has any bearing on decision making.
This is true. I was a senior developer at Apple for a decade, and if you think they follow some rigorous UI-vetting process (or even user testing in many cases), you’re wrong. There are probably exceptions, but it’s not a company-wide norm.
I also think the fashion theory is wrong. In fact, it’s backward. Younger users didn’t demand these regressions; they’re simply more used to lazy, shitty design and the absence of the visual cues and standards that made GUIs so intuitive in the first place. So, for example, they are more likely to tap or click on a plain text label to see if it’s a control than those of us who expect controls to be demarcated as such. But once those regressions become the norm, the better designs are indeed recognizable as “older.”
Thus we all suffer a decline in design quality. Windows is now an unmitigated UI shítshow.
Fortunately we’re finally seeing some backlash against “flat” (AKA no) design.
Some flatish themes can be good. Mac System 7, or Zukitre. Because the buttons have contrast and they are marked as such.
Yes. Cheesy skeuomorphism caused a massive overcorrection. It’s time to get back to some subtle bevels and highlights and stop dicking with it.
Yeah. It feels more like they have a long to-do list of settings menus to update and they just can never quite get through it.
"Politics" doesn't explain the change. Politics in corporations was just as bad in the 90s as it is today, if not worse.
Separately, I didn't say anything about "careful planning", I only said "research". And that the research is telling them to make the UIs look flat and non-skeuomorphic.
> scatterbrain UX with layers of half done redesign
No one here claimed that they succeeded ;-)
> They're boring. They're dated.
Boring sound like a good UI quality to me. I don't want UI to be entertaining and full of surprises, I want a job to be done.
But that will not get you a promotion or industry award if you are the designer.
The only flat theme I liked was Zukitre under Linux with the Newaita icons. Contrasted gray with clear buttons and nice icons. The rest sucked a lot. Either too bright, or dark, or contrastless.
II am one of the gen-Z'ers you are talking about.
Each time OS vendors update their UI, they add more white space and make the UI flatter. The old always complain but I just found the new design more comfortable and intuitive to use.
It is a one way trip. I can't get back to old, traditional IDE after trying the more modern VS Code.
VSCode doesn't have a lot of whitespace though, it's still a function-over-form, high information density, getting things done application.
It has much more white space compared to IntelliJ IDEA or Visual Studio.
I am a Millennial and I don't give a crap about fashion and trends. I want something that I like and is good to use. I found some old UI's ugly and clunky. I find the trend of material design just that: a trend. Just like Baroque, Rococo and Renaissance were trends. Which eventually faded, like all trends. Just like Material Design will fade. Some young people are rebels just for the sake of rebelling, and therefore it has to change regardless of whether the change is good or not. Cool, though sad. Those are the ones that most likely will become conservatives later on, as they're just following emotions. Some older people are conservative because "the good ole times when everything was better." I fit in neither, which is kind of lonely but it is what it is.
I love the W11 design, best looking one so far. Usability is not bad. W7's was better in some regards, worse in others. I hated W10 design. Usability was poor. W7 design was nice. Usability was good. Windows XP design was ugly. Usability was nice. Windows 98 was ugly. Usability was ok for the time.
The others in between are not worth mentioning.
You are wrong. My first graphical OS was Windows 98 at home after DOS at school. Windows 95 was built with UX/UI at mind, which lots of research. Current are themes are pure crap on usability. No contrast for buttons or menues. Too bright or too dark themes. No slight widget frames for separation.
The only semi usable flat theme under *nix it's Zukitre GTK2/3 theme with, maybe, the Newaita icons or similar. Everything else lacks lots of contrast.
You can use window managers in Unix.
Themes are used for borders. Every program has its own UI. Even on MS Windows.
Except for Motif/Athena, everything under my GNU/Linux setup uses the "blackwater-dim" GTK2/3/QT5 and the Chicago 95 theme thanks to qt5ct, among the Metal2 IceWM theme closeish to early 00's Java look. Best of worlds. A highly usable window border, keybindings, solid widget themings and virtual desktops.
> You are wrong.
Not acknowledging that other people have other taste that doesn't necessarily match with a person's personal preference is wrong in my opinion.
It's not a matter of taste. Windows 95 was specially built on a large study on usability: https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/238386.238611
Unix had brilliant points, too: Virtual desktops and moving/resizing with alt or super_l and clicking the mouse with a left/right mouse click.
Thus, you can use a Unix based WM/DE (IceWM, Mate, XFCE) with the Windows 95 theming (Chicago95) AND the Unix keybindings, having the best of the both worlds since Icewm was created from long ago.
Can't you just acknowledge that the GP just have a significantly different experience from yours? It's disappointing that you seem to just ignore everything that the GP said, with the explicit acknowledgement that it was just their personal opinion, and just rammed another comment without understanding it?
I will just ignore your thick-headed comment from this point, it's clear that you're not arguing in good faith.
Current icons will go out of fashion, then all we have left are single letters that comprise major "applications"... "T" for twitter, "F" for Facebook, "I" for Instagram. You get the idea.
Looks at work Windows laptop icons...stylized O for Outlook...Y for Yammer...T for Teams...E for Excel...etc., etc.
Apparently, Microsoft is way ahead of you.
Apparently.. :mindblown:
The trouble is that the desktop metaphor depends on your programs being analogous to physical tools. A text editor is a notepad, a directory is a manila folder, a contacts app is a Rolodex. What iconic tool represents Twitter, or "app store," or "password manager," or "detect the song that's playing right now"? The metaphor breaks down and your icons become mere abstract shapes. If no other meaning is relevant, an eye-catchingly stylized version of the first letter of the service name at least hints at what this is.
> Old versions of Windows seemed to be built in a intuitive way so even someone with no computer experience would have a chance at finding what they were looking for.
I think the goal is very much the same today, but the people first using a computer have probably already experienced Android or iOS. Computers are now for serious business and maybe high-end video games, the rest is done on phones and tablets. The world has gone mobile first so for beginners to pick up Windows, Windows needs to be "mobile-compatible". Icons are flat and abstract, buttons are big without borders, and half your screen being filled with UI is not bad as long as you full screen that important content when it matters.
I don't think the clarity of older operating systems needs to go away per se, but people's expectations have dropped significantly with small touch screen devices and designers love showing off how "clean" their design looks.
Mobile designs are horrible about being intuitive and discoverable, to the point that many apps have tutorials about where you can swipe or double-tap and what it does because there's no reasonable way to discern this from their UI. If that's what we base our desktop UIs on it's no wonder they become less usable.
Yeah, mobile is an mess of obscure gestures and icons.
Without the ability to hover over an icon with a cursor there's often no way to tell what it will do, and apps usually don't include any help pages.
I completely agree that UX on mobile is terrible, half the controls can only be learned by random chance or brute force. However, kids grow up with mobile devices from a very young age these days, young enough for the terrible UX not to matter as much.
Copying the mobile UI is definitely a bad direction, but it's a very understandable one from a business sense and it's the only explanation I can really think of when it comes to Windows 11's iconography and design.
I really dislike this trend. I switched my KDE theme to windows classic with the memphis icons and it's just a joy to use, even for a while. I like being able to tweak things, and the latest version of windows is even harder to do that.
> but the people first using a computer have probably already experienced Android or iOS.
Rape is also an experience. A negative one.
And Android or iOS are not computers (just like a TV or a washing machine are not computers). They are specialized entertainment devices designed to extract data from the users.
> Computers are now for serious business
Always have been.
Exactly, we are using the IBM-compatible PC, not some Amiga-compatible computer.
As others said -- "Control Panel" is the older UI being phased out, "Settings" is the new, unified one. And on Windows 11 it really does include 99% of what Settings had. There's only a few screens here and there for very specific, niche things that are still linked-to via Settings. (e.g.: Color Management -- you can select a color profile in Settings but you need the older "advanced" UI for manually importing ICCs and such. Colorimeters and monitor drivers auto-import ICCs.)
And "Start" has been gone for over 15 years. It transformed into the "Windows logo button" with Vista in 2006. The menu's naming was kept (and still is) but "Start" as text hasn't been a thing for a long time.
I normally use the "Change what closing the lid does" setting on laptops but it is not in Settings on Windows 11 nor is there a link to it. You have to know what search term to use to find it.
Yeah, that one is still stuck in power plan settings for some reason. But they’ve been moving to one “Balanced” plan for a while now so I guess that entire panel is going away.
I had to use Outlook recently after a decade or so to help someone declutter their mailbox.
I was shocked how unintuitive and sometimes insane that software has turned to. It's basically useless. After spending hours trying to sort the emails, we decided to just back them up and delete everything. My friend moved to Gmail.
I wonder what happened? Old Outlook while having some shortcomings was a manageable piece of software, whereas the new one is completely unusable. Other Microsoft software suffer the same problems like Teams. I feel sorry for any workplace that is using any Microsoft software. There are exceptions like VSCode, but given how things work at Microsoft, I wouldn't be surprised if VSCode turned into crap nobody wants to use anymore.
> I wonder what happened ?
They call it the Ribbon. A collections of icons (or as someone said, hyeroglyphs) arranged in who knows what order, which you need to guess what they do. Some have text, some not.
There are issues with the modern windows user interface but I’m not sure it’s these. For one “start” was never actually how most people started using the computer - it is through desktop shortcuts, so the label didn’t really make sense.
The control panel is depreciated and remains for compatibility reasons and is deliberately hidden in favour of the settings button, which uses the now familiar gear icon.
> For one “start” was never actually how most people started using the computer - it is through desktop shortcuts
This is just wrong haha. Here's a raymond chen post:
> But one thing kept getting kicked up by usability tests: People booted up the computer and just sat there, unsure what to do next.
> That’s when we decided to label the System button “Start”.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030722-00/?p=43...
Edit: I hope this comment doesn't come off as rude or anything too :). I just remember reading about this in Raymond's book and the fact that the start menu originally didn't say start stuck out to me.
Ah, but that's because those people were presumably used to Windows 3.1, where when the computer started up, a window opened displaying an icon grid of programs you could open. From the perspective of one of these people, Windows 95 is like if Windows 3.1 failed to finish booting up, so Program Manager never started, and you were stuck just staring at the wallpaper.
Well, prior to Windows 95, Windows didn't really have a desktop. 3.1's desktop was just an icon-grid taskbar. (Now I'm wondering if the "single instance" behavior of moving to front when you relaunch an app was done to accommodate that UI pattern)
> UI/UX decisions made in the latest versions of Windows
"Google and Apple does it so it must be good"
"Tablets and phones are the future."
"Users don't want to be bothered"
"We know better"
I don't care if it feels like a place to get real work done or not. Whether I do get real work done matters of course, but I want it to look like a really nicely designed space too. And by nice design I mean beautiful to look at, not merely "designed to get work done" in the industrial design sense. Just like working in an office effectively shouldn't mean it has to be decorated with complete utilitarianism at every turn, nor should by screen.
Am I strange to tend to like app and OS redesigns if they make things look fresh, even when they might slow me down slightly, or even slow my machine down? I just wanted to be the contrarian voice here. Redesign all you want. It's ok to say "Let's choose just a little bit of form over function here". I usually like the new better than the old. No, Win2000 wasn't the pinnacle of Windows neither in function nor design. There I said it.
> Am I strange to tend to like app and OS redesigns if they make things look fresh, even when they might slow me down slightly, or even slow my machine down?
It's not strange to like redesigns. But if they slow you or your machine down? Yes, it's strange!
Would you prefer a car that changed every year to a more "fresh" design, but each year make it harder to open the door and would let you go 5(km/m)/h slower? I definitely wouldn't and it's strange that you would, yes.
Moreover, people would be up in arms if a perfectly good car, with a perfectly good engine starts consuming say 30% more fuel than an "update" ago.
This is a great analogy.
It's actually not a recent analogy https://blogarithms.com/2005/01/07/if-cars-worked-like-windo...
> Would you prefer a car that changed every year to a more "fresh" design, but each year make it harder to open the door[…]?
I purchased a Tesla model 3 in 2019. Adjusting to controlling everything on a tablet in the center of the car was a huge change from every car I had driven previously, but I gradually got used to the UI and memorized the layout. In December 2021, Tesla launched a new UI that moved the buttons around and hid many single tap actions behind multiple taps. It was terrible. The last place I want a redesigned UI is in a car I currently own. They should have only launched the refresh on new models. It wasn’t the main reason I sold the car, but it certainly didn’t help. Big UI changes can be exhausting.
> make it harder to open the door
You mean like in the BMW i8 ? https://www.youtube.com/shorts/T-upswNkRqE
Exactly!
I guess it would depend on what you're looking to get out of your car.
I only open the door twice - once to get in, once to get out - so a small nuisance like being harder to open wouldn't bother me as it's only a fraction of the time spent engaging with the car. However I have family members with terrible arthiritis who struggle opening car doors anyway, so it'd definitely be a factor for them.
I'm also not typically in a rush when I'm driving, so if the car is a little slower that doesn't bother me as much as whether I'm comfortable and enjoying the drive. Or even if the car was no more comfortable, but just looked better, I might actually feel some pride in it and that would give me a lift and result in an improvement to my mood. If my goal was to get from A-B as fast as possible though, then it absolutely would bother me.
I agree with this. Regular computer users are fin and like these UI changes. Most professional users don't, because it hinders them. You want to have all the horsepower available and to be able to work quickly, not prettier.
But I guess we're the minority!
> Regular computer users are fin and like these UI changes
My experience is that regular users hate changes, period. Doesn't matter if it looks much prettier now. The button isn't where it was or changed color and they are now confused.
This is starting to change as more people had computers in a phase of their life where they were happy to experiment. But it will still be many years until the majority of the working population evaluates changes on design and performance criteria instead of just disliking them for being different than before.
I don't like this about myself, but these days when Google or Microsoft mess with the software I've been using for a few decades my first feeling is frustration and my immediate reaction is to turn off the new feature.
A few days ago, a new search bar showed up in Windows 11 and I immediately closed it without trying it in any way. Months ago, I switched to DuckDuckGo because I couldn't disable Google's search result highlighting. I hate the new microwave in our house because it doesn't let me type in seconds and instead I have to push some "Automatic 1" for a fixed 60 second interval (there's probably a better way, but my wife threw away the manual).
Sometimes, better is worse. I am so close to switching to a basic Linux distro like Gentoo just to avoid these surprises.
There are real issues with some changes, though.
Like Windows 11 for some reason centers the buttons on the screen. I'm not quite seeing what that improves since now things move around, and the start button is no longer in the very comfortably reachable corner by default.
> I agree with this. Regular computer users are fin and like these UI changes.
<citation needed>. I don't think I ever saw anyone say more than "ok it looks kinda neat" and that isn't commentary on "liking" just "well, they changed it and it is not terrible yet".
Most of UI changes in long running software honestly looks like designers (or their managers most likely) trying to excuse their employment than anything acutally useful for the user
> Regular computer users are fin and like these UI changes.
Why would you think so? It's not like any vendor goes and asks them about it, before making a UI overhaul.
In my experience - which I recognize is anecdotal - they absolutely hate those changes, even more than professional users, because it's even harder for them to find their bearing again. Non-tech-savvy people in particular don't have the experience and developed mental models to pin-point and describe the sources of their dissatisfaction, so they round it up into "tech sucks" or "my computer is slow, maybe it has viruses, I probably need a new one".
Computers keep getting newer and better features. Cloud software is in my experience leaps and bounds faster than legacy software, AI features have helped substantially and judging by ChatGPT will go on to help way more, videoconferencing has grown from a novelty to being able to handle people’s entire working lives (poorly, but better then not at all).
People have nostalgia for 98 and XP, but try to use any software from around that era and it’s the equivalent of riding a bicycle on a highway. Definitely not 5 km/hr slower every year
> Cloud software is in my experience leaps and bounds faster than legacy software
You and I must use disjoint sets of software then. For me, cloud software is universally slower than legacy software. Good chunk of it is because of the browser. The UI, by default, is jankier and slower for every interaction - to the point I can notice the delay on every click, which for desktop software even 15 years ago was true only when the machine was under large load - not literally all the time.
And that's without considering UI interactions that block on network requests.
And so, I find trivial webapps to be just jankier. For anything serious though, they're near-useless, as the performance drop prevents using the app or, in some cases, slows down the entire machine. 2D raster and vector editors, and 3D modelling software, is still done primarily as desktop apps for a reason.
I regularly use database software and certain queries that take hours on the legacy server-based software take seconds on the cloud-based software
Cloud-based software is server-based software. Cloud is just some damn servers that you don't own. There is no cLoUd. There are just servers.
No but I’m certainly accepting - even enjoying - to re-learn the car-UX (which takes months) every few years, in order to get the new model. If there was ever an option to purchase a new copy of the old model which I already know instantly, I’d go for the latest refresh even with a long list of infuriating quirks added!
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The problem is that it's gone too far to the other side, aesthetics with little respect for function.
It's akin to that office that has no desk because it would ruin the aesthetics. The desk has to be there, your challenge is (should be) to design around the functional requirements.
Good designers try to reach a good solution where multiple (seemingly opposed to each other) requirements are covered in such a way, they enhance each other's qualities.
That being said, designers work with customers and as a former freelance designer I can tell you that wrangling the customer is basically half the job. This is true even in a company setting.
Design is one of those fields where everybody thinks they know what works and everybody thinks they have taste (spoiler alert: they don't). I ultimately stopped working in the field because you literally had to manipulate customers into making okay choices instead of horrible ones and even then you had the occasional CEO just overriding weeks of work with some bullshit idea he had on the shitter.
Everybody blames designers, but designers rarely make the choices that lead to the results everybody sees. Designers just try to get paid.
I don't know who told me that this is a common thing among designers but it does ring true to me:
The designer described how every time they had to show a draft for a stakeholder such as a client or manager, they polished their design and then added some obvious design flaw like making something clearly off-center that should have been centered or similar. Then when they show their initial design, the manager says "Looks good but make that thing centered properly".
If the design had been flawless, the manager would find something else to object to, which would invariably make the design worse. So showing off the imperfect design leads to the perfect outcome: the manager or customer gets to feel like they contributed to the design but the design stays the way the designer intended.
This is one of the Laws of Consulting, iirc, and it applies to anything, not just design: find something for your counterparts to object to and hand it to them, so that they can feel empowered.
More broadly, it's just political management of assemblies. Most governments do the same with controversial legislation: attach some wildly-outrageous clause to something slightly-less-outrageous, focus opposition on that, then strike it out. You then have the space to pass the bulk of it, which was your real objective all along, while claiming you "listened".
I first saw that idea mentioned in a (deleted) 2010 StackOverflow thread [1].
This trick was used against Soviet censors as far back as 1968[1].
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062759/trivia?item=tr1788197
By designers I mean people who are involved in the design, I don't care what their official title is.
Having said that, at no point do I really believe the role isn't involved in decisions like hiding the randomize button in iphone music player.
>>And by nice design I mean beautiful to look at, not merely "designed to get work done" in the industrial design sense.
Yes, so.....win98/win2000 interface. I don't have any idea why you'd look at the attrocity that is win 11 and say it's "beautiful". It's not. It's mostly just empty coloured boxes that don't have any inherent meaning.
It depends on what parts we're looking at I guess, but I think flat looks good these days, I don't mind the rounded corners, I like the use of the palette in Win11 compared to Win10 (And definitely compared to Win98/2000 etc. which used too much contrast).
A lot of this is simply because the newer designs are based on large screens while Win98/2000 was hampered by the requirement to being readable at 800x600 and 256 colors. Using gradients, negative space and was a luxury not afforded in 2000 but it does help.
In the Win98/2000 days 32 bit color was already commonplace. 1024x768 was also becoming mainstream.
In fact Windows 2000 use different color pallete than 9x as it does not try to fit into the 16 color RGBI CGA palette. The difference is subtle, but significant.
>Yes, so.....win98/win2000 interface.
I honestly hate how it looks and I think it is fucking ugly.
Yet I still defaulted to switching back to it (back when that was simple, don't think it's an option in win 10 anymore) just because the new one was so anti-functional. It was that bad.
I wouldn't be surprised if many users did once they knew that it was even an option.
Peak of "traditional" while still looking decent was honestly XFCE for me. Since then I went full geek and set up i3 tiling manager with basically workspace/screen per app, as I realized near-everything I do is just "running 2 full screen apps on 2 screens" so I optimized for that.
Ugly? Why? Ugly would be Amiga 3.1 with odd proportion based icons and crude widgets. Win 9x looks functional and usable, with 3D hints everywhere.
Yes, it looks functional and usable, I already said that.
I just find the look ugly. There is no objectivism in preference to how something looks.
I wouldn't see that as "ugly". Highly functional, maybe utterly boring, but not ugly. I mean, w9x looks as boring as an Ikea stool.
Ugly would be, with no arguing, the first editions of Amiga OS. Look:
http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga1.html
http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga2.html
Windows 95, being designed for 256 colors, looks really fine. Ok, Mac's System 7 it's prettier, without any doubt, but as I said the Amiga OS 1/2.x versions are far worse.
Windows 95 it's boring in the sense of being tied to a corporation based style, with cubicles.
Is there a good theme for KDE that hews closely to the w2k/w2k3 look and feel?
I have fond memories of using wxpx64 which was basically w2k3 desktop edition.
Your point is very valid except aesthetic redesign shouldn't impose performance penalties. Or if they do, they should ideally be opt in settings. Other than that, yes, computers can also be used as a creative space to explore art & aesthetics. They don't have to be only focused on brutalist functionality. But UI updates in many, even most, cases, somehow manage to bloat the app or impose tiny inefficiencies, which over several such updates, tend to add up. But this is a secondary concern to the primary one with periodic UI redesign, which is to make the app more and more unintuitive to use, even though the very reason for these redesigns is the opposite end. This I feel happens when UI refreshes are done for their own sake rather than genuine need, and also when adhering too religiously to the prevailing industry UI fashion trends, and no real user testing/feedback.
Right but form follows function should be adhered 100% with no exceptions for software which only use case is to enable running and quick navigation between other pieces of software and related stuff.
If your artstyle(s) doesn't fit usability patterns, change it or find someone else.
I can't say that I agree at all.
My computer is sort of like a toolshed. There's a workbench. There are some tools hanging up on the walls. There are some storage cabinets.
Whether I designed it or someone else, I'm here to work, and over time I get used to how things are arranged.
If tomorrow I come in and everything is different, it will be difficult for me to find my tools, and my efficiency will be reduced. If the tools are rearranged in a way that makes them permanently less efficient, I may get irate.
It's different if we're talking about the living room or even the bathroom. It's different if it's my casual clothes or the garden.
But my computer is none of those things, it is my workstation. And if anything gets in the way of that, I get rid of it and find a replacement.
I like your analogy. I got a shed myself and I like working on my bikes. Got loads of tools and it is so relaxing and satisfactory finding the tools you need at exactly the same place you left them. When my brother and me were living together, I would get furious when he would leave tools somewhere else (and vice versa) so I feel the pain.
Thinking a bit about this though, say Microsoft could argue that the toolshed isn't really yours. That you're merely renting/"licensing" it and they reserve the right to rearrange their tools at a whim, and they usually won't touch tools you own. I don't know how to counter-argue this though.
I think if Microsoft - and Apple, and an increasing number of software vendors - were being a bit more honest, they'd argue the computer isn't a toolshed in the first place. It's a theme park. You're supposed to "use it" to enjoy a controlled experience, and get monetized along the way.
You can see it in the language used in UI design these days. It's all about user experience and their journey. Not much about what they want to actually do with help from software.
> Thinking a bit about this though, say Microsoft could argue that the toolshed isn't really yours. That you're merely renting/"licensing" it and they reserve the right to rearrange their tools at a whim, and they usually won't touch tools you own. I don't know how to counter-argue this though.
This is exactly the case, and why I don't use their toolshed anymore.
You write as if you assumed that people back then did not care for aesthetics at all. But they did, quite a lot actually. Those designers just happened to be lucky to be working in an era when any novelty desires they or anyone in the audience had could be perfectly satisfied just by using the possibilities of then-latest technology. Very much unlike these days, inn which novelty is limited to details and subtleties unless they force it in destructive ways. Which apparently "they" really like to do, and get the reaction they deserve.
And while we are into ending a post with random opinion statements, yes, 2k was the pinnacle of Windows design.
>Let's choose just a little bit of form over function here
All I can think about is the Windows 10 Calculator. Prior to Windows 10, you could type Windows Key + R, Calc, and immediately type my equation. Amazing for when you're in the middle of a meeting and just need to calculate something right away.
But now it's a stupid app that takes a few seconds to load regardless of how fast your computer is. Needless bloat which seemed to have only only made things look pretty.
The best feature: it will fill the screen. Good luck using the mouse.
Just remember that if you have a little inconvenience from a redesign, that regular non-technical users have that inconvenience magnified a hundred times over.
What you're talking about is "juicy" design. It's what takes UX up a notch and makes applications a pleasure to use, similar to games.
I think what people are trying to do is combine the legibility of Windows 98 design with the juiciness of modern UIs, which as far as I know hasn't been done yet and is why this keeps getting brought up.
The occasional refresh is expected. Revamping the UI every two years is not. It makes it impossible to do anything other than watch youtube. Supporting a network with a mixture of OSs that kind of match but not really is an exercise in frustration.
Comment was deleted :(
Yes some people want their computer interface to fade into the background. I want my own photos and wallapper to be more beautiful than the computer. Too much ornamentation is not a good thing. The contrast is better.
I agree with you that design and aesthetics matter, but I think Win 98 looked great.
Windows 2000, to me, was the pinnacle. It had a number of refinements.
Gallery of screenshots
Aaah look at that nice title bar gradient. Always liked that, they even took that away from us :-(
The Watercolor placeholder theme[0] for Windows XP was such a beautiful evolution of that Windows 2000 look and feel: much more professional looking than Luna, modern but obviously Microsoft, and very space efficient. I recently reinstalled XP on an old computer for some retro gaming and the first thing I did was find Watercolor and the anxiety induced by Windows XP instantly gave way to joy.
Windows 2000 will always be my favorite Windows, but XP with Watercolor is the best looking, imho.
0 - https://www.deviantart.com/alecu222/art/Watercolor-4-3-Visua...
So beautiful. We've fallen so far in modern UI.
Every six months or so I look for the ability to skin Windows 10 to look like this, or like Windows Classic at least. It seems to be largely impossible.
Watercolor is great! I used it too "back in the day". That crisp Tahoma font, those refined little squares where the 2 colors in the title bar meet... So elegant.
Speaking of Tahoma, I think that one was a big part of why Win2K looked so much better (the 9x series used Microsoft Sans Serif as its default UI font). It's not much to look at today, but it was amazingly readable on low-res screens back then.
I wonder sometimes just how much effort went into manually hinting it at all the standard UI sizes to make it pixel-perfect.
> much more professional looking than Luna
Coincidentally "Professional" was a code name for the theme, I guess making Luna "Home"? Glad there's a signed copy: https://archive.org/details/winxp-watercolor
Such a pretty theme, love it!
My favourite is the Gnome 2.2 icons that come with Redhat 9
That and the Bluecurve theme. Perfection.
Oh that's very nice. I remember that. You might like the BeOS icons too (which Haiku still has)
I agree 100%, it was perfect, and also intuitive.
Is there a Gnome or KDE theme or clone inspired by Windows 2000? Windows 8, 10, and 11 are simply offensive in comparison. I kept and open mind but still haven't come around to liking any version, not even close to W2K.
Edit: jeroenhd, this is superb, thank you for sharing! Also the BMW 7-series from 1998-1999 was one of the best ever. Every subsequent one isn't nearly as good, IMO.
There are several themes that try to approach older versions of Windows. Support for the latest versions of DEs is not guaranteed, though.
I've run variants of this: https://b00merang.weebly.com/desktop-themes.html on GNOME for quite some time, without putting in the effort to recreate the start menu. My coworkers definitely looked at me weird for my Windows XP theme but it felt very nostalgic. Small details are off, though, unless you go in manually and tweak the CSS even further to correct for the differences between the author's DE and yours.
For LXDE, this project: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 goes further than just a theme, restyling some common utilities as well. It's not Windows 95, but if you'd told me it was designed around that time I would've believed you.
This post: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/tijkr3/plasma_wel... shows a very good KDE Plasma theme. Some icons are Win98, though, so you may need to replace those for the authentic look and feel.
What I myself would love is for someone to make a proper Windows 7 Aero theme for Linux. The icon sets and the backwards compatibility themes are available everywhere, but there's no Aero theme that's not jarring. In a perfect world, I'd like the frosted glass effect as well, but that's probably too much to ask. I've thrown some Windows DLLs into Ghidra to try and find the frosted glass theme engine code, but I had no idea where to look and couldn't find anything.
Chicago 95 is not just for LXDE, it works perfectly under XFCE and MATE.
SerenityOS is inspired by old Windows stuff.
I have a gut feeling that SerenityOS is going to have the same kind of progress that Linux had. Started as a little hobby side project "but nothing serious" but could eventually become something that ends up being a really useful. We will see where it is in another 5 years. Coming from a completely fresh base means that it has not gather the same technical legacy as others and that could really play to its hands in years to come.
I don't like how it's written in C++ (and I'm not a Rust person either)
And you hate Python as well, so, which language is your cup of tea?
I use oxygen icons on KDE. Not at all a windows clone, but I think they look decent.
That old calc design with red text on light gray is an absolute abomination and an insult to UI designers everywhere.
UI designers had done worse stuff today with flat themes.
You should see the new calc. Gray on gray. Big buttons. Full screen.
Touchscreens really do ruin everything they touch (ha) in terms of UI design. All buttons need to be gigantic and simple, can't have mouse hover menus or anything nice.
I’d love to know the story behind why CD player is so different. Gotta be cool?
It's from the Windows 98 Plus Pack. They didn't rewrite it for Windows 2000, they just used it as-is, so it retains the Windows 98 "Plus" look.
> It's from the Windows 98 Plus Pack
Relevant: demo of this in Computer Chronicles' Windows 98 episode: https://youtu.be/N3s0_yf2mS4?t=1022
Oh that old chestnut. Is 2000 filled with 98 and 95 UIs like modern times?
Yes, but 95+98+2000 were basically all of the same design philosophy, so it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb when something was not changed from 95.
Except for the folder chooser from Win 3.1 that still lingers around in Win 11.
1990s multimedia skeumorphism.
Honestly, the cd player is quite understated there...
IIRC that cd player wasn't from Microsoft itself, they bought it from another company.
it was made to look like a car streo i guess
Absolutely. Windows 2000 was the pinnacle of Classical Millenial Windows design. After that we got XP’s Fisher Price mode (albeit easily regressed) and it’s been downhill since then (switched to Mac in ‘03, totally baffled by Windows UI nowadays).
it looked great, but it also 'felt' amazing. 2000 felt so different than windows 98.
It didn't crash upon installing a driver or sneezing near it.
The cohesiveness is delightful and makes me want to cry a little bit
This site is worth a post in its own right! Just enjoying skimming thru it. Good find!
Agreed.
One fundamental concept we've given up is "what you see is what you get". Open up a window from Windows 95 all the way to Windows 7 and things that behave different look different. The part of the window "inside" and the part of the window border you can click and drag to resize or move around are two different colors. The minimize, maximize, and close buttons are a different color from the part of the title bar you can click to move the window around. Not so anymore. The "close" button is now a visible X and an invisible rectangle around the X. The drag-able border of the window is an invisible radius surrounding the edge of a window. I hope the executive responsible for this rots in hell.
Exactly. Eg. at some point Ubuntu (true also for Win) decided no proper borders around windows and giant title bars. Now I always struggle findig the border, to grab, between two partially overlapping black terminal windows. And wasting screen realestate on title bars and margins just bugs the hell out of me. I've spent hours trying to fix these things, gave up in the end, there was always something that didn't work right. Why did the world forget doing reasonable defaults that just work without tweaking. Oh and don't get me started on disappearing scrollbars, and lazy loading ui components, which reorder what's under focus/mouse/finger every half a second, and make me do a wrong click if I'm in a hurry
> Exactly. Eg. at some point Ubuntu (true also for Win) decided no proper borders around windows and giant title bars. Now I always struggle findig the border, to grab, between two partially overlapping black terminal windows.
Try setting up alt + right click, or windows + right click to resize the windows. I have AltDrag installed on Windows, and I can grab my windows anywhere to move or resize.
Scrollbar fix: edit /etc/profile.d/gtk.sh, add this:
#!/bin/sh
export GTK_NO_OVERLAY=1
On theming: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
It works best with Ubuntu Mate. With Ubuntu Gnome it will work but not so integrated.
You never forget your first love.
I always felt like the Win98 icons were subpar because they didn't have a consistent perspective and the shading was unnecessary and not very well done. Everything is shaped like flat surfaces but shaded as if it's rounded and bulge-y.
The Mac System 7 icons were what made me fall in love with icon design. There are so crisp and legible, and create a consistent metaphor and perspective that spans the entire desktop and glues it together. And they still manage to have a little charm and warmth.
I remember reading someone (Steve Albini?) who said, paraphrased, "Your musical tastes as an adult were defined when you were 14."
I don't know if that's true. I don't listen to anything remotely simlar to what I listened to as 14.
Same. Maybe genres are roughly set, but for me that wasn't even true. I didn't start to get a deep appreciation for classical music until my 20s.
I think the popularity of music streaming services has made it so easy to try and find new (new to them) music, that people continue to discover forever now.
It is common in English to make statements like this that are attempting to assert a general hypothesis, and are not expected to pedantically account for every individual human being.
My first Mac was Mac IIsi in 1991. Just opening up control panel items was magic. Love at first sight.
You can try an online emulator to rekindle that nostalgic feeling... https://jamesfriend.com.au/projects/basiliskii/BasiliskII-wo...
I love how many purples are in the System 7 icon palette https://vintageapple.org/inside_o/pdf/Inside_Macintosh_Volum...
Warning to mobile users: the link is to a 385 MB PDF file
Warning ? This is the size of a modern webpage (hypertext). /s
> Everything is shaped like flat surfaces but shaded as if it's rounded and bulge-y.
but that's the best part!!
Personally I prefer the Windows 3.0/3.1 icons. Pretty sure that Susan Kare did some of those
And the set had some annoying style outliers like the trash bin
I really do think functional UI design peaked somewhere in the early to mid 2000's. Right after that people started speaking of skeumorphism as a pejorative and that meant anything that looked 3d in any sense or resembled any kind of real world object had to be scrubbed out. If you could tell what something did, that by definition meant it was old fashioned! And the UI frameworks at the time almost made it hard to build something where there was a UI action without a corresponding menu item and shortcut key. You could bring up the menus like a site map of the application to see everything it could do (site maps - another relic of the 2000's!).
I still see people confused about sandwich menus. They don't recognise those 3 stacked lines as a menu button.
I think I only recognise it immediately because I was involved with Web development when that thing came along, but to this day I always end up having to help someone, even tech people, finding some menu when browsing the web together.
Yeah, "hamburger menus" are the modern equivalent of right-click: very useful once you understand it, but very difficult for the general population to get to grip with.
Hamburger menus are not really the equivalent of right-click context menus, because they aren't contextual to elements on the screen. Long press would be the equivalent of right click, but it isn't used very much.
Agreed. Once you give something a label, it takes on life of its own. I think the sound of the word "skeumorphism" probably didn't help either.
I'm a big fan of the SVG icons used in the Azure Portal. They're embedded directly into the HTML, so they're efficient. Their design is simple and looks good both at small sizes and scaled up. They have a fairly consistent color scheme and "design language", making them easily recognisable. You can download the SVG files separately and embed them in design documents, preserving the high-quality vector art format!
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/icons/
Compare these to the AWS icon set, which are just lines on a single-color square: https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/icons/
I have my own complaints with how AWS does their icons. however
current icon set used by AWS is way better than the "3D" icons they had earlier
I think having "lines on a square" can also be converted to SVG.
In fact AWS page you linked does have an "Assets Package" download that included both PNG and SVG icons for both light and dark backgrounds.
the "single-color square" is actually a gradient fill too -- whether that is better is subjective.
I have always felt the need for an API that serves the correct icon in chosen resolution and format. we recently saw a HN post that argued that architecture diagrams should be code. this would be one necessary step towards that.
BeOS were my favorite. https://www.iconfinder.com/iconsets/beos
I'm fairly certain that if Apple kept on developing classic Mac OS, its icons would not look dissimilar to those.
Wow, those look amazing.
Meanwhile Google ones get worse and worse. I don't think old MS ones look nice but they are instantly recognizable (and really, most stuff from those times.
Nowadays we're getting weird trend to either monochromatize or outright abstract icons that can't be easily associated with a thing. When we had 256 colors and tiny amount of pixels developers used every single one of them, now we have millions and get colorful squares
Yep...
This picture says it all:
https://i.imgur.com/jaXMYHr.png
I also hate the minimalism of small greyish singe-color outline icons, where everything looks the same, and you don't know what it does... a grey square? A stop button? Oh no, it shows the list of already open apps... circle with an outline? Yep, everybody thinks "home" (button) when they see a circle... etc.
> Meanwhile Google ones get worse and worse
And Microsoft copies from Google. What can be worse than that ?
Cool browser. But, these icons were not meant to be rendered with the heavy anti-aliasing performed by today's web browsers and displays. There is now a CSS property `image-rendering` which you can set to `pixelated` to perform nearest-neighbor resizing. This looks great as long as you use a sensible whole-number multiple for the image dimensions.
Try adding a `* {image-rendering: 'pixelated'}` in dev tools and you can see these icons in their true glory.
They were meant to be rendered with the inherent anti-aliasing of a CRT screen. Pixelated rendering on a high-DPI screen will look quite different.
Color LCDs were common on Windows laptops in 1998, and decent CRTs in late 1990s were quite sharp.
Pixelated rendering is closest to the design intent IMO.
I sometimes wonder what would've happened if the UI itself hadn't changed much; if Windows had retained those icons, that style, those ways of doing things. What if we had the Windows 95/98 look but with the benefit of 20+ years of polish and refinement?
Not saying I think their UI is perfect, but perhaps we'd see people feel a lot more familiar/comfortable with their computers, and perhaps it would also have inspired future generations not to constantly redesign things. Just as Apple became an inspiration for designers; it could have been the other side of that coin.
It's fun to think about.
Not the exact icons, but the usage pattern is still alive and well with the Cinnamon and MATE desktops (the latter with the Redmond preset iirc). I won't use anything else.
Also, you can write Win32 apps on Linux with Nano-X/Microwindows.
Just use WineLib.
Fun and a bit sad to think about from some angles. For instance the often maligned baby boomer generation essentially had the UI/UX rug from pulled from underneath them leading to loss of confidence and computer skill regression. Not to mention probably opened them up further to fishing and other computer scams due to a combination of UI churn, generally being flustered by changing conventions, etc. Not to pin all their computing woes on this, but I think it’s had a large negative effect
Multiple times, at that.
I remember buying the very first iPad for my mom. One thing that she really liked was that huge, prominent physical button that you could press to immediately go to the home screen. No matter which app she ended up in and how confusing it was, the safe place was always there within easy reach. It made her that much more confident to actually go and explore.
Now, she's supposed to slide from the bottom edge, I suppose. Except if you don't do it vigorously enough, it doesn't actually bring you home. But, hey, the gadget is now 15mm shorter!
They need to make the dialogs resizeable, though. Those tiny dialogs where you have to scroll basically in the eye of a needle are ridiculous.
Windows NT4.0 icons were the best:
https://winuxinfocenter.de/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/deskto...
Why 98? Same icons on 95 were they not?
No argument that the Windows UI has gone massively downhill with each successive release. But hey, if they make it complicated enough, needing to add/remove programs in 3-4 different places, maybe you'll search for everything with Cortana and then they can track and guide you into their own services.
That is just nostalgia. There is something to be said about the icon design, but you really wouldn’t want the II of that era back. Nowadays you start an application by clicking a fixed location in the task bar or by pressing the windows key and typing the first two or three letters. Back than, you had to navigate a ridiculous start menu tree. Windows didn’t snap to the borders, task bar entries would move around. There was no search beyond the file system, so you either needed a ton of luck, a ton of time or a superhuman memory to change some obscure settings.
> navigate a ridiculous start menu tree
That's not true, the start menu tree was usually relatively clutter-free until the XP era, where companies went absolutely insane and started putting things like manuals and links to the website inside of the start menu tree... yuck!
Press <Windows>+R, "calc" <Return>. Easy and fast, if you can remember the exact names of the executables.
Also, back then Windows came not only with printed manuals, but also with an actually useful help system and not one that just makes a Bing search.
Yes, regular user, just do:
<Windows>+R, then write "calc", press <Return> and you'll be ready to use the calculator. Very intuitive.
Almost like you need a CLI as the OS that simply launches the visual UI program for specific tasks.
A pretty desktop background and a prompt would go a long way.
I'm now picturing something like ChatGPT (or a specifically trained model) integrated into the shell, so a user can simply type / vocalise what they are trying to do, without knowing specific app details, rather than having to navigate a bloated UI.
Clicking a single item it's faster than typing.
The modern-day equivalent is yes, regular user, just do <Windows>, then write "calc", press <Return>, and you'll be ready to use the calculator. That R really killed it...
To be fair, you have to remember that the calculator is called "calc.exe" to use this method. However, when parent said "you really wouldn’t want the II of that era back" I understood "you" as "HN reader", not as "regular user".
Also, there is also a "discoverable" way to launch programs keyboard-only: <Windows>, P, A, C (Programs - Accessories - Calculator).
I just really dislike the Windows 10 start menu search. It slows down on random occasions just often enough to be too annoying for me to use, at least on my machine.
I dislike it because the autocompletions are hilariously brain-dead most of the time. Like, it usually autocompletes folder names correctly, but I can't really rely on that feature because some of them are never offered as candidates. E.g. "Work" is not only not offered as candidate (even though I have a folder named "Work"), but mysteriously autocompleted to "Word".
It's also a solution to a self-inflicted problem. Super-crowded Start menus were a problem, but not a very widespread one among people who aren't nerds. The Windows 11 Start menu is crowded but largely because it's littered with Microsoft's own apps. If I were to take out Xbox, Alarms & Clocks and all the other crap I no longer bother to uninstall because it's gonna come back on the next update anyway, I could probably use it quite comfortably.
No, it's not. For tech people, yes. For regular folks, most don't even know you can write after pressing the Windows key. Moreso, not everyone even knows the Windows key opens the menu. Folks don't use shortcuts like we do.
The thing is, you can apply the modern UI features to the older desktop and design paradigms. Linux desktop environments do it to varying degrees, and the result is often very good. I like both of these things (the traditional desktop, and the modern features), and KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon all handle it pretty well.
Yes, everyone in the world starts applications by pressing the windows key and typing. Yes, that view isn't skewed at all.
> Nowadays you start an application by clicking a fixed location in the task bar or by pressing the windows key and typing the first two or three letters
This works on 1% of the cases because MS decided that you want to search the internet.
> Nowadays you start an application by clicking a fixed location in the task bar or by pressing the windows key and typing the first two or three letters. Back than, you had to navigate a ridiculous start menu tree.
Not me, I installed 3rd party application launchers on older versions of Windows. Those were nice and lightweight without the slowdowns of what Microsoft inflicted on everyone.
> Nowadays you start an application by clicking a fixed location in the task bar or by pressing the windows key and typing the first two or three letters
Big lolz.
Typing to start apps is one of those things that separate the general population from nerds.
Nowadays "you", as in "the general population", start an app from a visual shortcut on your desktop, taskbar, or start menu. Same as before.
Those icons are from Plus! for Windows 95, which NT 4.0 incorporates. Personally I find those 3DCG icons, replacing some but not all of the classic 95 icons, to be ugly and I always turn them off.
98's icons are yet another set, which in my opinion are closer to the spirit of the 95 icons.
> Why 98? Same icons on 95 were they not?
No. Iirc 98 have more colors and better resolutions.
I don't remember the gradients. Was that a later update?
I dunno, I think a lot of early windows icons were kind of hard to differentiate at a glance. A lot of them are just computers or windows with different smaller icons on them. You can see this even in the examples shown from the collection.
I generally agree that modern attempts to "unify" the design of icons usually go to far, but if you think Windows 98 icons are strictly better than say Windows 11 icons, that seems like rose coloured glasses to me.
The good ones are good, but the bad ones are worse. Although I do understand the appeal, and subjectively I do like them better.
As much as I am nostalgic, I agree with this. So many people here say how intuitive icons were, but which one of you can explain the meaning of the 5th icon on the first picture in the article, the one with an app window in front of a folder? I used Windows starting with 95, so it probably saw it many-many times. But now it is impossible to either remember or guess its meaning.
It's the icon for the "Programs" submenu of the Start menu. It is somewhat cryptic, but I think it's difficult to communicate "here's where your installed programs can be accessed" graphically. I don't think the icon is used anywhere else, so it's not much of a problem. You'll never see it out of context without the accompanying text.
All icons are confusing until they're burned into your memory.
How confusing they are has more to do with the complexity of the operation they symbolize than the design of the icon itself.
Naming is hard. Symbolizing is hard. Normalizing operations is not hard. I don't blame modern icons. I blame poor abstractions driven by marketing becoming the norm.
I'm waiting for designers to figure out some way to signify "save" without using a picture of a floppy disk. That was great back in the day, but I bet a large number of computer users have never seen a diskette.
People get what radio buttons are even if they never saw a radio with the mutually exclusive buttons[0] that these UI elements were inspired from - they were obsolete even back in the 80s.
Personally i never made the association until almost 2 decades after using computers with radio button elements, despite growing up having a monochrome TV that had actual "radio buttons" (or TV buttons in that case, which probably helped to avoid the association :-P).
And most people know what a phonograph/gramophone is without ever seeing one in person. I don't think a floppy icon will confuse anyone if they know it is for saving and is consistently used as the "saving icon", regardless of if they've seen a real floppy disk or not :-).
They might not be on radios any more, but round mutually-exclusive pop-up buttons are still something everyone in the modern world runs into — as, to this day, they're the idiomatic way to do speed selection on table fans.
Well, they are still called radio buttons, not fan buttons :-P.
Also i think those might be on their way out, the last fan i bought had a touch buttons (not screen) - and yeah, i often did mis-tap the button i wanted :-/
As a front end developer, I don't even know the name "radio" button, comes from radio.
It is just something you will learn interacting to after using computer for some time.
Let's get real, most saving happened on a Hard Disk rather than a floppy anyway. It was an antiquated icon even in 1992.
SD card shape would be a logical replacement today, I think.
Who is saving to an SD card these days? If we want to be really accurate, it would probably have to be a representation of a flash memory chip.
People who use cameras (dash cams, action cams, drone cameras), portable game consoles (by which I mean the Switch, yes, but also all those Shezhen "retro consoles"), and a few other things. People do still know what SD cards are, even if they don't have a slot for one on their flagship phone.
Nevertheless, the real issue is more that "saving" isn't really something you do any more; almost all apps now autosave and restore on restart, such that the real action that needs an icon isn't "save"; it's the option you get when you indicate you'd like to close an open, but unnamed project/document without quitting the application: "give this project/document a name."
Outside of the First World, that would be most people with budget Android smartphones, which normally come with limited storage and an expectation that someone who needs more can always buy a card.
That has been already figured out for about 20 years. You don't regularly use Windows any more, that's why didn't take notice.
The custom representation for that icon is "an arrow pointing into a half-opened folder".
Oh, so beautiful and so nostalgic. I think I always associated unconsciously GIF with the green color, and JPEG with the red color. The explanation may be on these icons: JPG is the frame with a red painting, while GIF is the frame with the green painting. I remember using them as a kid a lot in the 2000s when designing my own webpages in Frontpage + Paint.
It feels to me you had to be born at specific time to truly appreciate pixelart.
I show it to my wife (who's just 5 years younger), and she's like: "No.".
I love pixel art, used Win 98 as my first OS and still find them ugly as hell. The colors are sad, the perspective is off, and on the first image[1], only 2 icons out of 6 make any sense to me (the trash and the folder). On the second image[2] I understand the wheelchair and the notepad but that's it. These icons aren't inherently easier to understand.
[1]: https://alexmeub.com/assets/win98-icons-1.png
[2]: https://alexmeub.com/assets/project-windows98-icons.png
They aren’t very beautiful pixel art icons. Maybe a bit when seen through nostalgia glasses. They are well made though.
Just look at the top right icon in the first image.
Two computers connected by a pipe of sorts. The computers are two different colors, immediately telling you they are two separate entities (not a clone).
The pipe has a bright yellow notch.
Just perfection, damn! I wonder where the team is now and what they're designing. Anyone know?
Feels really nostalgic.
I was definitely around when all we had were 32x32 ICOs and "Windows Classic" (RIP).
All of these look old as hell now.
What's interesting is that while Windows 2000 is completely unrecognizable from Windows 11 (mmc, winver, and devmgmt.msc aside), OS X Jaguar looks and feels the same as macOS Ventura (System Prefs aside), just way more skeumorphic. Same with iOS (it basically hasn't changed since iOS 7).
I think that's a testament to how insanely talented the designers at Apple are/were.
In my opinion, iOS 5 was the peak for iOS, iOS 7 is where everything went off the rails. Present-day iOS has a notch, a screen with rounded corners, no home button, and endless places on the screen that are swipe-able.
Haven't used OS X since Mojave, but compared to Jaguar, there are no scrollbars, the interface is designed more for a trackpad instead of a mouse. The peak for OS X in my opinion was the Panther/Tiger/Snow Leopard era.
While I agree current day iOS is overcomplicated with too much white space and mystery interactions, one thing I do not miss is the home button. The gestures to go back to the Home Screen and to switch apps work extremely well and intuitively.
Years ago I tried to teach my dad how to work with Windows. He somehow wasn't capable of seeing the window borders and which window was in front. Also didn't see buttons.
Recently I have noticed that I am also beginning to struggle seeing the window borders in Windows 10. If design trends continue I may also soon be unable to operate my laptop :-(. I appreciate that MacOS hasn't gone as crazy as Window.
Windows doesn't render drop shadows in an RDP session, and I've had a few times where I clicked the wrong window because there is no border.
In old windows (95, 98, 2000) it was pretty clear which window has focus and which don't. In Win 10 is a mess.
The icon gallery could use image-rendering: pixelated, though. For 4k and "retina" displays. Otherwise the browser upscales it with cubic interpolation and it will look blurry.
It was blurry on CRT as well, though a different kind of blurry. It's difficult to reproduce the original look.
Reproducing CRT anti-aliasing on an LCD display requires a sufficiently high-density display and a shader applied to the text.
Things like that always catch me. I reflect about how many effort people put in the past and then they suddenly get replaced (and it doesnt mean it is for the better). The same to video games. Every year a new fifa, a new cod, etc. and lots of efforts and energy stay in the past. What was super exciting back then people dont even remember it existed today.
Unfortunately function lost to form. All icons are grey now. The biggest problem I have with Windows is borderless windows, where if you have a white window over another white window, 1) there is no way to tell where it ends, 2) if you want to grab the edge to resize it your mouse must be precise to the exact pixel, which is even harder when you are dealing with citrix remote desktop.
But I guess the most important thing is that it doesn't offend its designer's taste. I will try to resize those damn things again and again.
Nostalgia yes. And also utility. Icons have to scale both now and back then. Yet back then you had to draw pixel at a time or it looked like mud. Now you can downsample and most will never see anything smaller than 128x128.
Still sucks for users if they only see it rendered at half that size for menu or a reduced size taskbar. Or if it relies on color contrast without consideration for color blindness. Some designers aren't thoughtful enough to check.
An icon pack which included many icons in this style came with VisualStudio/WindowsSDK. MS Office 2003 toolbar icons also are worth extracting.
By the way, Windows 98 icons are Number-Two for me, the real Number-One top were Windows 3.11 icons.
Personally, Win XP was the pinnacle of Windows. Everything has gone downhill since then.
I call it the start of the decline, as it was the first version of Windows which featured on-line activation, legitimising the practice in the wider industry.
Microsoft online product activation was first introduced in Office 97, a few years before WinXP.
Where do you have this information from? As far as I know, product activation for office started with Office XP ("2002").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_activation#Microsoft
Win2K was the first one for which I've heard about it personally, probably because that's when it started to show up en masse in developed markets.
Thank you, was not aware of that. There was no mention on this Wikipedia article that I used to double-check:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Product_Activation
Let's rephrase @endgame's comment as "Windows XP and Office XP were the first versions of their respective series where product activation was mandatory on all retail editions." Point still stands I guess.
To me it was Windows 7. XP was great, 7 was amazing. (Reference, NT4 was my first Windows).
7 also had the most flexible/capable iteration of the Windows theme engine, which enabled the creation of a wide variety of high quality third party themes you could use if Aero wasn't quite your thing but you also didn't want to drop back to Win9x look.
8 gutted the Windows theme engine because most of it wasn't needed to render flat squares and it still has yet to recover.
7 for me too, and my first was 3.1.
As long as you turn off the Fisher Price interface
It wasn't so bad as long as you turned the window title height down to normal. Then it was nice because you wouldn't prick your finger on sharp edges anymore.
Out of the box, the extra window title height took up too much room, ugh. But then now there's so much whitespace everywhere.
It’s my fav! Loved the media center ui too.
XP was just 2K with a silly UI; it was a huge regression.
It took, what, 3 clicks to disable Luna and get back to slate grey?
And one more click to disable the XP-style control panel.
OTOH app compatibility in XP was quite a bit better, esp. with games. IIRC that's when Windows first started to experiment with features like virtualized disk and registry writes?
XP, yes, but don't forget the service packs. Win XP sucked SO much when it came out initially. Just burned a lot of resources for seemingly no gain, and it was very unstable, compared to the previous editions we ran at the time. With SP1 it was much better, but that was years after it came out, 2001 vs 2004 I think.
Previous discussion from back in January 2019:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18953542 (358 comments)
Some good nuggets of timeless insights.
It's surprising how 2019 feels just like yesterday to me, yet that was already 4 years ago.
In comparison, 1998 was 25 years ago, and that did feel like it was a long time.
The pandemic has frozen time in some ways. Time is strange enough already and the pando has compounded it.
In 1998 MS had design. Now it is all crap.
Imho, the BeOS icons are better than Win9x icons.
There's a lot of rose-tinted glasses in this thread and this is coming from someone who grew up using computers with these sorts of icons and designs. I appreciate the aesthetic, but I still think that many of them are too difficult to distinguish on their own, regardless of whether they're in full-colour skeuomorphic or a flat line icon. As another commenter pointed out, a lot of them are just variations of a computer / folder / paper with other icons stacked on them in different ways or sizes.
In any case, you would want a supporting label to really convey the meaning.
While I love to see these sorts of icons in personal sites and projects, the reality is that if I presented icons like these to a client for a SaaS app in 2023, I'd be sent back to the drawing board. No serious business wants their UI to look like it just stepped out of the 90's.
OS/2, BeOS, MacOS 8, Amiga and KDE 2 icons were great too.
Then you've got Irix icons, and probably on the last place, Solaris CDE.
'Amiga' is a pretty broad brush. Which ones in particular?
Amiga Workbench icons.
CDE is ok.
The middle two and bottom right of the first pic make no sense to me. I don't get this nostalgia. One of my first C projects was a failed attempt at using opengl to do a 3d desktop environment. Still frustrated at how archaic the desktop and webui is. The future is held hostage by the past.
Yeah they aren't too bad, but I still think the BeOS ones were better [1]
1. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=beos+icons&iax=images&ia=im...
Windows 2000 was the best MS OS IMHO. Looked just like win98, but was from their NT line.
I agree, but I may be biased. Windows 2000 was the last Windows I used for any significant amount of time.
I also have fond memories of the Windows 3.1 icons. I loved the old layout of the windows OS. If I was any good at Linux, I would make a distro/desktop behave exactly like 98.
I've always felt they were hideous, but I guess that's a matter of taste. They certainly are consistent, functional and clear, and that's the important part.
What came first? Apple’s trash or Windows’ recycle bin?
I always assumed the latter because it feels like a “we need to be different but throw a tiny bit of shade while we’re at it.”
To answer your specific question, Apple's Lisa was released on January 19, 1983. It had a waste basket. The Mac OS and its trash can debuted along with the original Macintosh computer on January 24, 1984. Windows introduced the recycle bin along with Windows 95 which was released on August 24, 1995.
Thanks! And yeah, it seems like this is part of the "ripping off Xerox" saga.
Now I'm curious what Microsoft did Between 1984 and 1995. Time to go boot up Windows 3.1.
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i think the concept originated with lisa
Likely more with the Xerox stuff that Apple uhh... "improved upon"...
https://interface-experience.org/objects/xerox-star-8010-inf...
It wouldn't suprise me if that was the case
Xerox.
I believe most of these icons are embedded in the C:\WINDOWS\system32\shell32.dll file.
Also check out C:\WINDOWS\system32\moricons.dll for even older icons.
UIs these days have terrible icons and amazing amounts of wasted screen space. I don’t get it.
Everything is so sterile and “modern” as others have mentioned.
Nothing beats Mac OS 9 icons. They were just in another league.
Check OSX' grandaddy icons: the NextStep/GNUStep ones.
Yeah, I had the chance to use most of the oldest OS's, I would say Mac OS 8 to 9 are the best icons that I found best, of course Win 95 was sweet, I really loved their work.
I love the win98 icons. But that teal background was something i found just fugly.
When i saw it on a Tektronix monitor, i was enlighted.
How the hell did we regress from these immediately recognizable works of art to what we have today: uninspired, barely discernable hieroglyphs? See Material icons, Bootstrap icons, Font Awesome... all boring as hell, and for how many N millions of dollars these corporations spend on artists and graphic designers and UX designers they still can't seem to break out of this tired trend.
"Ah but hieroglyph icons of today scale better!" Well, hieroglyph icons of today scale consistently, but remember the icon designers back in the day would make different sizes of each icon to be clearly recognizable at all scales (the whole point of the .ico format!), and to me that is way better than what we have now.
Part of it probably has to do with how sterile modern hieroglyphs are.
Look at those Windows 3.1/95/98/ME/2K/XP/Vista/7 icons: They have character. You try and tell me they didn't have fun drawing the icons for MS Agent and Dr. Watson; the fun and sense of humor the devs and artists had making them just ooze out.
Modern day hieroglyphs? They aim to not confuse or offend anyone, and end up impressing noone. They aim to speak all languages and end up speaking nothing. They aim to inform everyone and end up informing noone.
> Modern day hieroglyphs? They aim to not confuse or offend anyone, and end up impressing noone. They aim to speak all languages and end up speaking nothing. They aim to inform everyone and end up informing noone.
I would disagree as to the supposed 'aims'. Most flat designers don't aim to do anything - they just kept mindlessless repeating the mantra of 'minimalism' to the point where everything looks the same.
Your use of the word 'hieroglyphs' I think is very apt - because that's what they are: hieroglyphs, and NOT icons, as earlier versions of Windows had them.
In my opinion, the most beautiful icon sets are from Windows Aero (Vista + 7) and Aqua (Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard).
Immense character; there were Easter eggs when you zoomed in on any one of those icons. Now everything is a flat dreary mess.
I really like the look and feel of Tiger and Leopard. Also of Haiku and GNOME 2 (around 6.10 Edgy Eft).
They look nice and skeumorphic. Flat design is just lazy design and makes things hard for users.
My parents no longer understand what's a button and what isn't. They find modern desktops really confusing.
I hate modern desktops so much I just pretend they don't exist and run bare X with tiled windows, usually one only and fullscreen.
BeOS icons were really fun.
To add to this, I would argue that the Haiku Icons are the proper way to vectorize/modernize icons:
https://github.com/mdomlop/retrosmart-icon-theme/blob/master...
Instead of replacing them with vague minimalist symbols.
But those of Skeumorphic elements, so they don't fit into modern flat design and eliminating any affordances. Our designers are still trying to get the rest of the business to accept hyperlinks that look exactly like the rest of the text, so that the only way you can know what is clickable is hover the mouse on it, or try tapping it. /s
Gradients on buttons to make them appear rounded and clickable are dead these days. Nothing suggests the maximize/minimize/close buttons are buttons anymore other than being abstract looking symbols that are otherwise out of place (at least until you hover over them).
Hiding all scrollbars is totally the trend these days, so the only way to know that something is scrollable is either by trying to scroll it, or noticing cut off content. If the window is sized just right so no content is cut off, it is easy to not realize scrolling is even possible until you eventually do it accidentally.
Those sorts of icons just don't fit into this type of usability harming hyper minimalism that was largely intended to save precious screen space on small mobile devices, but which are simply moronic on full sized computers. sigh
I have to concur. I find that I am somewhat icon blind these days and can scan over an icon/app that I am looking for multiple times in certain instances before finding it
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What is bland is universal, what is universal is bland.
i think increased screen resolution (and smaller sized devices) led to a pixel art identity crisis. as you mentioned, everything today is expected to scale and fit on any sized screen. that wasn't the case when everything was explicitly designed for monitors with a resolution between 800x600 and 1024x768. the nice pixel art of windows 98 wouldn't really translate well to both a phone, a desktop computer, and a big screen TV at the same time.
except i doubt that's the entire story, because even though pixel art doesn't scale well, you could make very nice, detailed, inspired, responsive vector graphics using SVG, which would scale up or down to any size. but that probably would cost way too much money to produce, so we're now in the era where companies have brazenly embraced 'phoning it in' as an aesthetic (e.g. material icons, bootstrap, font awesome, etc.). so far, users have either put up with it, or have been tricked into embracing it too
SVG isn't necessarily the panacea you're making it out to be. If you have a highly detailed SVG that looks great at large sizes, when you rasterize it at low resolutions, it looks like a gray soup.
Haiku's icon format[0] seems to solve this issue: not only it supports per-shape level of detail, allowing elements of an icon to be hidden, appear or replaced based on the icon scale size, it is also much smaller than SVG (supposedly average size for Haiku icons is 500-700 bytes) so it can be used directly.
[0] https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/applications/icon...
You can make SVGs responsive based on their raster size[0] using media queries. So there's no need for a grey soup when the icon is rastered at small dimensions.
[0] http://tympanus.net/codrops/2014/08/19/making-svgs-responsiv...
That's something the browser is doing, not something the SVG renderer is doing. Someone still has to make multiple versions of the same image with different levels of detail, and some software still needs to pick the right one for a given resolution.
I'd probably be ok using an upscaler like the ones used for retrogaming. Probably not a very professional image for a mainstream OS though.
I've fed Silk icons into xBRZ and Waifu2x, and the results coming out were not pleasing to the eye (xBRZ can't handle antialiased input well).
I looked up the Silk icons and they appear to be about half the dimensions (1/4 area) and high color. I was thinking that there were upscalers that targeted and worked well with 16-color/more pixelated images.
The issue of scaling isn't so much about scaling in display dimensions but display pixel density. All the different resolution raster images stored in an ICO file were all displayed at the same ~96ppi of Windows. With high DPI displays and scaling a "pixel" is no longer necessarily a hardware pixel. Raster icons that display without upscaling on high DPI displays balloon in size quickly because they need 2x to 3x the number of pixels as the 1x version. Vector icons can have tiny file sizes but can be rasterized at any needed resolution and density.
The hieroglyphic-style icons remain sharp and distinct at most resolutions and densities. You also need to keep in mind the icon sets you mentioned (Material etc) are meant to be used by third parties. They're sort of indistinct and non-offensive because they're supposed to work with a site's branding. The icons are not supposed to be a site's branding. Windows' icons were part of the Windows product branding.
Designers seem to have no problem ballooning the size of their pages with high-resolution photos and videos through. Perhaps it's because getting high-resolution photos and videos is a lot easier than designing and creating icons in multiple resolutions.
Part of the reason might be caused by the popularity of the consumption web where sites want photo to be king, so they reach for minimalistic icons. Font awesome was invented and the look ended up being fed back into productivity apps.
I fully agree. I’ll throw out a thought: they don’t translate well into the higher resolutions.
Actually I doubt this. But the very simple, dumb icons probably scale more cleanly.
Too many people want "clean" and "modern" designs because they like the way it looks, usability be damned.
A lot of low skilled designers entered the workforce and they really fell in love with "clean ui" because it required so much less skill compared to making icons like these.
Yep. This is the uncomfortable truth: back in the heyday of Aqua, if you wanted a good icon, you had to pay a skilled artist about 40% of the sum that, today, gets you a full app design sketch.
Folks look at the cool designs from that era (and late '90s Windows) and want them back. You can't have that and $0.99 apps. If you try to get that kind of design with today's design budgets, you get exactly the kind of Y2K photo app skeumorphic design that everyone hated.
This may be true wrt. skeuomorphic Aqua-like designs, but pixel art with low native resolution and low color depth is the cheapest style of them all, only literal pencil drawings on the back of a napkin are cheaper. Look at SerenityOS for the kind of polished design that can be achieved with ease even by amateurs.
That is still substantially more expensive than flat/symbolic icons, simply on account of it requiring human effort. A substantial number of modern-style icons and logos that you see in the wild are obtained by (lightly) retouching the best our of a handful of auto-generated candidates. Since most logos are just "stylish" text now, and most icons are just variations on some letters/geometric shapes, there's a pretty lucrative grey market of tools that pump these out programatically.
Haiku had an icon format that is vector and also allows the inclusion or exclusion of detail based on render size. It's a pretty good update on the old way.
Design is countersignalling. Same as how we went from websites that put all the information on the first screen to those that conspicuously waste acres of space. Putting less information on the screen, and making icons harder to distinguish, signals that the site has sophisticated users and is best viewed on an expensive monitor.
I can tell you why I use lazy stuff like FontAwesome and highly reusable assets. The company I work at has a huge focus on small, independent teams (they call it Amazon-esqe). In the long term, I get penalized if I don’t make sure that I close every ticket that was assigned to me for a particular sprint. Pulling in any other teams increases my risk exposure to not closing a ticket for reasons outside of my control, so I just use pre-canned solutions whenever possible in order to hold on to my job.
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Is there anything that isn’t immediately turned into a pointless culture war argument these days?
This is an article about the design of Windows 98 icons. You’re complaining about two emojis in 2023.
I really have to wonder about the thought process that sees “iconography” and immediately goes to “can you believe Apple made a pregnant man emoji?!?”. It’s exhausting.
> Pregnant man is also bewildering
I would say Man in Business Suit Levitating is a more bewildering emoji, since men can't levitate no matter which suit they wear.
If that emoji is worth keeping then why not have a pregnant man emoji?
One is a product of some dev or artist's wicked sense of humor.
The other is a product of pandering and crazy talk.
> The other is a product of pandering and crazy talk.
Spot on. No sane person would ever say they saw a man in business suit levitating in their driveway. That emoji is a textbook case of pandering to mental ilness, treating hallucinations as some spiritual journey bullshit, rather than the health problem it trully is. It's literally crazy talk.
Not sure about the wicked sense of humor in the other one but it is hard to convey humor in the form of imagery so...
I think that's your perspective. It's clear that one of them triggers a strong reaction in you while the other doesn't, but other people feel differently.
The pregnant man emoji exists mainly due to the flexibility of the zero-width joiner and systems implementing it, not any political reason.
Oh please. Apple, and most of big tech is extremely socially liberal, and easy to implement or not there was no need to spend time implementing it except to cater to the trans community.
If ease of implementation was the sole driving factor then why are all the handshake emojis skin tones that actually exist, stands to reason it would be just as easy to flip some color codes and have every possible skin tone from green to orange shaking hands. Where's my alien-shaking-hands-with-oompa-loompa emoji dammit?
I personally don't care, and Apple is more than welcome to promote whatever messages they want on their private platform. But let's not pretend it's apolitical.
>But let's not pretend it's apolitical.
I'd rather say that corporations are amoral, not political. They are only seemingly political to the degree that it benefits the business the most. On a broader scale, you can observe that they behave differently in different regions, and behavior also differs on a larger time scale, often molding to the current times.
It should be there, because it enables expression just like all other emoji. It would have been a deliberate, discriminatory choice to not include it. If someone doesn't like that emoji, guess what: They don't have to use it!
The whole point of Unicode and emoji in Unicode is to support and enable free expression for the whole world. It makes sense to lean inclusive.
While I have no personal opinion on this topic (it hardly affects me in anyway); the emojis were most definitely added for conscious and political purposes:
https://blog.emojipedia.org/why-is-there-a-pregnant-man-emoj...
Don't you know about the cinematic masterpiece that is Junior? It's far from a new idea!
Edit: Also, aren't you undermining your own argument? If your standpoint that blandness and seeking to avoid offense is a bad thing, then surely the more weird and edgy emoji, the better.
I was going to mention how nice the old Black-White-Orange-Blue icons from the 80's Amiga era were, but it turns out I've completely misremembered and they really are quite horrible.
Gendered emojis in the first place were a mistake. Blobs were superior.
Trans men exist. I mean it's kind of edge-casey to include in Unicode, because trans-man pregnancies aren't super common, but if you're going to do both genders for all the other things, makes sense for that too.
I am trans and I do feel that this is the most accurate take.
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Trans men are men, regardless of what bigots might try to convince people of.
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Pregnant person!
Yes, there are all three.
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code