[HN Gopher] Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment
___________________________________________________________________
Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment
Author : ingve
Score : 278 points
Date : 2021-01-22 14:11 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hisham.hm)
(TXT) w3m dump (hisham.hm)
| Santosh83 wrote:
| The question is: can we design deep configurability (and
| composeability), and hence put more accessible creative power in
| the hands of the user (instead of say having to edit obscure
| configuration files or even worse, do a full recompile, or simply
| have no choice at all), _without_ exploding complexity of the
| system or is this fundamentally mutually exclusive?
|
| Power + complexity will only ever remain niche. But if we can
| design a system (be it a single program or an entire machine with
| OS), that is both powerful but intuitive to use, even down to
| deep layers, then we could actually empower 'end' users into
| becoming authors of 'creative computing'.
| bitwize wrote:
| Something like X resources gave the user deep configurability
| indeed; what's more, because they lived on the X server they
| communicated user preference to even remote clients.
|
| A graphical tool to allow users to set preferences through X
| resources, similar perhaps to Visual Studio Code's preferences
| pane, might be a great way to allow users to tweak their apps
| with power and precision.
|
| Of course, literally no one uses X resources these days, all
| settings live in XDG_CONFIG_HOME. And it's all moot under
| Wayland, which doesn't even allow remote clients.
| squiggleblaz wrote:
| I don't think that's the concern that led to the loss of color
| configuration. You probably aren't hardcoding colors anyway,
| but using widget toolkits and the like. It's mostly because
| marketers wanted it to look pretty, and that means more complex
| widgets, so they can't be configured as easily as the
| relatively flat UIs of Windows 2000 and before.
|
| (The new era of flat uncustomisable flat widgets is a direct
| continuation of the branding approach -- its their marketers
| saying "I know better than you what your working tools should
| look like".)
| ryandrake wrote:
| This attitude of "we know better than the user what the user
| wants" is pervasive throughout technology, not just software.
| Products of all kinds are getting less configurable, less
| adaptable for different purposes, less integratable with
| other products, and less suitable for uses beyond what the
| manufacturer intends.
|
| If hammers were invented today, they would be locked to a
| particular manufacturer's nails, have software that prevented
| them from hitting anything else besides nails, and have DRM
| that self-destructs the tool if you stopped paying the $5/mon
| subscription.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| I want Linux-like anarchy^H^H^Hthemability on Windows and macOS.
| I'm not keen on tweaking the appearance of every little button,
| but I want to go 'theme-shopping' from time to time and change
| the appearance of my desktop. Just to make it look a bit
| different now and then.
|
| It's interesting that the most slick and stylish desktops are now
| on Linux (of course there's 99% trash, but the remaining 1% are a
| lot more aesthetically pleasing than both the current Win10 and
| macOS themes).
| MayeulC wrote:
| > of course there's 99% trash
|
| I'm offended. 99% of the number of desktop environments, or the
| installation, or the stylized installations?
|
| As with everything artistic, the last is a matter of taste, and
| the more opinionated a visual design is, the more you are
| likely to disagree with it.
|
| For the rest, please give names.. I've seen magnificients {i3,
| sway, KDE, GNOME, XFCE, cinnamon, etc}. ricing is a popular
| sport.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| When you look through the themes on sites like
| https://www.gnome-look.org/browse/cat/135/ord/rating/, sort
| by rating and then skip the first few result pages, most of
| those themes don't look that "great". I don't understand how
| that's offending though, it's a normal quality distribution
| (also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law)
| MayeulC wrote:
| > the most slick and stylish desktops are now on Linux (of
| course there's 99% trash
|
| I read that as 99% of the Linux desktops being trash.
|
| There are a number of desktop environments, but calling any
| of these "trash" is pretty harsh and subjective, even for
| something as barebones as weston.
|
| For theme, icon, color packs, etc, for any desktop
| environment, I agree. That's always been the case for most
| user-generated content anyway.
|
| But you do see a lot of subjectively great styles on
| reddit.com/r/unixporn, even for environments such as
| windowmaker or fluxbox!
| majewsky wrote:
| > anarchy^H^H^Hthemability
|
| What's anarthemability?
| forgetfulness wrote:
| The themeability ran on anarchy but on the community-organized
| kind. Users expected apps to use the Desktop's toolkit and
| having their custom widgets respond well to theme engines.
|
| But that's only for KDE nowadays, there was a period where
| GNOME was breaking theming with new releases and its
| maintainers argued for why they just supported the standard
| Adwaita theme and not anything else. KDE comes with a historic
| sloppiness at the individual application level, you'll quickly
| notice that padding, margins, lines, orientation are all over
| the place and it's just how KDE application developers roll.
| coliveira wrote:
| The reason desktops were customizable in the 90s is that they
| followed strict GUI rules and used the same toolkits. Nowadays,
| apps want to have control of their UI to a higher degree, which
| makes it difficult to provide customization. The same applies to
| the web: since every app wants to have it own UI, there is no
| space for user-level customization.
| armagon wrote:
| I'll agree, this is one of the things I don't like about macOS.
| It looks like in the past there were hacks to do this, but Apple
| broke them.
|
| (Similarly, I'm so glad there's a hint of colour in the sidebar
| in the Finder again; I hate when Apple says, "We've got two
| indistinguishable shades of grey; one for available, and one for
| inactive. You can take it, or you can take it.")
|
| As to the point about setting a desktop background, though, I
| hardly ever see my desktop background, so changing it doesn't
| seem very important.
| helmholtz wrote:
| I used to change my desktop background approximately once per
| afternoon. It was a disease. Modifying Gnome themes.
| Downloading custom launchers for Android. Tweaking the colors
| representing my calendars. All with good intentions, mind you.
| "This green mountain background will calm me down in the
| morning" etc.
|
| At some point, I realised that if I just take a deep breath,
| slow down, and accept that I can modify _myself_ to align with
| my tool rather than the other way around, a lot of friction is
| removed.
|
| I set my background on every device to a solid black, and it's
| now three years since I changed them. My trello boards are
| still blue background. My calendars are whatever the default
| theme is. It's sometimes nice to tweak the tool for your need,
| but it's also sometimes nice to understand that everything
| doesn't need to be a huge annoyance. One can just adapt and
| move on.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > We've got two indistinguishable shades of grey; one for
| available, and one for inactive. You can take it, or you can
| take it.")
|
| What is up with this design choice to make the selection non
| obvious?
|
| On Apple TV, it's damn near impossible to see which app or show
| you have selected. The selected item is slightly enlarged, or
| slightly shaded, and I as a young tech literate person have to
| move around a bunch to figure out where I am.
|
| Why not highlight the border of the damn thing? It's like no
| one that works at Apple has older, non tech literate parents
| that use Apple TV.
| Finnucane wrote:
| I remember before OS X on the Mac, one of the fun things to do
| was trade sound effects for system actions, like the Enterprise
| door swoosh for window actions, and so on. Then Apple took the
| fun away, because Jobs didn't like fun.
| allenu wrote:
| I remember having a lot of fun on Macs in the '90s. We used
| them in my high school typing class, and I loved the monkey
| "squeak" sound whenever an error dialog would appear. That was
| also the time you'd often see the Star Trek After Dark
| screensaver set up on them.
| [deleted]
| whichdan wrote:
| I used to _love_ experimenting with LiteStep and Winamp themes
| and browser themes when I was younger, but honestly user
| interfaces are Good Enough now that I 'm relatively happy with
| the out-of-the-box experience. But it's still disappointing that
| a generation of potential computer nerds won't have the same
| experience of being able to treat their primary computer as a
| blank slate for personal expression.
| acquacow wrote:
| I spent years making litestep themes and moderating theme
| submission on litestep.net I still have a mirror up of the old
| owns.com minimalism site as well.
|
| http://dave.oc7.org/minimalism/themes.shtml
|
| Some folks still run litestep, but it's definitely not the
| community it was. We still have a small chat presence on
| discord and that is about it.
| fullstop wrote:
| I was the same way with Windowmaker themes. Now I use a fairly
| boring desktop with a dark theme, and I'm happy if GTK and Qt
| themes coexist nicely.
|
| With that being said, a lot of themes were UGLY or clones of OS
| X or Windows.
| fullstop wrote:
| Hisham keeps popping up in my life, it seems. He's the guy who
| created both htop and LuaRocks.
| joshmanders wrote:
| There will always be tinkerers and people who want to customize
| their stuff to their personality, but I think the majority of
| people don't want to tinker, they want to "get shit done" and the
| standard wallpaper and theming of stuff now days is visually
| pleasing enough to not mess with it.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Additionally, vendors just want to ship software. I guess
| that's their version of getting shit done. For better or worse,
| functionality sells most software. The stock UI is an
| afterthought, let alone possible customizations to it. Spending
| time on features that at best don't sell, and, at worst, can
| introduce bugs, is a non-starter for most shops.
|
| Maybe Microsoft/Apple are big enough that they can (and should)
| handle it, but I wouldn't generally expect this type of gold
| plating.
| floatboth wrote:
| Default wallpapers are sometimes so good that people import
| them to _other OSes_ :D
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Personally I couldn't care less about things being "visually
| pleasing", to me this is an accessibility feature. People with
| sight issues or dyslexia might want to use different fonts and
| weights, they might want high contrast colors, etc. The
| aesthetic personalization opportunities are second to that.
|
| More importantly: _this isn 't hard_. They did it in Windows 3,
| an OS that had an 8MB install size and required a mere 2MB of
| RAM. That we can't provide this functionality in 2021 with all
| these supposedly highly skilled software "engineers" who
| consider themselves so ridiculously productive because of all
| the complicated abstractions they use, on hardware that is
| several orders of magnitude more powerful than was available to
| Win 3... well it's completely ridiculous and we, as an
| industry, should be ashamed.
| BruiseLee wrote:
| > They did it in Windows 3, an OS that had an 8MB install
| size and required a mere 2MB of RAM
|
| Technically Windows 3 required only 384KB of RAM... Windows
| 3.1 required 1MB (in Standard mode).
| zepto wrote:
| I'm curious - have you experimented with the range of
| accessibility options in Mac OS?
|
| Are there particular ones that are missing when it comes to
| dyslexia?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I don't run MacOS on any of the PCs I own, so no. Neither
| do I have any of the disabilities mentioned. I just feel
| that being able to change colors and fonts is a
| significantly broader and more simple solution than bespoke
| accessibility features tuned for specific disabilities.
| joshmanders wrote:
| > I don't run MacOS on any of the PCs I own, so no.
| Neither do I have any of the disabilities mentioned.
|
| So what I'm understanding is you're saying an OS that is
| used by a LOT of people, is inaccessible, but you neither
| have any of the disabilities nor the OS you're
| complaining about to back this claim up?
|
| Because macOS has tons of accessibility options including
| font sizes, etc.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I never claimed MacOS was inaccessible. I don't even use
| MacOS, and haven't since about 10.1. I don't believe I've
| made any claims about MacOS at all, actually.
| joshmanders wrote:
| macOS or Windows. Both are leading operating systems and
| are both very accessible.
|
| You're ranting and raving for absolute zero reason at
| all. You have no facts to back up your claims nor any
| actual experience.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I don't get where you think that I am claiming these
| operating systems lack accessibility features. That's an
| invention of yours.
|
| I do make the verifiable claim that they lack the
| configurability of Windows 3 as regards font and color
| choices throughout the UI, and further that this is in
| fact an accessibility feature in itself.
|
| Windows 10, for instance, only allows you to change the
| "accent color" and select either "light mode" or "dark
| mode". While it does allow a change in font size, if
| there's a place in its settings dialogs to change the
| default font itself I couldn't find it, although I did
| find a place to change it in the registry.
| joshmanders wrote:
| > I don't get where you think that I am claiming these
| operating systems lack accessibility features. That's an
| invention of yours.
|
| Because you're ranting about operating systems not being
| accessible, there's only 3 possible options, Windows,
| Linux or macOS.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| No, that is not what I'm saying. I'm saying that this
| kind of configurability acts as an additional
| accessibility feature, and further could probably serve
| as a replacement for bespoke accessibility features these
| operating systems do have (like "dark mode" vs "light
| mode").
| zepto wrote:
| Arbitrary customization of color schemes _may_ be useful
| as an accessibility feature for certain conditions.
|
| However nobody has explained _how_ they offer an
| accessibility benefit for any _actual condition_ that
| isn't covered by the _existing_ accessibility features.
|
| It would be good if someone could actually point to an
| example of this. Otherwise it really is just speculation.
|
| General configurability of themes is definitely _not_ a
| substitute for bespoke accessibility features, even
| though it might be a workaround in some cases.
| robin_reala wrote:
| This seems to fly directly against recently articles about the
| massive uptick in iOS customisation after 14 launched. The
| #ios14homescreen hashtag on Twitter seems extremely popular:
| https://twitter.com/hashtag/ios14homescreen
| vanderZwan wrote:
| How does it fly against it? To me it appears to say _" well of
| course that's popular, the configurability gives users a sense
| of ownership over their device"_
| meibo wrote:
| I remember having lots of fun with cheesy widgets like that on
| my first Android phone in 2011, nice to see the iOS folks
| catching on. Always thought that they were missing out!
| toyg wrote:
| The post is from mid-2019. I think the development you mention
| tallies very well with how the post ends.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| The epitome of theming was on with Kaleidoscope. You could not
| only change colors, but the complete shape of every widget. And
| there were a few very tasteful themes, among the ocean of
| crazyness one would expect.
|
| This Twitter handle shows what was possible on early OS X:
|
| https://twitter.com/osxthemes
|
| Web Archive's page:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20050216050114/http://www.kaleid...
| masswerk wrote:
| Kaleidoscope 2 was really great. Technically, it was a more
| accessible frontend to the built-in Theme Manager of OS8 and
| OS9, and it facilitate some radical theming.
|
| Here are some of my own Kaleidoscope schemes (still available
| as free downloads): https://www.masswerk.at/schemes
| anthk wrote:
| Compared to any Linux desktops and WM's that was nothing.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Links please.
| godshatter wrote:
| I'm irrationally missing the hotdog stand Windows 3.1 theme.
|
| I use KDE at home and will occasionally try a different theme or
| cursor set when the mood strikes me. But that's the linux way.
| You're free to customize to a crazy extent. Once you get it setup
| the way you like it, you can achieve some nice workflow
| enhancements.
| mawise wrote:
| I think stylistic self-expression is important! While this
| article focuses on desktop and owned devices, there's been
| similar sentiment about the web (for example: [1]. Facebook gives
| everyone's site the same uniform styling, so there isn't much
| room for stylistic self-expression on the web. Unless you run
| your own site.
|
| This was one thing I kept in mind on my side project (easily
| self-hosted private blogs)[2] where I give people freedom to muck
| with the CSS however they want. We get to do so much more when we
| own our own content and platforms.
|
| [1]: https://jarredsumner.com/codeblog/
|
| [2]: https://havenweb.org/
| city41 wrote:
| Allowing customization also increases the feature area of your
| product, thus increasing need for support, dev time, qa time,
| increased chance of regressions, etc.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| The OS handled this, and it was just changing some colors and
| font settings. It's not like today where there's a whole Turing
| machine handling your needlessly complicated custom interface
| rendering.
|
| I'll say it again: people did this in the 90s, with orders of
| magnitude less computing power, significantly more constrained
| development tools, and fewer developers. That we think this is
| something we can't do today is evidence of a deep sickness in
| our industry.
| ryandrake wrote:
| There are a lot of things developers were doing in the 80s
| and 90s that developers of today will insist simply can't be
| done.
| wott wrote:
| They're too busy dropping platforms support, dropping
| backends support, dropping 32-bit support... in the name of
| the burden of 'maintaining' code that works, is proven (on
| the field) and basically hasn't moved in 10 years.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Not to mention dropping features and taking what few
| powerful features remain, and burying them deep in a
| "hamburger" menu so the main screen can have more
| whitespace.
| city41 wrote:
| I'm not really sure the developers are making these
| decisions. It's usually a project manager or someone in the
| role of deciding where to put money.
| marwis wrote:
| Probably true with commercial software but open source
| (e.g. Gnome) suffers from the same problem
| city41 wrote:
| Sure, and OSes are written by developers and cost money to
| make. Companies have to make decisions on where to put their
| resources. Customization and configuration almost always gets
| the ax today, and cost is often a leading factor.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| I recently set out to try a simpler window manager and custom
| desktop on Linux. This led me to discover Fluxbox. The sheer
| variety of themes for that WM is unfathomable. Enough to suit
| anyone for a lifetime.
|
| The go-to source for Fluxbox themes: https://tenr.de/styles/
| (currently down, hopefully not permanently)
|
| Mirror:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20201019233308/https://tenr.de/st...
|
| Nothing has this same variety today. I hate how _serious_
| computing has become.
| Koshkin wrote:
| There's also FVWM with its Windows 95 theme:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FVWM95
| ecliptik wrote:
| Fluxbox is still my goto window manager whenever I setup a
| Linux for local desktop or remote VNC because of how
| lightweight and configurable it is.
|
| Sad that it hasn't had an update in over 5 years, but also good
| in the sense that it's not becoming a shadow of it's former
| self and is still has the same solid principles and themes it's
| had for years.
| [deleted]
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| You renner the times where in a browser one picked colors and
| font for background, text and links and many sites followed those
| choices? Now one has to spent time to tweak the Userstyle By
| finding the right CSS classes and things to change ...
| [deleted]
| recursive wrote:
| Still has settings in firefox. Right on the first page of
| options too.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Which are mostly useless, since "everybody" has CSS on their
| site ...
| recursive wrote:
| I sometimes use it to detect when someone sets
| foreground/background without setting them both.
| smhenderson wrote:
| And for fonts there's a check box to override site choices so
| even if the majority no longer support this Firefox will help
| you override that.
|
| I don't usually mess with colors but I do like to set
| consistent fonts. It makes some sites look a bit off here and
| there but it helps me more than not overall.
| gambiting wrote:
| It's truly shocking to me how few people even change their
| wallpaper. I work in a video games studio and like 90% of people
| have the default windows logo on blue background wallpaper. Don't
| get me wrong, it's a nice wallpaper, but people have their custom
| figurines and personal trinkets on the desks, but won't bother to
| change the wallpaper on their desktop.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| For how long, approximately, can you see your desktop's
| wallpaper during a day? I see mine for about 5 seconds during
| the boot, after that Chrome auto-launches, and I never see the
| desktop until the next reboot (all the non-browser apps I use
| are pinned on my taskbar).
|
| So what's the point to change it? Instead, I always change my
| mouse cursors to the Garfield theme from defunct Microsoft
| Plus! -- they are of pretty nice orange color.
| gambiting wrote:
| I have 3 monitors, I very frequently have one monitor empty
| so it's nice to have something pretty on it.
| doodpants wrote:
| I constantly see at least parts of my desktop wallpaper
| peeking out from around and in between whatever windows I
| have open. (I personally have never felt any need or desire
| to use apps in full-screen mode.)
| mschaef wrote:
| > won't bother to change the wallpaper on their desktop.
|
| I use OSX and enjoy the fact that the wallpapers are dynamic
| with the time of day. Any photos I'd use myself don't do that,
| and I don't see much of the background anyway.
|
| (This is a far cry from the days when I remember skipping
| wallpaper to save on memory, etc.)
| tokai wrote:
| It's shocking to me that anyone would chance the background on
| a work pc.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| empowerment
|
| Customizing themes and such -- was it really empowerment in any
| meaningful sense, though?
|
| It was more like a really banal illusion of empowerment. Your
| Windows PC was locked down with all kinds of proprietary file
| formats and restrictive licenses, and wide open to malware. _But
| hey, you could change the colors of your title bars and stuff._
| Was that really "empowerment?"
|
| I mean, yes, changing your window colors is orthogonal to
| licenses and security and such. But despite fond memories, I
| can't see Windows 3.1 as "the good old days" no matter how hard I
| try.
| cosmotic wrote:
| Every time I see a headline new feature "dark mode", I think if
| this exact feature in Windows 3.1, along with all the studies
| that show dark mode is actually worse for all the things people
| claim it's better for (except maybe battery life).
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| At least for GTK there is Oomox, a theme generator than provides
| even more customization than Windows 3.1
|
| https://github.com/themix-project/oomox
| hashkb wrote:
| > In the old days of Windows 3.1, it was common to walk into an
| office and see each person's desktop colors, fonts and wallpapers
| tuned to their personalities, just like their physical desk, with
| one's family portrait or plants.
|
| Author (and many commenters here) take as a given that this is a
| good thing, but I'm not so sure.
|
| Starting with the physical desk metaphor - you probably have
| trinkets and photos and whatnot, and then a mess. An
| idiosyncratic mess, but still a mess. I'm defining "mess" here
| from the perspective of everyone who isn't you; which you could
| argue doesn't matter in the physical desk metaphor. Thinking back
| over the ~10 offices I've worked in, maybe 20% of people keep
| their desk tidy in a way that I could find a pen or a stack of
| post-its at first glance. Maybe it doesn't matter if someone else
| can be productive at your desk; but it can't be denied that the
| average human will (literally) leave food to rot on their desk.
|
| Let's move to the virtual desktop. We've been saying we love our
| Windows 3 customizations, and randomize our wallpapers and Winamp
| skins every few minutes, right? Back when we were playing all
| those video games? But now we're adults with jobs (maybe even
| coworkers) and productivity actually matters, right? But we still
| wish for the power to make our desktops messy. Why? Maybe it
| doesn't matter if someone else can be productive at your
| computer, but it can't be denied that millions of hours have
| already gone into making you productive there.
|
| Upon reflection, is this a freedom that you actually need; one
| that helps you in any way? What purpose was served by that flat,
| warm, old can of soda on your desk? Do you like all that paper
| everywhere? Do you even know what most of it is?
|
| Unless your job function is some type of artist, you're almost
| certainly better off using the consensus interface; and if it has
| problems, contributing the fixes for those problems back to
| everyone. And clean up that takeout container that's slipped
| halfway onto your neighbor's desk.
|
| Edit: I'm all for customizing the way that things work. Rebind
| your hotkeys, script stuff, write your own text editor- if it
| saves you time and you can prove it, go for it; but when it comes
| to colors, transparency, animations, all that stuff... just get
| your work done and then go outside or watch TV.
| mixedCase wrote:
| People customize their physical working space and tools as a
| way to help maintain a sense of ownership to the work they do.
| It helps with morale.
|
| It's fine if you think of work as a soul-sucking activity, but
| not everyone feels they have to hate their work or that it's
| not a part of their identity. Even for those who do
| dislike/hate their work, these small things can help them cope
| with the toil.
| mrob wrote:
| >you're almost certainly better off using the consensus
| interface; and if it has problems, contributing the fixes for
| those problems back to everyone
|
| This is usually impossible, because UI designers' goals are not
| your goals. Designers optimize for distinctiveness ("branding")
| and good first impressions from inexperienced users. This
| results in anti-features like low contrast text, excessive
| whitespace, and mandatory animations. There's no point
| complaining because it's working as intended. The only option
| is to switch to one of the few remaining systems that still
| respects the users.
| hashkb wrote:
| I don't agree that all designers do this; but it's certainly
| common. Are you extending that criticism to the designers of
| respected professional tools like Photoshop, Logic, Final
| Cut, MS Word, etc? Those are products refined over years
| using the feedback of thousands of professionals. If I walk
| into a recording studio you decided you don't like red clip
| meters... if I sit down in your airplane and you've flipped
| the rudder pedals with the stick... I mean... there are
| standards and standards are good and the more good standards
| we have the better off we all are.
|
| I'm using one of those few remaining systems that you
| mentioned. But even on OS X I don't find it "impossible" to
| use the standard interface.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| Up to Windows XP I used to change Windows colours and
| occasionally fonts and border sizes in order to distinguish real
| windows from fake ones in popups and banners, now the Windows 10
| automatic colour changes are a mediocre substitute.
| finnthehuman wrote:
| I think what UI customization shows us is that software vendors
| providing customize-ability correlates with a lack of confidence
| in the defaults they ship.
|
| When someone creating software has a strong opinion about the
| "right" way, they can't see the possibility that anyone would
| ever have legit disagreement with their brilliance so they take
| away control. And when they can't figure out the right solution
| to something, they ship flexibility so it can be the user's fault
| that it works like shit.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| Or they have moved to the next level up and seen one size does
| not fit all?
| agumonkey wrote:
| After watching a computer chronicles episode with win2 or win3
| MS marketing employee pitching the new options.. it felt
| exactly like the most recent apple/android talks (grossly:
| custom backgrounds, colors).
|
| My conclusion: whenever the core product is done, the company
| will sell you the 'make it your own' pitch, because that's the
| easiest path.
| janci wrote:
| Unfortunately, that does not imply they are right.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| On the flip side of that argument, it shows an extraordinary
| mount of hubris in their ability to know what the user wants to
| see.
|
| Allowing customization is considerate to the user, like saying
| "I made this and I think this default configuration works best,
| but you can change this if it doesn't work best for you." There
| is not necessarily a "right solution" for 100% of the users.
|
| The best user experience comes from strong defaults that don't
| need to be changed, but can be if the user requires it.
| joshspankit wrote:
| I remember the explosion of artistic creativity that lived all
| over the web. I could go to deviantart and see beautiful, new,
| and innovative designs every day (which some being all 3!). In
| Windows XP I could install most of them easily. On OSX there were
| less places for customization, but the icon sets! _chef's kiss_
| thedz wrote:
| This article is focusing on user customization in the wrong
| places. OS window chrome is mostly invisible to most users
| nowadays. The places where customization happens is within apps.
| Custom emojis, sticker packs, browser themes, slack themes,
| whatever else.
|
| IMO "theming" and customizing visual appearance is alive and
| well. But it's moved to higher layers.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| While I do greatly miss the ability to theme, I'm not sure it
| would work with a modern architecture. You used to have window
| "Chrome", titlebars, borders, buttons, etc as very distinct and
| separate from the window content. Now the line has blurred
| greatly. On top of that, the number of cross platform apps has
| increased so even if you could control the bog standard apps,
| things like Slack wouldn't follow.
|
| This last bit used to be a big problem with Linux, if you ran a
| Gnome theme, and fired up a KDE app, it was like an alien
| suddenly landed on your desktop. Statically linked apps were
| often worse because a static linked KDE app wouldn't even have
| the same theme as the dynamically linked ones. Java based apps,
| apps built with other toolkits, all added their own unique and
| clashing bits of chaos to your interface.
|
| One of the upsides to MacOS, is third party toolkits have a
| single target look to try and mimic.
|
| Even so, I still miss being able to theme. The recent post about
| Mira Furlan passing reminded me of a Babylon 5 theme I wrote for
| Windowmaker what seems like a lifetime ago.
| allenu wrote:
| I loved theming my desktop as a teenager, but now it's definitely
| not something high on my list of requirements.
|
| I think theming is one of those things that have been dropped
| because the cost vs. benefit just wasn't there. Theming isn't
| free. You have to invest resources into adding UI to support
| customizing it and any new UI you add should follow the themes.
| When the OS is upgraded and UI is tweaked slightly, you have to
| consider how to handle existing themes. It all adds extra
| complexity to your project that you may not want to carry forward
| long-term.
| nickjj wrote:
| Back in Windows 98 you could set your title bar to be a gradient
| between 2 colors. That used to be a fun way to customize your
| look.
|
| How did we get into a world where 20 years later with Windows 10
| you can't even set a dark title bar color because Windows will
| say "that color is not supported". There's a cut off when picking
| a custom color where if you go below a certain shade of darkness
| it denies you.
| kube-system wrote:
| Text visibility? IIRC, Windows 9x would allow you set text and
| the background to the same color.
| nickjj wrote:
| > Text visibility?
|
| In this case disallowing a darker color creates less contrast
| and visibility because Windows will use white text behind it.
|
| It's also one of those silly limits where one shade is
| allowed but then you make a 000001 adjustment to it and
| suddenly it's disallowed. It feels like an arbitrary decision
| to not let users pick the color they really want.
|
| To me it feels like the complete opposite of user
| empowerment.
| tacticaldev wrote:
| this idea was probably one of the first points that drew me into
| the Linux community when I was young (so many decades ago). The
| idea of customizing and even modifying my own Window Manager was
| intriguing!
| zepto wrote:
| I have been playing with Linux desktops recently after only
| using it as a server or embedded OS for years.
|
| It seems a lot harder to make serious changes than it used to
| be because of the rise of desktop environments.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I wish there were real high-quality Linux and Windows themes
| imitating Windows 3.x, 98 and XP (and some other old OSes
| perhaps) realistically, not just "kind of like that". I would
| even pay money for such if I were satisfied.
|
| Ideally, they should also be easy to combine in different ways.
| E.g. I want Win3.11 pixel art icons, Win98 window&panel styles
| and WinXP non-antialiased fonts - these 3 things make me feel
| orgasmic.
| anthk wrote:
| https://b00merang.weebly.com/desktop-themes.html
| there wrote:
| https://github.com/jcs/progman
| petepete wrote:
| Have you tried Chicago 95?
|
| https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
| tomcam wrote:
| That's dope AF, thanks
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| No, I haven't! Thank you very much! I have brought this
| subject up many many times and nobody could suggest anything
| which would be really close to any version of Windows (I
| don't insist really this old, interested in a good WinXP
| clone as well). This one seems by far the best. The
| screenshot makes me drool :-)
| zepto wrote:
| The article is misguided at best.
|
| The amount of desktop customization on MacOS _vastly_ exceeds
| anything that was possible on Windows 3.1 by an order of
| magnitude.
|
| Yes, tweaking the individual colors of desktop elements is more
| limited.
|
| However, look at the accessibility features, and you'll find many
| ways of customizing the desktop that make read differences in
| people's lives.
|
| This whole idea that disabling tweaking colors on the desktop
| theme is part of a slippery slope towards a computer 'you don't
| own' makes no sense.
|
| Windows 3.1 was not open source. Mac OS is _vastly_ more
| extensible and programmable than any desktop environment from
| that era.
|
| That said...
|
| I do agree that we live in a world where people who create OS's
| have vast power over the experiences of those who use them, and
| this is not where we should be.
|
| The real step down this path came when both Apple _and_ Microsoft
| copied the desktop metaphor superficially from Xerox but _left
| behind_ the end user programmability of the Smalltalk and Mesa
| environments.
|
| Their goal was to create an environment for the delivery of
| shrink wrapped software. That is what Windows and the Mac were
| about.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I remember I used to customize my desktop a lot. Then I started
| moving, from Windows 3 to 95, then some Solaris with OpenWindows,
| then CDE and it all got a little bit boring. These days the only
| thing I change is the overall theme to "dark" and that's it.
|
| I'm happy I don't do that anymore.
| zepto wrote:
| There is nothing 'empowering' about being forced to design your
| own color scheme rather than just picking a nicely designed
| accessibility feature.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| When I first started playing around with OS X the appearance
| section of the control panel seemed unfinished, and I naively
| hoped they would add more color options in a future update. Nope,
| just aqua or grey!
|
| At the time I'd been using Internet Explorer for Mac and really
| wanted to see the color-configurable interface happen system-
| wide. I thought it made sense to let people set their interface
| colors to match the fruit of their iMac if they wanted, since you
| could do that in OS 8 and 9. Eventually the computers themselves
| lost color/individuality as well.
| afandian wrote:
| RISC OS 3.11 (which was approximately contemporaneous) went a
| step further and allowed users to define the system palette LUT
| arbitrarily using the !Palette utility.
|
| https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/riscos311#appearanc...
| mschaef wrote:
| > RISC OS ... allowed users to define the system palette LUT
| arbitrarily
|
| For 8-bpp LUT graphics, Windows 3.x had a palette negotiation
| mechanism in the API that reserved 20 color entries to the OS
| and let the focused app control the remaining 236. Applications
| that weren't focused got a combination of whatever was left
| over and dithering to fill in the gaps. (In 4-bpp modes, the
| palette was entirely fixed.)
|
| This wasn't necessarily a bad solution to limited hardware, but
| non-LUT modes with 16 bits of depth were a huge, huge
| improvement once they were available.
| grishka wrote:
| Themeability doesn't rule out consistency. As long as all UIs use
| the system theme, they look consistent, no matter what that theme
| is. A good example of that was Windows XP and all the funny and
| atrocious themes you could put on it with WindowBlinds.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _As long as all UIs use the system theme_
|
| That's the root problem, though, isn't it? It's a
| business/people problem. You won't have consistent UIs as long
| as software vendors consider look&feel as something to exploit
| for branding or competitive advantage. Since user feedback is
| rarely sought and routinely ignored in computing, you'd need
| the OS vendor to either disallow UIs not conforming to system
| theme, or make them impossible (by taking away the API for per-
| pixel drawing). Neither of those options is likely to happen.
| grishka wrote:
| Back in the XP days, there were generally two kinds of UIs:
| the ones that used the system theme, sometimes as much as
| trying their best to apply it to their custom controls, and
| the ones that disregarded the system appearance altogether
| and drew everything themselves, including the window borders.
|
| > Since user feedback is rarely sought and routinely ignored
| in computing
|
| This needs to change, too. I collect user feedback and act on
| it and my users love me more often than not. The world would
| be a better place if everyone was doing this.
| wott wrote:
| > Themeability doesn't rule out consistency. As long as all UIs
| use the system theme, they look consistent, no matter what that
| theme is.
|
| Agreed. That's why the GUI toolkit must provide as exhaustive
| as possible a set of widgets, and those widgets must be
| versatile; so that applications developers can build basically
| everything from those widgets and not feel the need to build
| their own from a raw canvas or something like that.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Having just one widely used GUI toolkit would also help,
| something both Linux and Windows are struggling with (Windows
| especially, with Win32-style WPF vs Fluent-style UWP)
| OkGoDoIt wrote:
| Also on Windows you've got WinForms and MFC and I think
| another C++ UI framework as well. Microsoft has switched
| their preferred UI framework every five years or so, often
| leaving behind the old framework in the dust when it comes
| to new UI paradigms they want people to adopt. So you're
| kind of forced to roll your own if you're stuck on a legacy
| framework but want your app to look modern. It's a mess.
| Now they're just starting to roll out a new one called
| "WinUI". I'll wait a few years before deciding if it's
| worth the effort to learn or if it's just another one for
| the scrapheap.
| richard_todd wrote:
| On the Windows side, isn't it a side-effect of the shift from
| standardized common controls to WPF that happened around the
| vista time-frame? It's much harder to provide consistent user
| theming against non-standard controls. Similarly, on the early
| web you could theme sites easily with your browser settings, but
| as theming power shifted to web developers with CSS, that
| capability melted away.
| signal11 wrote:
| I do agree that the modern love for "dark mode" has made
| developers realise -- albeit in a limited way -- that there is
| a pent-up demand for theming.
|
| Products who do theming well tend to be popular among their
| users -- eg IntelliJ and VSCode of course, but tbh Emacs and
| vim are no slouches in this regard.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Using the configured system colors is still trivial even with
| custom WPF controls. CSS2 also exposes system color settings,
| even though the selection is a bit limited ("inactivecaption",
| "threedhighlight" and friends).
| WorldMaker wrote:
| WPF controls are still system provided/standardized "common"
| controls, though. Up until recently (.NET Core 3) all WPF
| releases were still Windows releases.
|
| The issue isn't necessarily caused by the controls themselves
| or even the theming engine baked into WPF. Had Microsoft
| prioritized it, WPF might have had stronger system
| theming/retheming out of the box. It could have provided
| stronger design themes and more user choice in adopting theme.
| There's a brief window in the Zune development life cycle where
| they almost delivered exactly such a thing for WPF. IIRC there
| were 3 or 4 prominent Zune themes and easy style sheet swaps
| (including on the fly) to switch between them in WPF and those
| base stylesheets were almost productionized and included in the
| system WPF resources. (Then of course we all know what happened
| to the Zune and things moved to other platforms.) They still
| likely would have been opt-in because Microsoft prioritizes
| backwards compatibility, but they were a glimpse to the
| timeline where Microsoft had maybe done that sort of design
| work further ahead of time and forced it to be opt-out by
| default. (Admittedly which they tried and failed to with
| Windows 8 because developers complained too much that the opt-
| out was too hard and we'd already lost the war for "native
| controls/native themes" by that point to corporate/enterprise
| designers and branding efforts.)
|
| Of course the "two worlds" problem of having multiple
| "competing" systems controls between the classic Win32 world
| and the WPF/XAML world is unlikely to ever be solved, given
| backwards compatibility assurances, but having "two worlds"
| shouldn't have stopped Microsoft from a single unified theming
| engine had they the initiative/prioritization. There's even
| hints that some people at Microsoft were considering it back
| before WPF was launched. WPF was always a partial shell of the
| "Avalon" dream of Longhorn's tumultuous development.
| squiggleblaz wrote:
| > On the Windows side, isn't it a side-effect of the shift from
| standardized common controls to WPF that happened around the
| vista time-frame? It's much harder to provide consistent user
| theming against non-standard controls.
|
| Not directly. If you code in Win32 on modern Windows, you
| pretty much have to enable themed widgets. Once you've enabled
| themed widgets, you give up the ability for the user to control
| the appearance.
|
| I don't believe there was any technical reason for the change;
| it was the desire to have themed widgets (or in plain English:
| branded widgets) which made them uncustomisable.
| marwis wrote:
| Most native desktop development in Windows is nowadays based
| on WPF and as parent mentioned WPF broke the consistency with
| the rest of Win32. WPF does it's own vector-based drawing
| that completely ignores legacy Win32 API except for some
| basics such as control colors.
|
| Even its standard Windows theme is a poor imitation of actual
| Windows style - you can easily spot WPF apps with default
| theme because they stick out like an eye sore.
| cgrealy wrote:
| Is WPF actually that popular though? Honest question...
| last time I did any WPF dev was 2008 and I haven't really
| seen it used much since. MS certainly aren't hyping it much
| (although that could just be the decline of the desktop app
| in general).
|
| My impression was that it wasn't worth it for small apps
| and not performant enough for things like CAD, etc.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| On Windows most applications don't even use the normal title bars
| and controls. What's the use in allowing people to customize
| their colors?
| signal11 wrote:
| You can use nonstandard controls and still allow people to
| customise colours. There are APIs (GetSysColor for instance)
| which'll let you query and honour user settings, assuming you
| care to and don't put your branding / Look & Feel preferences
| ahead of the user's.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| The fact you can doesn't mean apps do.
|
| They probably fixed it now, but this is what Microsofts own
| explorer looked like in 2018 with Dark Mode:
|
| https://www.howtogeek.com/fyi/microsoft-adds-a-dark-theme-
| to...
|
| You can guess about the support in third party apps.
| arketyp wrote:
| >Looking back, I feel like this trend of less aesthetic
| configurability has diminished the sense of user ownership from
| the computer experience, part of the general trend of the death
| of "personal computing".
|
| This, and end of story. What's personalized today are things like
| the extensions for your browser and your Google account. OSs are
| becoming terminals.
| sildur wrote:
| > But then I realized how much I struggled to get my Android UI
| the way I wanted, until I installed Nova Launcher that gave me
| Linux-levels of tweaking. The average user does not do this.
|
| No. Stop, please stop with the paternalism. I cringe every time
| someone talks about "the user" in third person, like they were
| laboratory specimens. We all are mostly average users. There is
| not really any difference between your father and you. My mother
| wants to play with things like everyone else. But we, the
| developers, don't allow them, and we put them into walled gardens
| without ever giving them a choice. Because we are smarter and we
| known better, and we are doing it for their own good. Apparently.
| And all of this reeks of paternalism and elitism.
|
| The silver lining will be when all those developers receive the
| same treatment in 30 years. Sadly, it will be too late by then.
| fouric wrote:
| I don't understand the point you're trying to make here.
|
| > We all are mostly average users.
|
| If by "we" you mean the population of HN - that is blatantly
| false. The average HN user is _far_ more technically
| sophisticated than the average computer /phone user.
|
| >> The average user does not do this.
|
| This is completely true, and not "paternalistic" in the least -
| it's a statement of fact.
|
| > There is not really any difference between your father and
| you.
|
| Absolutely false. My father, as do most of the fathers I know,
| are profoundly _disinterested_ in customization and learning
| more about their devices - even after I show them some of the
| stuff that they could do, and offer to teach them. It 's simply
| not interesting to them - they want to do workworking, or
| something.
|
| > My mother wants to play with things like everyone else.
|
| Then your mother is different than most peoples' - including
| mine. My mother does not want to play with her phone - she
| wants to use it to get something done, whether that be talking
| with her friends or watching a video. This also describes my
| father, and the parents of the majority of people I know.
|
| Now, sure, most humans want to "play with things" in the
| general case. However, that does not extend to every kind of
| object (e.g. car, gun, workbench, computer, house) for every
| person, and what's more there is a _tremendous_ amount of
| variability in the _drive_ that each person has to customize
| each of those things. The fact that your mother might passingly
| be interested in changing the wallpaper of her phone does not
| in any way make her comparable to the /r/unixporn poster who
| has spent literally hundreds of hours on a single visual theme.
|
| > But we, the developers, don't allow them, and we put them
| into walled gardens without ever giving them a choice. Because
| we are smarter and we known better, and we are doing it for
| their own good.
|
| _That 's what the post is arguing against._ You seem to be
| under the impression that separating "users" and "developers"
| implies taking control away from the former - which is false.
| Users _are_ different than you - and you should give them
| power.
| sildur wrote:
| > If by "we" you mean the population of HN - that is
| blatantly false. The average HN user is far more technically
| sophisticated than the average computer/phone user.
|
| Elitism, again.
|
| > This is completely true, and not "paternalistic" in the
| least - it's a statement of fact.
|
| Backed by nothing.
|
| > Absolutely false. My father, as do most of the fathers I
| know, are profoundly disinterested in customization and
| learning more about their devices - even after I show them
| some of the stuff that they could do, and offer to teach
| them. It's simply not interesting to them - they want to do
| workworking, or something.
|
| They want to do workworking or something... Honestly, that
| sounds quite dismissive. Hopefully your teaching offer was
| slightly more humble than that...
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Good Lord, just give me control over the appearance of scrollbars
| again. Was there some international UI/UX meeting where they
| declared a holy war on scrollbars? Seems like everyone is trying
| to make them disappear like they're an embarrassing and unwelcome
| distant relative they're passive aggressively trying to make go
| away.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Scroolbars are useful for making large coarse leaps within a
| page in an instant, while scroll wheels are good for accurate
| positioning over short distances.
|
| But please. just stop making everything flat ffs. On the GUIs
| of old, you knew straight away what you could interact with,
| while now, everything is so flat or hidden away that everything
| blends together, I have no idea what I can click on and what's
| static unless I used the app before.
|
| Best example, compare Windows 95/2000/XP to 8/10.
|
| Also, please stop with the auto-hiding bs. Sometimes I have to
| do a brute force sweep of the GUI with the cursor to trigger
| some elements to pop up from where they were hiding. WTF?! This
| would have made more sense 20-30 years ago when displays were
| running at 640x480 so real estate was precious, but now FullHD
| is the entry level norm.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _Scroolbars are useful for making large coarse leaps within
| a page in an instant, while scroll wheels are good for
| accurate positioning over short distances._
|
| That's funny. I use them in the exact opposite way.
|
| When I want exact positioning then I will use the scrollbar.
| When I want to scroll past pages and pages, I will just fling
| the scrollwheel.
| [deleted]
| crysin wrote:
| I think it's dependent on your mouse too. Personally I only
| use mice that have a click wheel, I absolutely hate free-
| spinning scroll wheels.
| germ wrote:
| I use a Elecom Huge with drag-scrolling enabled (check
| xinput if you're curious!). For any kind of scrolling I
| just hold a sidebutton down and roll the ball, it's very
| handy and feels better then using a wheel, even if
| imprecise.
|
| For exact scrolling I'll use the scroll wheel or dive for
| the scrollbar.
|
| What I really want is a toggle bound to a button for
| enabling/disabling drag scrolling. Most of my flow is
| keyboard based so being able to toggle that on/off for a
| dedicated stroller would be great.
| wolrah wrote:
| IMO the best mice ever are the Logitech MX Revolution and
| MX Master series that have an electronic clutch on the
| wheel. It's clicky by default but if you whip it the
| clutch unlocks and you can traverse an entire EULA in 0.6
| seconds.
|
| Some of their newer gaming mice have a half-ass version
| of this as well with a manual mechanical toggle.
| msie wrote:
| Loved the Windows 95 UI. I dream of hacking Windows to
| restore that look. I've tried WindowBlinds but they don't go
| far enough to change everything.
| jart wrote:
| What is the use case for scroll bars, now that we have mouse
| wheels? Progress indication? My view is that content is king
| and any UI element that needlessly takes away space from the
| content needs to be destroyed.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Indicating where you are on the page, and indicating that
| content _can_ be scrolled. (I 've seen webpages where there's
| content "below the fold" but where it's extremely easy to
| miss that depending on your screen size.)
| core-questions wrote:
| > now that we have mouse wheels?
|
| * Horizontal scrolling
|
| * Scrolling when using pen/touch input on non-touch UIs
|
| * Making it obvious that a content area is scrollable
|
| * Providing context into how much content is visible vs.
| hidden, and where you are in the document
|
| * Making it easy to scroll to a precise location without
| sitting there twiddling the wheel for minutes to go through
| something long
|
| > My view is that content is king and any UI element that
| needlessly takes away space from the content needs to be
| destroyed.
|
| Your view makes sense at 640x480. Maybe on a mobile screen.
| On a widescreen computer display, there's plenty of space for
| elegant UI controls.
| [deleted]
| indymike wrote:
| 1. Position of elevator (the little thumb you traditionally
| drag up or down) shows where I'm at relative to the beginning
| and end of the content.
|
| 2. Size of elevator in relation to the scrollbar tells me
| what percentage of the content is viewable (except when the
| size of the elevator becomes so small it makes it unusable).
|
| 3. Up and down buttons allow a simple way to bring the next
| or previous item into view.
|
| A lot of the hate of scrollbars comes from the web, where
| browser scrollbars could not be styled and didn't necessarily
| use the operating system's style. You could have a beautiful
| page be ruined by the default windows 3.11 style scrollbars
| in the browser.
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| Don't forget the near religious debate that is scrollbar
| snapback: skim a document backwards to review an earlier
| point, or forwards to determine if it's worth further time
| investment, and then release the mouse button outside the
| scroll area so that you can snapback and continue where you
| left off.
| wtallis wrote:
| Your list is missing an entry:
|
| 0. The existence of a scrollbar tells you there's something
| to be scrolled.
|
| Flat UIs are pretty good at accidentally hiding the fact
| that not all of the content fits on screen on in whatever
| borderless frame.
| function_seven wrote:
| It's always fun when the content layout naturally fits
| into the viewport in such a way to make it look like
| there's nothing down below.
|
| Also fun when websites that are waging their holy war
| against the bars don't anticipate that I'm zoomed in a
| bit. Having to delve into devtools to disable "overflow:
| hidden" is a delight.
| crysin wrote:
| Whats worse is when a website has a footer but they have
| a never-ending scroll div between the header and footer
| so as you approach the footer more content loads pushing
| the footer even further down.
| tsukikage wrote:
| Being able to click to go directly some porportion of the way
| through then fine tune, instead of having to scroll through
| all the intervening space.
| rdiddly wrote:
| Scroll bars are a position getter _and_ setter.
|
| Content is king, but kings have all sorts of people
| supporting them. In fact you can immediately tell who's the
| king not by how solitary and unencumbered he is but by how
| much clutter and commotion and how many attendants are around
| him. I realize I'm pushing the analogy too far.
| alexvoda wrote:
| Progress indication among others. But this is actually the
| only one retained by current simplified, slimmed and
| autohiding scrollbars.
|
| Here are others:
|
| -Discoverability: Is there more content? (Scrollbar
| enabled/disabled) How much? (Size of scrollbar)
|
| -Jumping to a location in the content
|
| -Skimming by hyperfast scrolling
|
| -Coasting by holding a scroll button pressed (this one is
| forever lost because the buttons have been abolished
|
| -Providing a space for bookmark indicators/in-page search
| result indicators
|
| There are probably other use cases too.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| I can't figure out if this is parody or not.
|
| In case it isn't, scroll bars are for quickly figuring out
| the scope, for quick positioning and for remembering where in
| the article things are.
| zbrozek wrote:
| Progress indication and scrollability indication. I'd
| actually like to see scrollbars enhanced rather than
| diminished. So for example I would love to see indicators of
| headings or breaks or page bookmarks. The latter could even
| be clickable.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| My time is valuable. How much more of this do I have to read?
| That's the question scrollbars answer.
| Lopiolis wrote:
| Scrollbars are all about physicality. We are creatures
| fundamentally rooted in a physical world and we think in ways
| that are deeply connected to spatial properties of the things
| we interact with. Scrollbars reflect many of these properties
| in a natural way on a limited 2D plane (as demonstrated by
| all the other comments). Mouse wheels aren't able to replace
| that function in any way. It's not their purpose.
| userbinator wrote:
| Auto-hiding elements are one of the worst trends in "modern"
| UIs. I've had countless times where I had to waste a lot of
| effort trying to find controls that were hidden and only
| appeared if you hovered for long enough in the right place. It
| reminds me of this amusing comment:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965293
| mssdvd wrote:
| And at the same time modern ui have much bigger element to
| accommodate touchscreens.
| dingaling wrote:
| What really irks me are the autohiding scrollbars, especially
| when working over a VNC connection and I have to wait for them
| to fade-in over a 3000km link
|
| Give me scrollbars and keep them visible please.
| sp332 wrote:
| Windows: Disable "Automatically hide scrollbars in Windows".
|
| Mac: General Preferences has an option "Show scroll bars"
| which you can set to "Always".
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| The Mac setting does not seem to work for all applications.
| sp332 wrote:
| Right, anything that's just mimicking the default without
| checking this setting is going to be stuck. Also anything
| more custom, like websites that override scroll behavior.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: optimising for "branding" is what killed
| theming. Everyone wants to have their own custom colour theme,
| brand-associated font or button style, which clashes with
| uniformity of system controls.
|
| If everyone renders buttons in a custom way, they bypass the
| native, theming-capable, accessible-by-default system controls.
| As long as product managers are happy, it doesn't matter that
| users aren't.
| pwdisswordfish5 wrote:
| I thought this was obvious.
| II2II wrote:
| I suspect there is more to it than branding. You can still
| establish a brand through the design and texture of controls,
| while letting the end user have limited control over colour.
| That is evident in the classic Mac OS as well as modern
| Windows.
|
| What we are most likely seeing is push-back over some of the
| excesses of themes. Branding is likely part of that, but the
| astounding number of controls likely played a negative role in
| the user experience as well.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| Theming was HUGE in Linux back in 2005-2010, consistency was
| paramount, adherence to toolkit was extremely important just
| like Apple claimed.
|
| For Apple it was about delivering a consistent branded
| experience, for the GNOME and KDE communities it was about
| being able to consistently customize the experience.
|
| In Windows? Always a free-for-all of such heavy customization
| on the side of the third-party applications that a Windows look
| and feel was never really a thing, nor was theming because of
| the same thing.
|
| Then GNOME 3.0 came and they went for the consistently branded
| experience approach, and you were left with a black and gray
| desktop environment that at best tolerated customization.
|
| And it works alright, but Desktop Linux at most you'll get to
| work alright, the third party app ecosystem is small, without
| the feeling of ownership and freedom that an end-user can have
| with their system, customizing not the kernel but the things
| they're actually interacting with, what's left? An unremarkable
| desktop environment with few applications, that you'll want to
| replace with macOS as soon as you have the money.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| This has been bugging me for years. I was having a much
| better user experience ~20 years ago with Enlightenment
| desktop on top of Gnome or a lightweight window manager.
| deckard1 wrote:
| > Theming was HUGE in Linux back in 2005-2010
|
| Eh? Theming was fizzling out by 2005, which starts to
| correspond to the rise of OS X and Macbooks.
|
| Enlightenment came out in 1997 and was all about theming. But
| theming predated E by a few years already.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_(software)
|
| This is what I would call the "golden years" for Linux
| theming. Late '90s to early 2000s.
|
| > Windows look and feel was never really a thing, nor was
| theming because of the same thing.
|
| I mean. Did you even read the article you're commenting on?
| Windows 3.11 had themes. Windows 95 had Microsoft Plus:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Plus!
|
| > Then GNOME 3.0 came and they went for the consistently
| branded experience approach
|
| This happened way before GNOME 3 was a thing. GNOME 2, Xfce,
| and others stopped their obsession with Windows and started
| thinking about OS X, which was eating the desktop UNIX lunch.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| > Eh? Theming was fizzling out by 2005, which starts to
| correspond to the rise of OS X and Macbooks.
|
| I don't know man, it's what I saw as more and more people
| came to Ubuntu with Windows Vista flopping, and they came
| with expectations of a flashy UX and a dynamic growth of
| the platform. Lots of theming, lots of hopeful mockups and
| GTK+ struggling to support transparency as theming engines
| hacked it in, the race to incorporate compositing and
| having everyone's graphics cards actually work.
|
| I get it that there was a lull during the transition
| between GNOME 2 and GNOME 1, many of the myriad themes you
| found on repos in 2005 were ports of GTK 1.X themes, no
| more. But the influx of Windows users injected a lot of
| vitality into the theming scene.
|
| > I mean. Did you even read the article you're commenting
| on? Windows 3.11 had themes. Windows 95 had Microsoft Plus:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Plus!
|
| Precisely, long-since retired technology. The Windows XP
| era lasted 8 long years, as people for the most part
| skipped Vista. It just wasn't very prominent and crazy
| custom UIs were rampant.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I'm not sure when the last time you've used a Linux desktop
| is, but today that is mostly not the case. The third party
| app ecosystem is relatively strong today on Linux, with
| multiple implementations of Spotify, Discord and other "must
| have" apps. Since many of them are simply wrapped in Electron
| and shipped out to the end user, theming these apps are a
| cinch. If user empowerment is the topic of conversation, you
| shouldn't be ushering users to replace their systems with
| Macs "as soon as {they} have the money."
| indymike wrote:
| The current KDE does a great job allowing for customization.
| grawprog wrote:
| Reading this discussion got me thinking. I've been using KDE
| now for years specifically because every part of it can be
| customized, but for the most part, i've used the same theme
| and configurations now for pretty much the entire time i've
| been using kde.
|
| I still think it comes down to branding though, even with
| those totally customizable environments. The difference is,
| it's not someone else's brand. I get to turn my environment
| into my own 'brand'.
|
| That's always kind of been the appeal of theming and
| customization to me, the ability to remove someone else's
| brand from my computer and replace it with my own.
| nitrogen wrote:
| _the ability to remove someone else 's brand from my
| computer and replace it with my own._
|
| In Windows 2000 and earlier, before system file protection,
| it was possible to use a resource editor and/or a specially
| crafted BMP file to change system icons, boot animations,
| start menu imagery, login screen, etc. With a hex editor
| you could change any UI text, too. I had a _heavily_
| customized W2K alongside my heavily customized Linux (even
| started working on my own graphical boot animations and
| graphical login for the text console as part of a media-
| focused distro project I had joined).
| fl0wenol wrote:
| I remember doing the same for Windows 2003. Got a little
| more difficult with the theme engine and having to use
| cmd shells running as SYSTEM but the end results were so
| satisfying. _Sigh_
| jcelerier wrote:
| > Theming was HUGE in Linux back in 2005-2010, consistency
| was paramount, adherence to toolkit was extremely important
| just like Apple claimed.
|
| it still is, just look at how neat things in
| https://reddit.com/r/unixporn/ look
| ravi-delia wrote:
| But none of that was configured in one place, with every
| other program taking its lead from that central
| configuration. Instead, effort must be made to work through
| every program individually, customizing its color scheme.
| jcelerier wrote:
| > But none of that was configured in one place, with
| every other program taking its lead from that central
| configuration
|
| that's definitely not my experience with KDE, I just have
| to set a theme on the system settings and 99% of apps
| take it (e.g. with this theme in my case: https://www.red
| dit.com/r/unixporn/comments/b49l7k/kde_sweet_...).
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| For any apps written using Qt, sure.
| deckard1 wrote:
| that's how it has always been. There isn't a system out
| there that does theming where some apps won't be left
| out. It's practically impossible. Even dark mode on iOS
| doesn't work on every app. And then there is Android...
| which is just unspeakably bad at all things UX.
| bsdubernerd wrote:
| I agree that theming was much more consistent a decade ago in
| linux-land. GTK2 + QT with GTK2-style would get you an almost
| seamless experience.
|
| The "dark or light" theme we have today is an absolute joke
| by comparison.
|
| Many Gtk-engines were also much faster in terms of pure
| rendering speed.
|
| Another issue as mentioned is that per-control CSS skinning
| breaks easily with custom themes. Instead of using system
| colors devs often hard-code a custom look.
|
| Finally, some programs go for a fully custom theme that
| doesn't even work properly without. Darktable is one example.
| Darktable looks cool, but a long time I had a hard time
| reading it's controls since it didn't respect system's font
| sizes nor it allowed to change it. The contrast was poor. It
| now comes with several themes, but nothing matches my system
| theme, which is more accessible.
|
| As much as I love darktable, I'd skip the custom UI any day.
| eikenberry wrote:
| I'm not sure why you're talking about Gtk/QT theming in the
| past tense, it all still works the same way with modern
| versions of Gtk/QT.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Another issue as mentioned is that per-control CSS
| skinning breaks easily with custom themes. Instead of using
| system colors devs often hard-code a custom look._
|
| Ironically, you _used to_ be able to use system colors via
| CSS. Like it usually happens on the web, that feature was
| also removed because of security reasons - apparently it
| made it easier for scammers to render fake system popups.
| nitrogen wrote:
| Some UI toolkits use CSS or CSS-like styles for native
| widgets, hopefully those can still access system colors.
| kiawe_fire wrote:
| > Another issue as mentioned is that per-control CSS
| skinning breaks easily with custom themes. Instead of using
| system colors devs often hard-code a custom look.
|
| After years of using MacOS, I made a commitment this year
| to use, support, and develop for Linux on a regular basis.
|
| Starting off with little knowledge of GTK, I progressed
| from "hello world" to working on my first app, but end user
| customization has always been close to my heart, so
| naturally I started looking at what it takes to bring a GTK
| desktop app from "stock system UI" to "developer and user
| themable".
|
| All this to say, it could be my inexperience, but I'm
| finding that GTK seems to be very much "all or nothing"
| here. I can use all the default widgets and be 100% native,
| and I can "* { background-color: pink; }" my way into a
| blank canvas, but if I want to make custom controls that
| build on the user's system theme and whatever accessibility
| he/she has set up for him/herself, I'm on my own to make my
| best guesses.
|
| There's no reliable way to determine whether the user is
| scaling text, using a dark or light theme, or something
| super high contrast for accessibility. I can try to query
| some built in widgets and make decisions from there, but
| I've found that quite flaky as well.
|
| Moreover, even finding which classes to assign to widgets
| to "piggy back" off the common system colors when building
| my own widgets is a chore of hunting through themes like
| Adwaita to find the piece of the system widget I'm trying
| to utilize. It's not quite WPF "copy the entire widget's
| XML and re-implement it from scratch to customize it" bad,
| but for as powerful as the CSS support seems to be in GTK,
| it feels like there's a layer in between "full system UI"
| and "total rebrand" that's missing.
| cycloptic wrote:
| For whatever reason this is not well documented, but all
| the theme's colors are available with a special syntax in
| the CSS: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/blob/master
| /gtk/theme/A...
|
| So for example you should be using this to use the user's
| foreground and background color: color:
| @theme_fg_color; background-color:
| @theme_bg_color;
|
| You can use some modifier functions on those colors too
| to compute additional colors:
| https://developer.gnome.org/gtk4/stable/ch39s02.html
|
| I would suggest against trying to piggy back on built-in
| CSS styles; usually with the default widgets you want to
| favor composition over inheritance. But if you really
| need to you can use the GTK inspector to look at the
| styles on any given system widget, that should be a bit
| easier than grepping through the CSS.
| kiawe_fire wrote:
| Thanks for the pointers, this is very helpful!
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| I still use gtk2 style for Qt to this day, as it's still
| supported in Qt 5. I run i3 as my window manager, and most
| of my applications are either Qt or still using GTK2 (like
| pcmanfm).
| jonpurdy wrote:
| As a Technical PM, I fought against a former boss when they
| wanted to forego native controls because they wanted their app
| to be branded, because without a custom look they felt that
| their app would not be unique and memorable.
|
| If an app can't survive on its usefulness alone, it probably
| shouldn't exist.
|
| As a user, if an app doesn't have a native UI, I disregard it
| unless I need it for a specific and mandatory use.
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| I believe Winamp became so popular because it had such a
| unique UI, that was also incredibly customizable. Compare
| that to Windows media player at the time...
|
| On the flip side I want me email client, my desktop authoring
| tools and admin tools to all look and act the same.
| deathanatos wrote:
| Perhaps partly, but the UI was also _useful_ compared to
| WMP. WMP was slow, bulky, and took up lots of screen real
| estate. WinAmp, while it was themed, was _slim_ , but also
| packed far more control into a tinier space than WMP.
|
| (The blue/grey theme that came later was far less
| performant; I mean the original dark green/black theme.)
|
| And WinAmp would open & play literally any format under the
| sun. WMP was limited to something like MP3 and WMA. (And
| maybe WAV.)
| RedShift1 wrote:
| WMP plays anything the system has a codec for.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Ah, codecs. The biggest PITA on Windows in the
| 1990s/2000s. I went through two or three different
| videoplayers for the sole reason they shipped with
| whatever was needed to open just about any format out
| there. Meanwhile, trying to coerce WMP to open popular
| video formats was an exercise in futility...
| core-questions wrote:
| > I believe Winamp became so popular because it had such a
| unique UI
|
| Well, yes and no. Remember, Windows Media player used to be
| this:
|
| https://www.windows-media-player.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2019...
|
| and without system-installed codecs, which were hard to
| come by for something like MP3 files, it was basically
| useless; you could play MIDI files through your shitty
| OPL-3 FM synth and that's about it.
|
| Winamp came with a remarkable set of capabilities: - A
| bunch of useful codecs out of the box - An extensible
| plugin system, with input, output, general, and
| visualization plugins - Skinnable UI
|
| The secret sauce was the extensibility, really. You could
| kill hours just tweaking your Winamp, installing crazy
| audio effect plugins, and so forth. It was really a new
| breed of application for most users who were used to really
| business-like apps.
| deckard1 wrote:
| > As a user, if an app doesn't have a native UI, I disregard
| it
|
| I disagree rather strongly with this. You should use the UI
| elements that make sense. It doesn't make sense for Maya or
| Blender or Photoshop to constrain themselves to whatever
| Microsoft picked out for them to use. The palette of native
| widgets and native UX methods is woeful across all systems.
| It's constrained to the set of generic elements which are
| applicable to some theoretical business application, like
| Word or Excel (which, I must point out, could _neither_ be
| implemented fully in terms of native UI widgets alone).
|
| > If an app can't survive on its usefulness alone, it
| probably shouldn't exist.
|
| Form follows function. And I would argue the opposite of the
| point you're making: if an app can exist purely in terms of
| native UI widgets, does it even need to exist? I can think of
| almost no useful apps outside of basic utility apps (file
| copying, patching, app installers, etc.) that are useful and
| fully native UI.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Arguably it's woeful because everyone goes off and does
| their own thing rather than having any notion of a
| shareable commons.
| virtue3 wrote:
| The only time you should NOT be using a native control is
| when you have UX that demands something very custom. Or
| you're doing some multiplatform thing, in which case you
| should try and use a toolkit that can at least pretend to be
| native controls on all the platforms.
| InvisibleUp wrote:
| This MSDN article (which starts by recounting a day in 1995)
| backs your theory up: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/previous-versions/ms364048(...
| [deleted]
| u678u wrote:
| I remember when office came out late 90s with the custom DLL to
| make everything grey and 3d looking instead of white. It was
| cool, but yeah breaks the consistent theme.
| bitwize wrote:
| This was true in the 90s as well, or have you never used Kai's
| Power Tools?
|
| What's more recent is that the OS vendor now considers UI font
| and color choices part of their brand, and thus fixed them
| immutably for "consistency" i.e., to advertise the Apple-ness
| of the Apple UI even in screen shots of the OS in action.
| encom wrote:
| >Kai's Power Tools
|
| Page curls. Page curls everywhere!
| [deleted]
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Agreed. CSS is the worst thing to happen the web because it
| privileged advertising and designers over content and writers,
| and designers make more by going from client to client. Instead
| of the web being the world's library, it has ended up like an
| endless magazine stand, optimizing for sensationalist crap.
| jbjbjbjb wrote:
| The ironic thing a lot of the popular theming on Windows and
| Linux is to make it to look like Mac!
|
| I was thinking it would be great if someone redid the tiled
| wallpapers in windows 3.1 to be hi-res and realistic. The one
| with the leaves would look amazing.
| thisisauserid wrote:
| I fun prank used to be setting someone's color scheme to black on
| black with black highlights. It didn't work as well on later
| versions of windows because the button highlights were always
| visible. In 3.1 you'd have to guess where the buttons even were.
| tomcam wrote:
| How did you restore it, you monster?
| cgrealy wrote:
| Is it possible that the reason for this is that the desktop
| simply isn't that important anymore?
|
| For a non-trivial number of people, a "real computer" (i.e. a
| laptop or desktop) is still just a web browser with a nicer way
| of typing.
|
| People don't care about customising their computers as much
| anymore because they have several devices and almost all of them
| are for accessing internet services (even "apps" are generally
| just an optimised UX for a web service).
| tacotacotacos wrote:
| Improved usability killed theming. When you are no longer bogged
| down in a tool, you're less concerned with how it looks. You're
| more focused on accomplishing your task.
|
| Theming is alive and well in code editors like VS Code and
| Sublime -- because we stare at them for 6-10 hours a day.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Today customization is effectively a big hassle for everyone
| involved. We no longer have "PCs" in the workplace, just
| "assets". User customization becomes a security threat on top of
| a broken feature. The popular "app" that gets your daily cat
| wallpaper should be rejected by your security team. The OS
| "theme" that enables dark mode will effectively break some legacy
| UI you need to do your job.
| godot wrote:
| Here's one counterpoint, that doesn't necessarily argue against
| the author (I love Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 theming btw!) --
| diminishing ownership of the computer experience over the years
| gave me one great benefit, that is I'm much less reliant/tethered
| to everything on my computer.
|
| Sure, it's not an effect of themes, for sure. It's everything
| from, code for all my personal projects are in a git repo
| somewhere online, important personal media are backed up in the
| cloud or external drives, text chat history are backed up in some
| app or in the cloud, music is listened to on some app, etc. So
| much so that if a laptop of mine is bricked randomly one day, I
| don't suffer much of a loss (other than spending the money to get
| a new one).
|
| Back in the 90s or early 00s, it would've been catastrophic to
| lose a computer. I would have had so many personal files of all
| kinds, customizations of all kinds, that would be lost. Nowadays,
| a machine is mostly disposable. If one is lost, I simply get a
| new one, and all my stuff is online or accessible somewhere. I no
| longer think of my computer as a prized possession I can't lose,
| but rather just another tool.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Using Nix gave me all the benefits of reproducibility and sane
| package management. Almost everything else differentiating then
| from now is just software as a service trying to suck the
| information from my existence and make me a fungible consumer.
| cutitout wrote:
| I use FreeFileSync to synchronize my Thunderbird and Firefox
| Profiles, KeepassXC files, web server stuff etc. I also prefer
| portable applications that keep their preferences in their own
| folders. So I also don't mind if a machine randomly dies, but I
| still have _all_ my stuff locally, plus backups, and what I
| upload is always a copy. Other than stuff that lives on chat
| servers or social media, of course, Soundcloud and YouTube
| playlists -- but that stuff, but that stuff will go away sooner
| than the files I have locally. Stuff that lives elsewhere is
| just a way to interact with others and show them things, not
| the keeper of anything that matters to me.
|
| The downside is that I can't just change machines nilly-willy,
| I need to sync first, at least if things overlap. For example,
| I can use one Firefox profile on one machine, another on a
| second machine, and use Thunderbird on a third, but I can't use
| the same profile on several machines without getting a merge
| conflict, so to speak. That was confusing and annoying for like
| a week, since then it's not been a problem, and by now I'm so
| pampered by it, I simply avoid stuff that doesn't play nicely
| with my workflow. Smartphone apps, for example, or programs
| that doesn't allow me to configure the paths it uses, and so
| on.
|
| Since I use applications and work on data, the OS doesn't that
| matter much. I mind changing Windows from the ass-backwards
| defaults much less than sticking with the defaults, and I do
| that as I go along, i.e. when I use a feature or get annoyed by
| the default, I just change it. That doesn't require any thought
| and very little time, so the configuration I would have to
| repeat on a new system isn't something I consider valuable, I'm
| pretty sure it takes much less time in total than working with
| the default config, in the long run. If I had to do it more
| often than every once in a blue moon, I'd find ways to automate
| it.
|
| I am just not interested in something that could go away based
| on the decision of some pointy-haired boss, which is tends to
| be inferior software in the first place, anyway. Like, compare
| Directory Opus with Windows Explorer, one is a serious
| application, the other is a toy that constantly gets in your
| way.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That's mostly because computers got cheap.
|
| The diminishing ownership of ones's computer only makes your
| data more linked into your device and the device's
| manufacturer. We are lucky in that desktops are still free
| enough that this isn't a problem, but there is severe loss of
| data when one loses mobile devices, for example.
| toyg wrote:
| I agree wholeheartedly with this (2019) post. I'm still very much
| a fan of customizations, forever mourning the end of easy
| tweaking of icons and themes on non-Linux. I used to "refresh" my
| desktop every two or three years, but nowadays tweaking Windows
| or MacOS is unsustainable: every couple of months an update will
| likely break all your carefully-laid-out hacks, and the knowledge
| is getting harder and harder to acquire. So I limit myself to
| wallpapers, browsers, and IDEs (IntelliJ is quite skinnable).
|
| I understand the rationale for the market evolving as it did: the
| world of computers is now much seedier than it was in the '90s...
| every customisation option will be jumped on by malware writers
| of all sorts. Tweakers are now effectively banished from
| commercial vendors, but at least we'll always have Linux.
| gmueckl wrote:
| More configuration options come with an increased risk of
| inadvertently pointing one of the gun's barrels at ones own foot
| without noticing and then pulling the trigger.
|
| To stay with the theming example: it's nice and dandy have
| control over theme colors. But what happems when you set button
| background, window background and text color to white by
| accident? How do you recover from that? Back in the 90s you'd
| have been stuck with a mostly unusable UI. Somehow that was OK.
|
| Nowadays, things like that are tolerated a lot less.
| Configuration options in mainstream products are (often) fussed
| over to the nth degreee to make sure that there isn't a way to
| get the whole thing into a bad state. The result is usually
| somewhat more robust. And that's enough to satisfy most users
| most of the time.
| bussierem wrote:
| I can understand what you mean, but let's be fair -- preventing
| things like "all white UI" can easily be coded into the
| configurability. Yes, the full iteration of possible situations
| you could get into are quite large, and maybe you miss some --
| but there are also options for coding in some kind of "reset"
| quick-switch that doesn't require the UI.
|
| Also, I'm not sure I buy the claim that "things like that are
| tolerated a lot less". Are they? Or has it just been so long
| since we've had anything like that, that we just assume people
| would hate it even more?
| gmueckl wrote:
| Well, I'm sure you'd hate it if your smartphone would keep
| white text labels without outlines on your home screen if you
| set a very bright custom background. I've just tried it on my
| phone: if I set a mostly white background image, I can still
| use the home screen because the text also has a dark drop
| shadow (for exactly these kinds of situations!). That
| illustrates my point quite nicely I think: there are fewer
| settings now, but - when done right - those that are
| available behave quite well.
|
| Theming was just the first example that came to my mind. It's
| a pretty benign one in the grand scheme of things. There were
| other ways in which you could misconfigure your system. These
| were also the days before PCI, USB and hardware auto-
| detection. You could easily pick the wrong driver and/or
| wrong settings for some hardware and the system would mostly
| just try to run with it, not knowing that anything was amiss.
| Pick the wrong mouse driver? Set the wrong COM port for the
| serial mouse? Tough luck.
| kwanbix wrote:
| In Win3 era you will see a representation of what your new
| color theme will look like.
|
| Also, you can do something similar to what happens when you
| change screen resolution.
|
| A window pops up with a countdown for let's say 60 seconds (or
| more), and if you don't press ACCEPT before it reaches 0, it
| undoes the changes.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Someone did this to me as a prank back in the 90s, and I could
| easily undo it using keyboard commands. This was back in the
| day where companies were serious about making every mouse-
| invoked function also available via the keyboard, which is also
| sadly going out of style.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I am torn on this. On one hand, these kinds of choices made
| MySpace very popular. At the same time, they could make
| particular pages almost unreadable. And certainly in the Windows
| 3.1 days I was occasionally called to "fix" when someone had made
| a near contrastless color scheme and couldn't figure how to get
| out of it.
|
| Aside from issues of taste -- and Christmas season is the perfect
| time to look around at people's idea of good taste -- I think the
| best thing to come up with in this area, sort of an anti-footgun,
| would be an automatic contrast checker, similar to checking for
| different kinds of color-blindness.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| > At the same time, they could make particular pages almost
| unreadable.
|
| That's part of the fun of having your own page. Your aesthetic
| can be whatever you want, including "borderline unreadable".
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Ooer/ is a great example of
| prioritizing form over function ad absurdum.
| marktucker wrote:
| I have a small b2c business and one of our key differentiators is
| the customizability. Users LOVE to turn stuff on and off and
| customize fonts, colors, and every bit to their liking. Sure it
| makes bugs and some users post ugly screenshots, but there's
| definitely still value there that users recognize.
|
| I've also noticed that surprisingly many of my friends have
| changed their Gmail theme.
| jeromenerf wrote:
| Some people still enjoy << ricing >> their desktop, especially
| the Linux desktop, from the wallpaper to their editor syntax
| highlighting scheme. It can even be automated. Bike shedding
| ninja level.
| [deleted]
| acquacow wrote:
| There was a free/shareware app for Apple's OS 6/7/8 called
| Kaleidoscope. It was a resource editor that would let you change
| pretty much any aspect of the desktop interface. Apple folks
| definitely had customization before OSX, but not sure if OSX
| killed that entirely or not.
| joshspankit wrote:
| If by "folks" you mean users: yes. And yes: OSX killed that
| entirely (not just did they kill it, but as users found ways to
| crowbar in and do customizations, Apple changed the UI code to
| block each crowbar hole.)
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Kaleidoscope is by far the best implementation of system
| theming I've used. A single file was responsible for the
| appearance of window chrome, window controls, control and text
| colors, fonts, desktop icons, cursor, text selection color,
| etc.
|
| Furthermore, the schemes were free to rearrange and reshape
| window chrome as the artist pleased, meaning it was possible to
| do things like have a titlebar on the _bottom_ of the window or
| to make the titlebar into a vertical tab that hung off the left
| or right edges of the window. Heck, it was even possible to
| make windows take on odd, non-square shapes. The results weren
| 't always practical, but it was a great enabler of creativity,
| and made for probably the most true-to-the original OS themes
| on any platform.
|
| The only thing that even comes close is probably WinXP/Win7
| msstyles, but even those have significant limitations compared
| to Kaleidoscope. Some arrangements of Linux desktops come close
| from a technical perspective, but suffer from the
| customizability being divided into 500 small pieces, making it
| a bit arduous to get everything to match up.
|
| EDIT: One other thing -- Kaleidoscope had something unique that
| I have yet to see replicated elsewhere: _there was no
| installation process for schemes_. You could keep your schemes
| wherever you pleased, and switching them was as simple as
| navigating to the desired scheme in Finder and double-clicking
| it. Boom, done. No obscure and /or hidden directories to copy
| things to, no incantations to make them show up in a control
| panel. More things could use that classic Mac flavor of
| simplicity.
| _a1_ wrote:
| Generally I agree with the article, but it would be nice for the
| author to enable dark mode of the website for dark mode users :)
|
| (it's possible in CSS to detect if the user is using dark mode,
| and adjust the colors automatically)
| bovermyer wrote:
| That's not a commonly known or used trick.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| It's becoming pretty widely used these days. ~25% of websites
| I visit flip dark mode correctly.
| suprfsat wrote:
| Only known to users of such niche websites as YouTube,
| Twitter, and Facebook.
| speedgoose wrote:
| > Remember changing colours on the computer?
|
| You can do that in Windows 10. It can also change automatically
| based on your current wallpaper.
|
| Similarly to installing Nova Launcher, perhaps the author need to
| use GNU/Linux or Windows instead of a Mac.
| p410n3 wrote:
| Windows 10 has themes now too
| HelloNurse wrote:
| Except that Windows 10 themes are a severe security/malware
| hazard, not a customization of harmless graphical elements.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Eh? Windows 10 themes are just wallpaper packs and a
| defined accent color.
|
| I assume you're referring to UxStyle etc as used since
| Windows XP? That doesn't involve loading any executable
| code (unless there's an RCE vulnerability in the theme
| resource loader, I suppose) - patching the signature checks
| in UxTheme.dll isn't that big a deal, imo.
| chungy wrote:
| Windows XP themes are PE binaries. They totally run
| executable code.
|
| This might even be the main reason that the operating
| system as-is only allowed themes signed by Microsoft.
| hulitu wrote:
| No. you cannot change colors in windows 10. You can only change
| 1 color which only Microsoft know on what exactly is used.
| speedgoose wrote:
| It's relatively well documented IMHO.
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/uwp/design/style/co...
| 1996 wrote:
| Not even 1. You can't select by RGB value something too light
| (or too dark) for the accent color if Windows think it would
| be illegible. It's even worse if you have enabled
| transparency.
|
| I wish there was an override, because if I want pure white
| #FFFFFF as my accent color, that's my problem. I don't want
| to settle on a light grey.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Not quite.
|
| You can set an Accent color and either a light or dark
| background - that's it. You can't specify each component color
| or named system color - such as separately specifying the
| colors of the scrollbar' track and thumb - or icon text - or
| button shadows - and so on.
|
| The old "Desktop Themes" feature for Windows 95 Plus! and
| Windows 98 let the user radically change the appearance of
| Windows - for better or for worse - when was the last time you
| saw a custom desktop icon pack or purple 3D face color?
|
| But yes - all of this assumes the user is _aesthetically_
| capable - but neither was Microsoft: Google Image Search for
| "windows hot dog stand". Be careful, you might get a migraine.
| speedgoose wrote:
| I did that search and I didn't know I could get physical pain
| from pictures.
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| Yep, I remember that game well: switch to Hog Dog Stand, then
| see how long you can tolerate it before eyeball bleed forces
| you to revert.
| FreeFull wrote:
| Supposedly Hot Dog Stand looked really good on monochrome
| monitors, at least.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Most of the options are pretty terrible, often unreadable
| depending on the color settings/abilities of the LCD panel.
| When I started using Windows 10 full time this was my biggest
| gripe - you can change the accent color, but Windows picks what
| it thinks will be the best text color.
|
| I really, really miss the Windows 95 color picker. Sure, you
| could put grey text on a grey background, but you could also
| _not_ do that. Microsoft has taken away the option one way or
| another.
| jug wrote:
| I think this is clouded by nostalgia in case it's implying
| greater customizability than today. It's little more customizable
| than Windows 10 which has both light and dark modes for even more
| than the chrome, it has colorizable title bars, and of course it
| has wallpapers. The accent colors can be customized to take
| effect on the start menu background, the task bar, and the title
| bars. This is how my desktop looks right now with merely two
| additions: TaskbarX for a centered task bar and Rainmeter for
| some "widgets": https://i.imgur.com/4qoxSkM.png
| freetonik wrote:
| Shameless plug: I started documenting and collecting screenshots
| and screencasts recordings of old software at UI museum[1]. There
| is a great intro tutorial from Windows 3.11[2] and extensive
| collection of screenshots as well.
|
| The level of consistency and overall caring is very high by
| today's standards. The tutorial explains core GUI concepts like
| mouse movements and windows. This is something I'd gladly show to
| my parents, for example.
|
| 1. https://ui.codexpanse.com/ 2.
| https://ui.codexpanse.com/windows-311-intro-tutorial-video.h...
| Narishma wrote:
| That tutorial dates back to Windows 3.1 at least, if not
| earlier.
|
| Edit: I also suggest you scale those Windows 2 screenshots to
| the correct aspect ratio. They currently look very stretched.
| syx wrote:
| Nice collection, a similar project you could take a look at is
| Toasty Tech's GUI Gallery[1]
|
| 1. http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html
| freetonik wrote:
| There's also GUIdebook[1]
|
| 1. https://guidebookgallery.org/
| cbanek wrote:
| I was just twiddling my GTK theme for the first time since the
| 90s the other day. I guess my tweaker gene got activated again.
| It is really fun though, and getting even more dark mode was
| worth it!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-01-22 23:00 UTC)