Does anyone else miss simple gray GUIs? There is something in my brain that associates that style with “real” computing. I would love to have an editor theme for it (IntelliJ / vs code / terminal.app).
Aren't we at a pretty good place with that stuff, though? It's rare to see the abominations that used to roam, especially in the Flash era. Web designers generally follow mostly the same principles and design language. Windows is the only place where it's still a bit wild west.
Going past windows 7 the trend moving from graphical/textured UI chrome to minimalist/hidden elements, scrollbars has been one of the big 'casualties' for me. When it's just a solid gray there's very little to distinguish it from the content, and it doesn't help readability if the bar is meant to show what proportion of the whole document you're viewing. As much as some people hated it, going back further to winxp where they had color in the UI made contrast better again (and you could customize the theme in the win3.x/9x windows), or third party themes if you were prepared to lightly mess with OS files.
It's kind of hard to tell how real your problems are without knowing which environment you are talking about, but it would be helpful to know where you have encountered these problems. I haven't seen them in any of the apps or OSes I regularly use (Windows, macOS).
On both Windows and macOS, windows are clearly delimited by drop shadows. You have to go out of your way as a malicious app developer to explicitly disable that.
I haven't interacted with a scrollbar in decades. Its purpose in 2024 is a visual cue.
>On both Windows and macOS, windows are clearly delimited by drop shadows.
I disable window shadows with extreme prejudice because I find them visually painful. They obscure something I should be able to see without meaningfully highlighting what I want to see, which instinctively strains my eyes.
What the sincere hell was the problem with a simple, thick window border?
>Its purpose in 2024 is a visual cue.
Yes. They are practically non-existent in most environments.
I don't think so. One example: on Windows, vscode changed the behavior of scroll bars -- something that has been a standard since the mid-80s. They changed the paging behavior and removed the end buttons. Unbelievable.
End buttons on scroll bars are a remnant from when scrolling was new. macOS has done away with them entirely. It's been decades since I interacted with one, so no, I don't miss them at all.
So, I'm not denying that the situation on Windows is inconsistent when you factor in UIs that Microsoft is trying desperately to update, but the design language around scrolling in modern UIs just doesn't seem to be a real problem (outside of accessibility, obviously, which needs special attention regardless).
> design language around scrolling in modern UIs just doesn't seem to be a real problem (outside of accessibility, obviously, which needs special attention regardless)
This is another difference between the mentality today vs. the mentality back then. Accessibility should not need "special" attention. It should be baked into the product. Enough users lack the ability to comfortably drag while clicking, that you don't want to first release a product that doesn't work for them, and then later fix it as a bug. You need to consider Accessibility from day one, during the early design. Just like you need to consider security vulnerabilities and user privacy from day one. They're not things that get tacked on at the end.
But this example isn't even about considering Accessibility holistically. The devs just flat out -removed- the scroll end caps from the product! This wasn't an oversight or some UX over-eager designer accidentally going overboard. They deliberately went out of their way to remove a standard control.
I don't know about Windows 11, but on Windows 10 end buttons remain standard. Do you also think that diverging from consistency with the host platform is acceptable?
I use Edge as my browser, but I think Chrome is the same: The scrollbar is hidden while I'm not scrolling. There's an option to always show the scrollbar, but it's still this tiny little sliver that doesn't match the system scrollbar.
Someone at Google, and someone else at Microsoft, probably think this is good UX. I beg to differ.
I sure do. Modern OS UIs might be visually rich and feature-packed, but this definitely came at the cost of clarity and efficiency. Because I do a lot of writing, I keep an old thinkpad and an old PowerBook running NT 4 and Mac OS 9 respectively. There's just something about those grays and the straightforward, no-nonsense UIs that allows me to work without distractions. I can't say the same thing about my macbook and all of its colorful superfluous features. Of course, since those OSes are ancient, it's more difficult to access the internet which also helps quite a lot with me being more focused on my work.
> There is something in my brain that associates that style with “real” computing.
That's interesting. For me, it's green or amber terminals - perhaps it's like music where the genre of your teens defines the best music for the rest of your life. Were you a teenager in the Win3.1 era?
in the old days you had to pack your 17inch screen into your car, drive to your friends house, plan to game Doom or Quake, but in the end you were configuring network drivers etc. the whole weekend instead of playing: including features like countless reboots and reinstalls because something was crashed during "optimizing" the memory configuration for whatever driver<->game combo.
and if you set a wrong/not supported screen resolution in NT4, you had to set off power to reboot the computer because resolution back-switching was not available back then.
REAL computing also in the sense that a 500kb wordfile could crash your machine, if it loaded at all - because it took 1 min to load the bytestream from disk :)
While I appreciate the flashbacks you just gave me, I don't think the enshittifaction of GUI:s is orthogonal to the evolution in not having to deal with hardware issues any more.
well, then we may have a different interpretation of "REAL computing" :-D LOL
but i agree:
that we do not have these hardware issues anymore was huge driver in getting mass adoption of home computing & internet and the ecosystem as a whole - i remember 1994 when i needed a graphic driver update for some niche SVGA card, i had to go to the store, give them 4 x 3.5inch disks, wait one week and then i could get the disks back :-D
today, the normal DAU is able to buy a super powerful computer in a discount store and have it running with some games 1h later.