this thread about tasty-lookin' win2k/macOS9/beOS-era GUIs mentions that today's high DPI displays mean we can't simply return to that era, where every icon was a delicious little simcity building and every pixel was a big load-bearing statement. it reminded me how much the current feeling of being "stuck" in the current bland iOS-google-electron is due to, well, capitalist realism but also the ineffectiveness of computing's corporate masters at driving new visual and design languages. and folks, i think we're gonna have to figure it out on our own, by making a huge range of weird experimental probably-ugly stuff and seeing what shakes out.
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in reply to @vectorpoem's post:
Hey, just a heads up, people with web browsers in HTTPS Only Mode can't see your screenshots! Upload them to the Cohost CDN by making draft chosts with regular top-of-the-post photo uploads, then copy the link and use it in this chost.
EDIT: This has been fixed. Thank you!
ah, i was wondering how to do that. does that mean i need to keep that draft around indefinitely and be careful not to publish it?
Actually I have no idea, I haven't had to delete a draft yet... It would be nice if we could manage our own CDN uploads directly, but that's the workaround everyone uses for now. (It would make a great Cohost Plus! feature to be able to upload arbitrary photos for use inline.)
this is the existing feature request for that: https://help.antisoftware.club/support/discussions/topics/62000183096
Oh perfect! I hadn't seen that. I'm glad it's a formal feature request already :D
the files get uploaded when you save the draft and remain separately, i have seen people say
can confirm this -- no need to keep the draft. (and in fact, there is apparently a cap of 10 or so drafts)
but a user here also stated that after a certain Cohost site update the tricksy-uploaded images in their prior posts broke, which makes the whole trick sound unreliable to me. so i opted for Imgur (and would try Neocities if Imgur was found to be problematic).
I've been using the draft trick for ages and it's never been a problem for me.
lightwave in particular reminds me of the pleasantly awkward design and color schemes of CDE -- unsurprised to find out that (after the Amiga) its first home platforms were Tru64 and IRIX
i love the shit out of the old CDE and IRIX looks, i actually tried it out on my current desktop with the NsCDE project, which coexists 100% peacefully alongside my main gnome desktop login.
I have current CDE installed on my desktop and I drop into it sometimes, it feels so much nicer than any of the current DEs but it's not super practical for day to day use so it's back to XFCE after an hour or so.
I tried really really hard to use Trinity Desktop Environment and kept it up for a few months before I could no longer stand having to teach what is basically unmodified KDE 3.5 teleported into the future how to open modern file formats. I would absolutely love using it if it went through a refresh and modernization the same way MATE did compared to the original Gnome 2.
ty for this post.
just in case you haven't seen the windows 95 GUI paper, https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/
I'm so annoyed by modern UI trends, and that they're copied everywhere, including Linux desktops.
For example, in Windows 10 (maybe already in 8?) by default you can hardly tell the focused Window apart from other Windows, because the main difference is that the window title text is dark grey instead of light grey or something like that? Win10 lets you choose an "accent color" and has a setting to apply that to window titles and window borders (which otherwise are basically invisible) - but that only changes the window title color for some (more classic) Windows applications, more modern ones (of course including several Windows builtin settings apps etc, or Visual Studio) don't use the accent color for the window title bar.. this probably is one of these mobile designs (doesn't matter if apps are fullscreen, or even if they're not it's less annoying if you only have one screen), but how could this happen, do Microsoft developers not use their own software? Or do they only use one screen? Or did they realize that it's unergonomic and someone forced them to follow the design anyway? Anyway, nowadays many (most?) XFCE window manager themes, including the default one and the widely used Greybird theme, do the same thing (focused window looking mostly the same as unfocused ones). And, based on some Gtk3 fad introduced by GNOME (client side decorations), some of the XFCE apps don't even use the window manager window title bar, but ones that somehow come with the Gtk theme - so even if you use one of the XFCE themes that do have readable window title bars, those apps don't (unless you use hacks like gtk3-nocsd). Yes, they took the one thing away that gave graphical Linux applications (with different toolkits) at least a bit of a unified look.. (Not sure about KDE, but GNOME window manager themes will certainly have the same problem as XFCE, presumably worse)
And then there's all the problems with flat low-contrast UIs, like tabs where it's hard to tell which one is active, and for the remaining tabs the only way to tell where one starts/ends is their icon or close button, scroll bars where the thumb is grey on a slightler lighter grey background (or scrollbars that hide themselves, the single least useful feature ever for DESKTOPS THAT USE WIDESCREEN DISPLAYS AND THUS HAVE PLENTY SPACE FOR (VERTICAL) SCROLLBARS), etc
Maybe desktop UI really did peak with Windows 2000. IIRC just because Apple at some point overdid it with the Skeuomorphisms and it looked a bit silly, they (and then everyone else) went to the other extreme of bland flat UIs
yeah, given the battles over client side decoration and themeability (especially GTK4) it seems like the situation on linux is going to get worse before it gets better. but ironically it's also the environment where the user theoretically has the most control and might be the best laboratory for future directions we've got.
IIRC just because Apple at some point overdid it with the Skeuomorphisms and it looked a bit silly, they (and then everyone else) went to the other extreme of bland flat UIs
like i said in my original post, i think the flat design trends happened more because of the power + business focus shift from desktops to touchscreens than being any kind of coherent reaction against the excesses of skeumorphicism. that said, the first few versions of iOS unsurprisingly did borrow a lot from contemporary OSX.
it seems like the situation on linux is going to get worse before it gets better
Hope that'll happen, eventually.. it feels like just the stupid discussion about client side decoration in wayland held back its adoption by years(?), and made non-GNOME projects write their own compositor instead of using weston.. and unsurprisingly, one argument here was "but we also wanna use wayland on mobile were there are no window decorations", fitting nicely in the whole "mobile design decisions make desktop software worse" theme.
it's also the environment where the user theoretically has the most control
Yeah, I ended up creating my own Gtk theme so I can stand the look (based on another, just changed some colors and defaults for scrollbars - https://github.com/DanielGibson/Greyteal/), and while it's great that it's possible, 1. I wish it wasn't necessary and 2. I wish doing the kind of simple changes I did were just userfriendly configuration instead of messing with CSS
might be the best laboratory for future directions we've got
That would be nice, but do open source projects have the manpower for that? It feels like KDE an GNOME are usually busy with rewriting everything with little functional change and the smaller ones are often busy with keeping up with changes in the toolkit they use (how long did it take XFCE to migrate to Gtk3?) or with migrating to wayland or ... (OTOH there of course have been innovations at least in window managers, before wayland became relevant, like all the tiling ones or awesomewm which is heavily scriptable etc)
i think the flat design trends happened more because of the power + business focus shift from desktops to touchscreens
Why do touchscreen UIs have to be flat (as you said, early iOS wasn't, was that bad?)
But either way, the trend of designing for touchscreens even when in reality targeting the desktop is the root of many evils in modern UIs. (So depressing how Microsoft made almost everything flat and touchscreeny and then Windows Phone failed so they made their main product worse for nothing)
Plus the shit where the close button for a tab (or whatever) is invisible until you put your cursor over the tab (which has no border). Boils my fucking piss
I guess I'm the only one who genuinely prefers the modern style, huh. All the UIs you used as examples here are distractingly busy to me, and not just because of how many controls there are.