Nire Bryce

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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

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

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.

ive ran into this gradient border issue before im quite annoyed about it

Wow, that's gorgeous.

This is clearly an example of what some pundits are calling neumorphism, a reaction to both skeuomorphism and flat design. Design elements that don’t resemble any actual real-life objects but still look physical and tactile and have a little flair.

But I mean, isn’t that really just a description of Aqua and Aero and even Luna, too? There was just a really weird period of skeuomorphism for a couple years that designers had a violent long term reaction to. And it’s not like some elements of flat design didn’t call back to System 6 and Win3.1 anyway…

I feel like we’re getting stuck in a weird cycle lol, but that’s fashion I guess.

typically i find myself drawn more to flatter designs than those with gradients on like every button but this feels oddly pleasant. i find myself enjoying it more the more i spend time looking at it.

brb lobbying tabatkins to make border-color support <gradient> and <image> data types

I rather like this. I think what we honestly need, is a UI widget/element component system which really exists in 3D, is composited by the GPU, is rendered as if it were a flat window on non-depth-capable displays, but has shadows, height, and balanced text formatting, widget and text sizing, and correct planar projection to the display, from being a 3D widget and window engine.

a big plus is that when depth-capable displays come into play, these elements will live in their depth, naturally - rather than as a decal stuck on the face of a flat window.

holy goddamn, this is magnificent.