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28 years ago, Windows 95 entered general availability (August 24th 1995)
(en.wikipedia.org)
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this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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Seriously though, this is the first properly good UI for a desktop computer. Mac OS (or I guess Macintosh OS at the time) was okay, but reliant on the global menu and weird drop-downs. Windows kept everything self-contained. Even multi-window programs tended to use the "multiple document interface," i.e., windows inside windows. Tabs weren't really a thing yet.
It also crashed if you looked at it funny and had the antivirus capabilities of warm cheese. But there's damn good reasons Windows 7 was the same experience, extended, rather than replaced. It's more-or-less what I style Linux to look like. And in light of that I'm kinda pissed off any OS ever struggles to remain responsive, when this relic ran smoothly on one stick of RAM that's smaller than my CPU's cache.
See Fitt’s law for why the Mac’s menu bar is the way it is.
Thoroughly familiar with it; don't care. The global menu has always been goofy because of the invisible relation to some open window. Usually a small window floating out in middle of the desktop, because Mac OS took forever to adopt any concept of "maximize." I'm still not sure they do it right.
Nowadays macOS maximises like Windows does. Whether that’s “doing it right” is something else entirely.
If you hold down one of the modifier keys, either Options/Alt or Cmd I don't quite remember which, and then click the maximize button it does the normal Windows style maximize.
Lol this is my biggest beef with MacOS: the extent to which you have to memorize a bunch of utterly non-intuitive key combinations just to do basic tasks. Like taking a screenshot, which remains an absurd nightmare.
What's the behavior when you double-click the title bar?
It usually maximizes it Windows style as well. I feel like I've had more inconsistency in behavior from that (like it would sometimes just fill the width but not the height), but nothing I can reproduce right now.
Googling around suggests it's a global setting. Having recently used an Xfce version that didn't want to super+arrow, maximize-vertical is an okay tool, but outside of super-duper-widescreen, it's not what I'd ever want by default.
Dear god, my biggest beef with using a smart phone is that UI designers 1) love to have tiny buttons for shit, and 2) the tappable areas for those buttons are almost never made larger than their tiny graphics, so it's a bitch to actually tap them.
I used to be a mobile app developer, and when I wrote apps by myself I would always expand the tappable areas so they were easy to hit with fat fingers. My last job was working for a huge cable company (maybe the name rhymes with "bombast") and whenever I expanded the tappable area of a tiny button the UI designers would pitch a fit and insist that that not be done. Management would agree with them on the grounds that expanding the tappable area would require too much time to implement - and then they'd order me to spend even more time un-implementing it.
I find this problem to be especially pronounced in the exit buttons on in game ads.
Something that irritates me in desktop design is, there's a clickable icon. There's no box around it to represent a button, just the icon on a blank background. You move your mouse towards the icon. When you get close to the icon, a box appears around it. You take this to mean "this object will be interacted with when you click the mouse." You click the mouse. Nothing is achieved. You have to move the mouse into the actual borders of the icon, it's just that now icons get visibly excited that you might pick them.
Windows 95 legitimately had better UI than that "Material" bullshit, via relief shading conveyed through four fucking colors. The hierarchy of elements is instantly visible. Buttons even popped in and out when clicked. There's just no excuse for how minimalism fetishists have taken over user experience.
Certainly windows took inspiration from the apple button in the upper left, but changed a few things so they wouldn't get caught copying.
There's only so many corners.
I think they actually tried to take MS to court, but lost since they had stolen the ideas from Xerox in the first place.
The movie Pirates of Silicon Valley does a great job at illustrating the basics of the story.
First off, Apple licensed the idea from Xerox, they didn’t steal it. Second, Apple lost because they had a badly worded contract with Microsoft for implementing Word for Mac that could be construed to allow them to copy the system's API and thus UI.
IBM contract lawyers the day that was announced:
"OH FUCK! OH FUCK! OH FUCK!"
It really was a game changer. I remember the excitement of getting it for the first time after using windows 3.1.
The full screen app contained in a single window was great! I hated the Mac eat fo many windows floating around. My ADHD was so overwhelmed by all the tiny windows instead of a clear one.
mac os sucked ass