I don't know if this is nostalgia talking but there is something particularly attractive about the BeOS and Haiku desktop both in terms of design and aesthetics. The interface actually has a certain depth and this is consistent across icons, windows, dialogs, menus, buttons, etc. It's a shame that interfaces nowadays are completely flat. They are almost... expressionless and with the exception of the odd drop shadow they completely lack a third dimension. When I first learned of Haiku (and BeOS), back when Gnome was in the 2.x days, I was so impressed by the interface that I installed a look-alike desktop and icon theme. I used it for quite a long time until GTK+ 3.x eventually became prevalent.
All 90s GUIs have something that I miss[1]. I think the flat movement was a desire for hyper genericity .. but turns out that a bit (just a bit) of visual signal and faux skeumorphism (some widgets emulated actual LED keys found on hardware) is good.
ps: also, flat came after both the aqua trend where effects were everywhere and skeumorphism was pushed higher. Not that surprising in a way.
[1] beos, win311, macos classic, win95 (office97 era) and nt5
I mis those from the 90's GUIs:
- Standard interaction widgets. There was no breaking the scroll, there was no button that you can't discover how to press.
- Expert oriented interfaces. There was no action without a shortcut. The most complex software always had some CLI or an API (optionally with an intepreter).
- Discoverability features. The sortcut descriptions were embedded on the same places you had to click to get the functionality. Buttons were clearly marked. There was almost always some text area telling you what was happening.
I don't miss skeumorphism, but it was often used to mark real features, and those features were gone with the arbitrary skeumorphisms. Current GUI trends were created by people with no interest on making their software useful, instead they only keep an eye on showroom conversion rate. (Whether they are right or not on doing so, it's a problem nonetheless.)
> Current GUI trends were created by people with no interest on making their software useful, instead they only keep an eye on showroom conversion rate. (Whether they are right or not on doing so, it's a problem nonetheless.)
Yeah, I feel A/B testing is really the place where Satan secretly influences the world. I'm losing track of how many times I've seen user-hostile or application-debiliating decisions justified by "data" on user behaviour. Something is very wrong here.
Hello, Office's Ribbon.
# Runs horizontally.
- Result: wastes precious vertical space on low-resolution widescreen displays (i.e. business displays and most notebooks) that should be dedicated to showing the document body.
# Due to being horizontal, GUI items appear/disappear depending on window width.
- Result 1: having two documents on screen can be disadvantageous compared to having one on screen because a lot of the GUI items aren't showing or are hidden in submenus, encouraging wasting screen real estate by only having one document on the entire screen.
- Result 2: due to the Ribbon's horizontality, instead of having the elements stay on screen in a consistent manner and be easily scrollable, the interface constantly surprises the user by unexpectedly hiding even key GUI items.
# No option to disable.
- Result: if you wanted to have certain GUI items visible at the same time… well, tough. If the floating palette that inconsistently appears when the user places the mouse cursor over certain elements doesn't have your favourite item, then you're out of luck if the items you want to use exist under different tab groupings.
iWork '09 and prior had the best design: a main toolbar with general items, a smaller context-sensitive toolbar underneath, and context-sensitive inspector windows. If the revamped iWork had simply docked those context-sensitive inspectors, rather than get rid of the context-sensitive toolbar, it mightn't have received such a poor response.
The irony is that Office 2003 (and a few releases prior) already had inspectors on the side, and those would have been perfect given the prevalence of widescreen displays, leaving as much vertical space for the display of the document body as possible.
LibreOffice seems to have three GUI modes; one like iWork, one like the old Office, and one like the Ribbon.
I've been using my taskbar on the side of the screen for the past decade, because every screen I use has an excess of width and limited height. I seem to be very much in a minority here - I guess people don't change things from default?
Most screens are wider than they are tall, but I wouldn’t say there’s an excess of width. I use the width for multiple windows side by side, and I’m fine with having a “global” taskbar running horizontally and using a small portion of the height. MacOS and other operating systems cleverly have a global top bar that changes depending on the focused application, which I like.
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