Just an absolutely lovely line of text.
Modern UI design could stand to take not just a few pages but the majority of the book from both the Windows 7 variant of Aero and the OS X 10.9 variant of Aqua, in my opinion. Legibility, information density, and communication of interactability and widget function have all been lost as we’ve careened towards egregiously thick padding, low contrast, and low differentiation.
That said, I really do think the Windows NT era had the best UI in terms of brute usability.
Again, I love Aero's faux glass, cyan highlights, high gloss, etc... but it is indeed a lot of noise and I think it's a bit distracting.
Any new UI design looking to incorporate Aero’s good bits would be smart to tone the look down a little.
On flat themes, I like Zukitre, which I modded the highlighting color to black instead of blue. It's the only usable theme I found not being either blinding light nor often unreadable dark. It has a grey neutral tone, something Apple understood for platinum if you worked on graphic design, video and photo editing, or as a journalist (the 99% of the Apple users in late 90's).
Modern day “light mode” would benefit from taking notes. The surge in demand for dark mode lines up pretty cleanly with the advent of the stark white themes that the flat UI epidemic ushered in.
most likely.
Also, they screwed up the start menu/screen search in windows 8 and it has sucked since then. :(
- An influx of print/commercial/etc designers into UI design, who lack the full suite of knowledge and skills to design usable UI, crowding out the UI designer old guard
- The likes of Dribbble and other social media kicking off self reinforcing minimalism trends within the field
- The rise of “UI as branding” which places brand identity far above practical usability in terms of priorities
There are other factors like indie devs not wanting to hire a designer for their projects and just phoning that part in (which flat is conducive to), but they don’t have nearly as much sway on industry trends at large.
This little bit of tuning is called Shine 2.0 and is still the most modern desktop user interface, even though it was published in 2010:
https://www.deviantart.com/zainadeel/art/Shine-2-0-for-Windo...
https://web.archive.org/web/20140511174529/http://www.devian...
Android, Windows and iOS all look similar now… macOS is shifting that way…
Bring back skeuomorphic design…
I'd like to see someone create the longhorn vision though.
https://gizmodo.com/this-incredible-windows-7-launch-party-v...
I suspect this is linked to its era: it came out on the cusp of the trend of having everything autoupdate on its own initiative. (I just looked it up and Firefox 15 came out around the same time and was the first version to have "silent updates".) This in turn came as some kind of tipping point was reached where it became simpler to assume everyone was always connected to the internet (and have some kind of "emergency mode" for when they weren't) than to assume they weren't (and have some kind of "online mode" for when they were). And that also led to the proliferation of telemetry and other such things that involve using that always-on-ness to talk back to the software company.
I see this as part of a trend away from what I call "bounded transactions" and toward subscription-type models, and I think it's been one of the most corrosive developments in our society. The thing about Win7 was that once you had a computer up and running with it, it was up and running and would continue to be, and you could just kind of leave it like that. You had security issues to worry about, but you still had the option of being the one to worry about them. In the following years, everything began to shift towards the "you own nothing" model where so much of the functionality of "your" hardware and software was actually just a short-term lease with some company on the other end that could decide to rugpull you at their convenience.
I don't find it funny when it's bare metal! On my work laptop I put Windows to sleep 100% of the time, and restart for updates when I'm forced to with 3 hours notice before a mandatory reboot.
This battle with Windows doesn't even need to be happening! I am very good with updates and go looking for them in the settings without needing them to be pushed, at least on less hostile OSs! I run beta iOS on my old phone, and get a little disappointed when I see no changes required when running an update through apt or nix-env or whatever.
I highly recommend running virtualised Windows somewhere for the sanity preserving feeling of vengeful control :)
So while it was indeed a great version of Windows, having COM as the new way of shipping Windows APIs wasn't that welcoming, it is kind of incredible how for such a critical technology on Windows development, Microsoft keeps shipping cluncky frameworks to write and consume COM.
There was even the famous Hilo sample that was praising this as the way forward,
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/announcing-hilo/
https://github.com/microsoftarchive/msdn-code-gallery-micros...
Combined with a theme-to-CSS convertor, imagine an Electron app looking like a Windows app on Windows, and a GTK app on Linux, while following the colours and styles of the custom theme the user has selected in their OS.
I'd be wary to build on top of these clones only to receive a cease and desist, but that's a fear of mine, I don't know if it's founded.
Side note: the iOS version of Tetris is an ad and gambling ridden hellscape, and that's a licensed spinoff.