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Comment by ungzd | Hacker News Reader

Compare this to modern video players, especially in web, it's not that bad. No disappearing buttons. No panels appearing from all 4 sides of screen on mouse hover. This QuickTime thing does not appear from nowhere and start autoplaying videos when you start some program or open document. It does not move to screen corner when you press "close" button.

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I've been using computers since the mid 1990s, and after getting better from about 1995 to 2005, software has taken a turn for the worst. I'm sorry, most of it's just garbage these days. The new Gmail site lags on my Thinkpad with an i7-8650U (turbo boost to 4.2 GHz). When docked to the left-hand side of my screen (using WIN-LEFT), the layers of various toolbars makes it so the actual message text doesn't start until halfway down the screen. The content area extends past the right edge of the window, but not only that, it won't let you scroll that pane sideways to read the rest of the content. The reply button gets shoved off screen too, and the forward menu item is buried under some cryptic icon with three dots. And this is with the "compact" view and the left sidebar hidden!

In short, Gmail 2018 does a fraction of what Outlook '98 did two decades ago, and does it while pissing away processing power, memory, and screen space. This sucks. I want off this ride.

(While I'm ranting: what's up with Dropbox these days? I've been looking for an app to manage a library of PDFs and notes alongside. I decided to try Dropbox & Dropbox paper. The web app burns up 20% CPU just sitting there displaying a PDF. It can't render fast enough to keep with scrolling. I don't remember PDFs being onerous back in the late 1990s, but web apps seem to universally struggle with them even on modern hardware. After trying a bunch of other crap-tacular web apps, I stumbled upon Citavi, a traditional Windows .NET app. I was so happy I almost cried. It displays PDFs! It sits at 0% CPU usage when idle! It has a menu and toolbars, and you can dock and undock the content area to fit everything on screen! It's a wholly unremarkable app that's remarkable only because software has gotten so incredibly awful in the last decade.)

Try using this url for gmail: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/

I've been using it since the new UI update, which seems to have awful scrolling performance on safari.

Who knows how long they will continue to support the HTML view…

You might want to check out Mendeley if you're still shopping for a pdf with notes application.

Unfortunately Elsevier own it nowadays, but it's very functional. Also, I haven't used Citavi, so I can't offer you a comparison.

This was also an age of people getting on computers for the first time. The brushed aluminum feel, the drawers, static buttons, etc. were all to make it feel like a physical media device since the target users were used to using those to consume media in the 90's.

Most of the article is an explanation of why this was a wrong decision.

The nostalgic web designer / graphic designer from those years in me is really fond of and misses the old conventions of web interface and application design.

I don't know if anyone / everyone remembers phong photoshop tutorials (oh my god they are still there! http://archive.phong.com/tutorials/ ) but that type of interface design was my heart back then.

It was all about creating almost sci-fi like installation design. Wires, vents, metal surfaces, rust, plastic, gel, glass, reflections, scanlines, wireframing, grids and 3d grids, and other things like that. Think Starcraft's HUD design and the Terran installation type maps that floated in space. ( https://media-curse.cursecdn.com/attachments/21/437/b34694f4... <~ this is actually the perfect representation in my mind of what I wanted to make in terms of the graphical interface in websites in the mid to late 90s and probably early 2000s before everything became about "clean, flatter, simple, "elegant") and I'm not so sure I like things that way.

In fact I think I'm going to make it an express feature that all of my future side project's design portion will be dedicated to creating mid-to-late-90's-like interface / graphical designs based on phong's tutorials and other things I loved back then.

My favorite tutorial:

Metallic Tubes and Wires: ------------------------- http://archive.phong.com/tutorials/wire/

Yeah, to my surprise there's a lot that I actually miss about that era.

I don't really miss the graphical excess of trying to make one's site look like a Starcraft map, but even when that graphical excess existed it was sort of a thin veneer atop good old raw plain fast HTML. As opposed to today's sites, which download and JIT megabytes of Javascript before they're ready to respond to a single click, and have often invented their own bizarre UI patterns.

It's odd how right after that era the design stuff we're getting nostalgic about was derided more often than not. Is that something you remember as well? It's not that it was pointed out as being terrible and nasty like, let's say Geocities or MySpace type pages, but I know there was a drastic shift and unlike most trends it hasn't seemed to loop back on the internet of all places where things seem to cycle back into popularity faster than something like fashion? Maybe that's my personal perception but it feels at least somewhat correct.

> it was sort of a thin veneer atop good old raw plain fast HTML

Yes, I loved that too! It felt like you actually had a handle on everything your website was doing and was comprised of. There wasn't anything involve with it that you just installed and assumed would work. Each decision and technology was something you knew inside and out and employed specifically.

Things these days are crazy, eh? Maybe it's a bigger combination of that part of it plus the fact that it looked the way that I described that creates the fuzzy feelings? Well, if I ever get around to doing what I said above I'll have some sort of answer, haha.

I do think that mid-2000s "web 2.0" era that came after the era of shiny pipes and stuff.

The "web 2.0 era" was pretty good. There was a doubling down on semantic HTML, sharing data via RSS, etc. The first cross browser JS frameworks began to pop up which allowed everybody write JS once that would work mostly everywhere.

During that era there was definitely a lot of derision of that late "web 1.0" era with the superduper photoshop-image-slice-heavy rendered pipes and stuff UIs. At its worst a lot of it fundamentally broke basic web functionality like bookmarking and such. The derision was probably justified, since it actually sort of sucked when the whole web looked and worked like that.

HOWEVER, like you I am nostalgic for some of that excess! I like it better than a lot of today's web!

Indeed, Skeuomorphism was solving an actual real world problem of giving people analogies to physical objects. It's been vogue to hate it so long that we forget the challenges of software design that predecessors faced. There are a few strikingly bad choices here (mostly the drawer) but the buttons are all omnipresent and look familiar even if digital.

If you stuck the modern quick time interface in 90s, I imagine the disappearing buttons and positional play interface daunting. We've evolved as our literacy has evolved.

...and most importantly of all, buttons that actually look like buttons.

What, you mean to say it's not a brilliant design idea to make everything flat and make clickable and non-clickable areas indistinguishable? Shocking! /s

...except for the volume control. That's inexcusable.

or Mobile Android Youtube. "Video starts dim with an overlay. Pressing the X in the corner to hide overlay may or many not skip your video to the end." Sometimes the X just disappears and you cant close the overlay.

Absolutely terrible design.

That's because QuickTime was actually not crapware. Go look up some real 90's crapware and it was just as bad, if not worse.

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