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Comment by eloeffler | Hacker News Reader

I miss the times™ where theming was a thing in my favorite programs and environments.

WinAmp, MySpace, even my Nokia 6300 had themes. I never understood why this trend didn't stay and become more popular.

I miss the times before applications had their own theming and just used bog-standard OS provided widgets that could be themed globally by the user. That this has fallen out of favor is, in my opinion, a good indication of how unprofessional and user-hostile our industry has become.

We didn't use to need bespoke "dark modes", you just changed the colors globally. We did this in the 90s, when 64MB of ram was huge. We have become pathetic.

Switching Windows to dark mode

And yet, Windows 98 let you have more control over its appearance than Windows 10 does.

Absolutely :) There was some official addition to 95 that was later integrated into 98 in a way... Don't remember its name.

Was it the Windows Plus! feature pack or was that 98 as well?

Microsoft Plus? It added an official theme engine, but even base Windows 95 allowed quite a bit of visual customization. Themes could change sounds, cursors, and icons, in addition to widget colors and fonts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MkYcUvkbYk

Everything nice and dark… except the web page content… at least back in the very early day before user style sheets and other workarounds became usable.

It's doubly annoying when you consider that apps like Discord that leverage web tech have a very capable themeing system built in to them via CSS and the user styles web standard.

I imagine it's because it makes the app look amateurish.

There were really nice looking themes for the 6300 e.g. here: https://www.deviantart.com/search?q=6300%20theme

And WinAmp was kind of famous for its themes. If well done, they didn't look amateurish at all. Even better than the original.

But it's true that currently most UIs that don't look like all the others quickly seem half-baked.

Anyway, having even a little theme support in popular programs would fix issues like the posted one easily.

why does a discord full of 15 year olds need to look professional?

Because you want to appeal to all audiences and investors.

I doubt discord would have got influencers and musicians creating communities on it if it looked like xfire

mySpace did

Theming makes it really hard to update the software in any substantial way. Even the slightest change to the design could end up breaking themes, or being drawn as white text on white background, etc.

I think it’s natural that it was more common when auto-updating software wasn’t the norm.

Hm that's a good point. Some access to the theming would be nice though.

Old themes were heavily based on tailored graphics that can really not be adapted easily. But the problem at hand (UI that's hard to read for the visually impaired) could be addressed with at least some access to the theming.

That's something many programs still offer though.

“Theming” for accessibility reasons is something I believe most systems support. Things like larger text size, high-contrast mode, etc.

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