I Miss Software from the 90s | Hacker News Reader

I Miss Software from the 90s

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11 pointssmusamashah8 comments

Kai's Power Tools was a magical oasis of creativity-inspiring interface.

Sonic Foundry Acid, around the same time, inspired the same love for interaction. It always felt like software was worth the effort to learn, if the interface was somehow not what you would expect. The engagement was encouraged, because the boundaries for what was standard behaviour for a button were extended.

Somewhere along the line, we lost that magic. Was it when skeumorphism became mainstream, and thus un-cool, and then it became un-cool and flat designers took the helm, returning us to boring looking software that didn't encourage use?

Either way, I personally apply the lessons I learned during the KPT era every day, working on audio plugins I am reminded to make the tools fun to use and non-primary functionality fun to discover through exploration .. its so important to make a creative tool fun to use and explore.

If its just flat, boring UI elements, no matter the power of the software functions made available, the user just won't bother. Or, at least, non-power users will be left behind ..

I am perplexed how anyone can think this is somehow better than UI we have today.

Looking at the picture I have no idea what I am looking at there are million arrows on the left and weird non identifiable pictures in the top.

You can say that modern UI is more boring but I argue that when it comes to UI of software boring is good. If boring means understanding instantly what does what on a pleasing look than I take boring over the old exciting UI where the cognitive load is so big that Id probably had to resort to hovering over every single icon to see what it does.

The Real Programmers (modern UI designers) use only can think of flat 2-dimensional UI elements in pale monochrome colors. The graphic acceleration and 16.7 million colors is beneath them.

Many old tools were theme-able. Windows was most theme-able up to XP probably. This power was reduced with windows 7 Aero and these days windows look like Mac out of the box.

Winrar was theme-able and still is to this date. Winamp is the best example.

Now days, just like web, most desktop software look same. Innovation in design finished at Apple. All Android phone manufacturers copy iPhone. Windows copy Mac. Even when Linux tried to bring itself to masses, it copied Mac.

Apple has got the cultural victory and has penetrated everywhere.

As a person with not so ideal eyesight I have two modes of operation:

I suffer from the extremely bright picture of black text on white background;

I suffer from the extremely contrast picture of white text on black background;

There is nothing in between.

Why would contrast be bad for someone with bad eyesight?

I also miss the freedom of using websites where I don't need to login. Try to scroll down the Twitter page and get deadlocked in to registering an account to see anything more.

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