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Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

I disagree, stuff today is un-boring mostly in a bad way: Is this a link or a button? Is that a checkbox or an option box? Where'd my scrollbar go? Is this two-state control already on or off? Is this row of text labels a bunch of tabs, or a bunch of new panels? What zones are right-clickable, and does right-click even work? Will this website hijack key combos used by my browser? Does this app even have key combos, and why can't I discover them by looking for an underlined letter? Is there a cheatsheet somewhere? ...

In contrast, a lot of classic 1990-2010 stuff was stable and boring because it had reached a point of working well and the visual indicators were consistent.

Now it's more like "pandering to the lowest common denominator of a touchscreen interface, and doing it badly", or "sacrificing good UX in the name of looking different".

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Even when things weren't consistent, they were 'readable' and you could understand what a control was offering.

I wonder if our current state is a consequence of the 'iteration' of skeuomorphism, where a few decades ago computer UI controls were representations of what people would have been familiar with before - physical buttons on machines or concepts like files in folders, more recently the feedback loop is abstract controls being the input for the next iteration. How many objects in the world that you use in a week give a good template to inspire designers?

Not necessarily, look up "mystery meat navigation". The affliction that produced our current UI woes has existed almost as long as the WWW itself.

I recently had occasion to go back and use the Microsoft Office 97 suite in a VM (because... reasons). It occurred to me that this entire generation of computer users has probably never encountered anything that works like the multiple-document interface that was so prevalent in the 90s. It just sorta "went away" and I haven't seen anything quite like it in some time.

Whether MDI was good or not, eh, probably not. But I never would've expected that (of all things) to trigger nostalgia for me.

You might enjoy or find-use-for: https://jdan.github.io/98.css/

People have made versions for XP, 7, etc. as well.

Philosophically, MDI is probably not a great way to do most things. It makes more sense to have the Window mamager manage windows, but unfortunately, we moved away from MDI without really coming up with a solution for providing the advantages of an MDI through flexible WM solution.

Mac OS 9 did this well, but that was because it was effectively single tasking in terms of the user experience.

For Hi-Fi systems, MDI was skeuomorphism too. Actual sound systems had separate boxes that did graphical equaliser function, amplifier function, tape function, CD player function, etc.

When portable CD players were still chunky companies would give them a bit more funk, buttons that followed the curves of the device and such. Similarly, before MP3 players went tiny there was some extra space for a bit more design that some Winamp skins would mimic.

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