I've spent too much time on that website I think I've developed an appreciation of GUIs before the mid-nineties:
Buttons for everything, no hidden corners and such, no excessive skeuomorphism, respect of preferences in colors and fonts, low feature creep, no excessive social media integration and network services 'integration' (AOL, MSN).
What happened since? The open-source world hasn't offered anything of that caliber, so I guess there was a shift in thinking at some point.
On the open source side, feature creep and lack of design direction. On the commercial side, the internet + desire to squeeze in as much advertising/profits as possible.
It is definitely still possible to have a desktop that looks and behaves like this on Linux, if you use a minimalistic window manager and apps (dwm, xmonad, open box, the suckless apps, etc). I've been doing this for a while, it makes the computing experience much nicer IMO.
The GUI I use everyday is very much like that. I have been using windowmaker as a my window manager of choice for at least six years, if not more. There is literally zero integration with any social networking stuff -- save for the occasional Facebook surfing (which I keep at a low profile), there's only the occasional IRC chat that happens in a terminal. Save for the applications (which use GTK themes, indeed -- but they also respect those -- or whatever settings I have in ~/.Xdefaults) which have their own settings, WM pretty much has the colors and fonts I tell it to. There's no skeumomorphism in it, no hidden corners and so on.
To be fair, I do need to be relatively picky with the applications I use to get a reasonably clean experience. There are some tools for which I really have no working alternatives. I eventually graduated from mutt to Thunderbird, but it's fairly overloaded. The only RSS feed reader I found to be reasonably useful is newsbeuter.
But in any case, I can still stay away from the flashy crap that has invaded the UI world recently. I kind of feel like a dinosaur at times, but I can do my work perfectly well, so I'm happy.
The more powerful a system becomes, the less responsible the design choices seem.
There has been a rush to increase functionality without taking a step back to determine if it is a good idea. The concept of modularity seems to have been forgotten.
This is one of those amazing free resources that makes the Internet amazing. I wish Wikipedia's sections on each of these OS's had such comprehensive screenshots and writeup.
also: I had forgotten how many Windows 3.x shells there were.
Haha yes I remember running Calmira II on a Windows 3.1 486 SX25 with very little RAM (or was it a 386 monoscreen laptop?) in the desire to get the functionality of Windows 95. How little I knew!
Does anyone know why pretty much all of the PARC's successors choose to orient their monitors in "landscape" mode as opposed to "portrait" as was done on the PARC? Reading and working is so much easier in portrait mode. You get to see a lot more without having to scroll all the time.
I recall spending silly amounts of time years ago trying to locate some of the more exotic stuff on that site (particularly GlobalView & NewWave). Nice to see that direct access to these important historical resources is much improved since then.
Looking at BeOS screenshots make me relive the disappointment I felt as a Mac owner in the 90s when Apple decided not to use BeOS as its next generation OS. It was quite a bit ahead of its time.
As was AmigaOS in its own way. Is it really accurate to call all these ahead of their time, or rather that what was in common use at the time was behind the times?
straight C++ is just too hard to use for GUI. Trolltech at least bite the bullet, and decided that you need some kind of preprocessor (moc) to get around dynamic objects and exposing their properties, signals/events/connections/etc.
I'm now on the Qt wave, but had to use wxWidgets, .NET Windows Forms, MFC and few others. Never been too proficient in them, just enough to support and add features.
So far having the best experience with Qt - things like styleSheets and the data models (table, tree, etc.) are th best things I've seen. (I'm not much familiar with CSS, but somehow I'm getting exposed to the concept through qt-ones).
With .NET Forms it always seemed like I hack to go low-level and do some Win32 GUI stuff (which for some strange reason i love - since I do love "C" at heart).
I've also seen WPF, Reactor, etc. - and I simply could not understand them - either they look too foreign for me, or I don't know.
As for non-C/C++ ones - I loved LispWorks CAPI - it mimicks wxWidgets that it wraps native controls, but it's so easy to write bulk UI stuff in it (for me)
Yeah but his criticism is objective and thoughtful. I have read about 5 different reviews he made and I can totally understand now why he dislikes Windows 8.
Those Xerox Alto screenshots are amazing; I cannot imagine how exciting it must have been developing the seeds of the GUI way back in the mid 70s. Something about that font makes it more pleasing than anything we have around today.
They had generic operations that were supported by many parts of the OS, like a move command used for files or data inside an editor. Like Algol, successors peaked below, they mostly provided superficial similarities.
I rember, even then, thinking -- well this might be ugly, but they sure got the contrast right -- and everything is really visible/obvious. But I mean seriously: orange on blue -- that takes some serious "usability trumps looks"-focus...
[edit: And also, even back then, I thought; wow, these black/orange scrollbars are really confusing - what signifies where I am, and how much I can "scroll to"...]
Buttons for everything, no hidden corners and such, no excessive skeuomorphism, respect of preferences in colors and fonts, low feature creep, no excessive social media integration and network services 'integration' (AOL, MSN).
What happened since? The open-source world hasn't offered anything of that caliber, so I guess there was a shift in thinking at some point.