Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

Yeah as far as GUIs go, Win95 isn't in the "nostalgia" category for me, I was already well into adulthood.

I kind of get the appeal, but it's also unnecessarily skeumorphic/fake-3d and there were some UX things that made little sense especially lumping all the window controls all together (including the destructive "close" X) where MacOS smartly separated them.

The fake 3d is actually very useful in communicating what is a button or another interactive piece of the interface and what's not. The modern clean uis where everything is a thin rectangle or just text that you are supposed to click are a nightmare.

> where MacOS smartly separated them.

Interesting that modern macOS now have them next to each other, like Windows.

You'd be hard pressed to call the Window 95 UI pretty, but it is really functional. I'm still a firm believe that the majority of the work we do with computers today could be done within the Windows 95 shell. We need 64bit, more memory, faster CPUs, GPUs all that, but the modern UI aren't really "better", if anything many of them are more confusing. I think a lot of office works would be happy to just have kept the Window 95 era UI for Windows and Office.

Old screen caps of UIs with depth feel so relaxing to look at, and I don’t think it’s just a nostalgia effect.

It’s like there’s always just a little extra brain power and attention being used by modern flat UIs, and you get to shut that off when you look at a depth-enhanced UI.

I agree. Early Macs had to give buttons a 2D distinctive look. A good thing was that the look and feel were part of the OS and not the application, so everything would be consistent.

The most important part is that controls are consistent across applications. In that regard, tools and libraries that implement some look and feel rather than deferring it to the underlying environment are a disservice to users.

Windows, for instance, has dozens of ways to do that, and you can find parts of Windows that use an archeological version of the controls. Nobody, it seems, bothered to reimplement the older APIs on top of the new ones.

Though Apple has forgotten or ignored this in products like the Apple tv where restart and factory reset are right next to each other.

> You'd be hard pressed to call the Window 95 UI pretty, but it is really functional.

Ironically, the Windows 95 look seems a lot like a copy of the NeXT look, which is the OS all modern Macs are kind of running.

Yeah frankly I'd take the NeXT UI over any of them, including Mac OS X, which felt like a huge step backwards to me compared to NeXTstep

EDIT: Sun's OpenLook is the other one from that era that was fantastic

Especially when you're using that tiny trackpad remote. Overall, Apple TV works, but most of the apps UX suck, and that's not Apple's fault.

The window decorations in Win95 are in fact pixel-for-pixel copies of the ones in NeXTSTEP.

Note that NeXTstep actually did the right thing with window controls -- close is on opposite side of the window from the others, so you can't accidentally hit it.

Windows3 and Motif hid this stuff under a menu, so wasn't a huge concern.

But then Windows95, and then (oddly) MacOS through this away in favour of throwing them all together.

Awareness of spatial patterns / frequency of use seems to have been higher among early UX/UI designers than after. I guess maybe because mice became more accurate?

> I'm still a firm believe that the majority of the work we do with computers today could be done within the Windows 95 shell.

Wasn't that one of the ideas behind SerenityOS?