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

(github.com)
567 points elvis70 | 2 comments | 30 Mar 25 15:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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metadat ◴[30 Mar 25 16:14 UTC] No.43525239[source]▶
This looks nice and easy to use.

My hypothesis is today's "modern" OS user interfaces are objectively worse from a usability perspective, obfuscating key functionality behind layers of confusing menus.

It reminds me of these "OS popularity since the 70s" time lapse views:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=cTKhqtll5cQ

The dominance of Windows is crazy, even today, Mac desktops and laptops are comparatively niche

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voidfunc ◴[30 Mar 25 16:25 UTC] No.43525330[source]▶
I got in an argument with an accessibility engineer about this recently...

The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability.

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cosmic_cheese ◴[30 Mar 25 17:00 UTC] No.43525627[source]▶
It’s a completely predictable result if you think about it.

Old style UI was developed with the findings of countless man-hours of UX research performed by field experts, while branded UI is typically whipped together purely based on trends and vibes in an evening by a visual designer who’s probably never performed an ounce of serious research or user trials. It’s natural that the latter is only going to be good at the most superficial of purposes. UI as branding is the McMansion of UX.

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1. bri3d ◴[30 Mar 25 17:59 UTC] No.43526126{3}[source]▶
I think it’s worse from a time wasting standpoint, really - a lot of modern UX does have thousands of hours of UX research dumped into it, but with faulty metrics driven goal seeking and internal politics bolted on. I agree that Vibe Branding killed UX in the way you describe in the 2000s (remember when every company had some abominable Flash site?!), but now, we’ve come full circle: from the ashes we’ve allowed warring factions of UX researchers to return to create hundreds of carefully constructed disparate systems with no consistency.
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2. cosmic_cheese ◴[30 Mar 25 18:06 UTC] No.43526181[source]▶
I don’t think we’re quite back to where we were, because branded UI widgets are almost always devoid of functionality compared to their traditional UI toolkit counterparts. If a feature is even slightly “power user”, branded UI widgets probably don’t implement it, even in tools made for technical users.

One of my favorite examples is tree-style lists (“outline views” in AppKit nomenclature). On macOS these have a very convenient functionality where holding down option while expanding/collapsing a section performs that action on all children as well, and it’s practically never implemented in custom-built tree widgets even in cases where the primary audience skews Mac-heavy.