I agree with most of the examples at the end of the post, except HelloFresh.
I'm a huge fan of HelloFresh, and I think it solves an important problem which is one of waste. Before this service, I would buy odd quantities of ingredients (especially vegetables) that would invariable go bad and get chucked in the bin. The amount of lettuce, mushrooms, avocados, etc I threw away were obscene.
With these kind of services I get a tailored amount of perishable ingredients to a specific recipe on a specific day and great deal of mental energy is saved by outsourcing meal planning to them. I don't think I've ever threw away a single food item since using them. IMO this well worth the extra money.
On the other hand, food itself is renewable. The energy embodied within it (expended in its supply chain) may not be, but neither is the energy consumed during deliveries.
It may be that throwing away a few pieces of food obtained from a highly-optimized supply chain (such as a supermarket) is still better from an environment point of view than not throwing anything away but getting your food delivered.
There's always a degree of subjectivity and personal taste, but I do consider this to be the peak of OS UIs.
I have an "ironic" machine at home that is an old retina iMac, with Linux installed and themed with Chicago95. My attempt at a machine with a nice hardware, nice OS and nice UI :)
I agree with the choice of Windows 2000. The reaction to Windows XP was that it was too videogamish with its choice of colors and bezels. Then it lasted for so many years past Vista and in part Windows 8 that it became the reference Windows interface. Then the flat UIs mimicking the web and also the 80s with simple elements (we couldn't do complicated widgets back then, not enough pixels.)
Win XP with classic look was pretty decent and useable. There was an option in system settings to disable all theming, 3D stuff, animations etc. just the basic look of that time and a lot more snappy UX.
Do you have a picture of what that looked like? I'm curious. When I search for it, I can only find pictures of normal Windows XP and older versions of Windows. I can only imagine it looking like Windows 95 again.
Also took the good parts from Windows NT. I loved using Windows 2000. I remember being really mad when XP came out and it added all the colourful and curvy GUI elements - felt really dumbed down.
Got an old Dell running Windows 2000. Its remarkable how responsive the UI is. I open an Explorer window, it paints instantly. The Start Menu pops up completely drawn in a fraction of a second.
Windows 11 on a monster machine is sluggish by comparison -- I can feel it drawing each window I open.
I was just having the argument the other that dragging windows on Haiku on a plain old unaccelerated framebuffer just feels an order of magnitude faster than dragging windows around on Windows 11 with all acceleration enabled. On a 5K monitor. Windows is not setting a very high bar these days.
I miss being able to tell what’s a button. And what state it’s in.
It is kinda funny that a style that looks like one of those bad UIs a stereotypical doesn’t-know-GUI programmer might have made as a stand-in before the actual designers could make it good, is what’s in vogue. Finally, even I can make a “good” UI! Thanks, flat design.
I agree with you. Buttons were immediately identifiable as such, menus had keyboard shortcuts visible everywhere, all items always looked the same across all apps, and everything was really snappy.
Aqua (in early versions of OS X) did a fantastic job of combining all this clear usability with a lot of fun visual flair. Even the old Qt/GTK themes which emulated that look were pretty good.
It really is incredible how flat and boring modern macOS is.
At some point "skeuomorph" design went out of fashion, and everything had to be flat and simple. I think it all started with the Microsoft Zune (an MP3 player), which influenced Windows Phone, which influenced Windows 8. Then came iOS 7, and finally Android 5. I actually don't know when Mac OS went "flat". I only know ever since that time it is regularly unclear what a "button" is, as it doesn't look like a button.
And it even matched the hardware back then. You could have the colorful blue Aqua theme to match for example the iMac G3 or the graphite appearance to match the design of the Power Macs back then.
I’m primarily a Mac user (from the 80s until now minus a Linux break), but still think Win98SE was the best OS ever made.
The UI was flawless. Fast/responsive even on low spec PCs, cohesive design across the entire OS, logically laid out, and minimal while still giving access to everything you needed within a couple clicks.
I believe that graphical polish is just a distraction. It's part of why I like reading this site!
When I have time to waste, I am happy to have something pretty and shiny to work with. For professional work, I want my OS to be snappy and without distractions.
In hungarian when “[the cat is] meowing” we say “[a macska] nyávog”, which means to make sounds similar to ‘nyí’ [1].
Now that I think about it, it’s weird, because the we use “miáú” for the actual sound, but we don’t use the verb “miákol”, which apparently exists.
I would actually contend that "meow" and "nya" are pseudo-cognates, they are onomatopoeia of the same sound. M and N are both nasals, and iˈaʊ̯ and ia are close in vowel space.
This isn't the same thing, but: in most indigenous languages of Latin America where Spanish is the national language, the word for cat is something like 'mees' (or 'mis' if you use the Spanish-like spelling). This is because cats were introduced in that area by the Spaniards, and a common way to call a cat in Spanish is 'mis-mis' (like saying "here kitty kitty" in English). One exception to that is Waorani (an indigenous language of Ecuador), where the word for cat is kitty (not their spelling). I'll let you guess why.
One would think animal sounds would be basically universal but it isn't so--other than meow I can't recall any animal sound that was understandable to my wife (native Mandarin speaker.)
However, it's one of those things in life where I don't remember when or why I started doing it like that. Surely I didn't clap like that before my earliest memories (3 or 4 yo).
These are not "small things", but things people generally don't pay attention and just use a cheap version. Using good quality ones really makes life better:
A mechanical keyboard. Retina displays. Comfortable shoes. Prescription sunglasses. Good coffee.
I'm a huge fan of HelloFresh, and I think it solves an important problem which is one of waste. Before this service, I would buy odd quantities of ingredients (especially vegetables) that would invariable go bad and get chucked in the bin. The amount of lettuce, mushrooms, avocados, etc I threw away were obscene.
With these kind of services I get a tailored amount of perishable ingredients to a specific recipe on a specific day and great deal of mental energy is saved by outsourcing meal planning to them. I don't think I've ever threw away a single food item since using them. IMO this well worth the extra money.