from Hacker News

Graphical User Interface Gallery

by Kristine1975 on 4/26/17, 11:54 AM with 49 comments

  • by russellbeattie on 4/26/17, 6:33 PM

    It's my opinion that the Windows Control panel (pictured here: http://toastytech.com/guis/win10control.png) is the single worst designed user interface of all time.

    Why? It is the only - and I mean only - list of items on a screen organized horizontally in any OS I can think of. Any time you resize the window, every single item in the list is now reorganized into different rows and columns.

    Ever wonder why you can never seem to find what you want in the Control Panel? It's not just because Microsoft loves to subtly change the names of core settings every year or so, but because they're constantly moving and shifting around.

    Seriously, give me an example of a horizontally organized list like this in any OS - past, present, desktop, mobile... I can't think of any. Nothing else is so dumb. There must be special code in this particular window to keep it so moronic, that Microsoft continues to maintain, year after year. Amazing.

    /rant

  • by scandox on 4/26/17, 7:12 PM

    I don't know when it happened but at some point I just fell completely out of love with the whole concept of a graphical interface. I think around Windows 2000 (Server) I remember thinking: "this is quite nice", but since then nothing.

    I ought to at least feel some nostalgia around all these interfaces, but actually I don't. I just feel like, why on earth did I think Windows 95 was a good thing? Why didn't I see what a huge step backwards it was - at least for a user like me. The beginning of moving away from understanding the machine I was using.

    I know too, the Terminal+Browser existence I have now is far from perfect, but I just feel liberated to know I don't need to spend most of my computing time navigating visually - it just doesn't suit me at all. I think the only interface now I feel as negatively about as the Windows-style interface is maybe the filesystem. Not for any rational reason I can explain - I feel like there's something wrong with our whole way of thinking about that. But I'm like a rat in a maze and can't imagine what outside of the maze might look like.

  • by saw-lau on 4/26/17, 4:20 PM

    I particularly enjoyed the thoughtful and reasoned critique of Windows 10: http://toastytech.com/guis/win10.html.

  • by username223 on 4/26/17, 6:11 PM

    Pour one out for BeOS. Unix-based, lightning-fast GUI, process isolation, and no user isolation on a single-user machine. They got quite a few things right 20 years ago.

  • by bshimmin on 4/26/17, 8:32 PM

    I quite miss RISC OS sometimes... Macs seemed great when I switched from whatever vague succession of Linux distributions I was using in around 2004, but for quite some years now Macs have annoyed me in a way that I don't recall RISC OS ever did. Probably just rose-tinted glasses!

  • by rbanffy on 4/26/17, 5:38 PM

    These days I was looking for the Burroughs ICON. I wonder if any Canadian retrocomputist is around.

    Another I've searched over and over in vain is a GUI I used on graphical terminals connected to a SINIX server. It was called Collage and looked a bit Mac-like.

  • by StillBored on 4/27/17, 2:31 AM

    He has some good ones, my favorites though are the ones that run in <64k of memory. In particular the Apple ][ desktop http://toastytech.com/guis/a2desk.html, which he comments on finding on a IIGS, but in reality it would run on the IIe and IIc as well. Although, it qualifies more as a "launcher" than a GUI/desktop because outside of the apps it comes with I don't think anyone every wrote anything for it. Meaning all its apps were just normal 8bit prodos applications that took over the whole machine. Given the timeframe though, the mac didn't have the multifinder until system 6 a couple years later.

    (whats pretty scary is that I've run (or at least booted) nearly all of them, all the apple and x86/PC ones for sure, plus quite a number of the others). GEOS was pretty cool too.

  • by cdcarter on 4/26/17, 11:36 PM

    I wish there were more complete collections of industry specific software GUIs. For example, the Bloomberg Terminal is a very specific and near complete sub-UI: https://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/economics/images/bloomberg....

  • by justinzollars on 4/26/17, 4:06 PM

    cool! I loved this!

  • by aphextron on 4/26/17, 7:25 PM

    I really enjoyed his fantastic GUI design advice here (http://toastytech.com/guis/uirant.html)