I was in the hospital in 2015 and was talking to the person next to me. He realised I was in IT and as he turned his laptop to me he's like I can't seem to view websites anymore with toolbars up the wazoo. It was already a throwback even at that time
In ~2005 I was at a job that provided tech support to local hospitals. That's the first time I saw this image and ... It didn't strike me as too unrealistic.
At that job I once spent seventeen minutes on the phone trying to help a nurse find the semicolon on her keyboard.
Times didn't change! Anyone that provided any large scale tech support to the actual average person understands that tech is indistinguishable from magic to them
A lot of people installed this shit. Because they’re visiting fuckmybeaniebabies.net and a popup is like “Install our spam bar for a chance to win herpes!” And they happily click ok.
A lot of people still do that, but it's "Do you want your phone/computer to constantly nag you with browser notifications about our spam?" and they click "Yes!"
Ugh. Yeah, my mom intentionally allows push notifications from Amazon, Temu, tons of fast food chains, and a bunch of other sources on her phone. It goes off like every thirty seconds.
I don't get push notifications unless it's a text or a 2FA email. And for that matter, I don't understand how people get so many emails or, if they start to, why they don't unsubscribe from or block all the spam. I get an average of maybe 3 emails a week on my personal accounts.
I'd always have to do this crap to our old Sony VAIO desktop (that was mine, until I went to college and my mom took it over). Then my mom would get mad that I "messed up the computer" because I'd delete this crap and apparently she used it?
I can't tell you how many fleet fights I literally disabled graphics and only had the overview and chat. Especially multiboxing, I might have one with graphics. Not necessary for most.
I miss it sometimes. Then I remember, last time I played it, I didn't have my original log ins and whatnot so had to start from the beginning and it took weeks to get to a level where I could do basic noob stuff without dying right away. I then spent like 18 months of just training skills, I'd log in, fill the queue, log out, log back in a week or so later and fill the queue again. After nearly two years of doing that I just gave up :D
But I still miss it. But I also miss my abusive ex.
It was a different time, the novelty of the experience made up for the lower frame rate. A stable 30fps used to be considered good, and 15fps was fine for a game like WoW which didn't really need to rely on buttery smooth gameplay.
The internet was also just a lot slower back then, too, so in one sense the framerate only needed to be as good as your ping, essentially.
Lol I had all of those and then some but I also had enough resolution/UI scale that it was all tucked to the sides (other than the nice looking hp/mana bars that framed the middle of the screen).
Did the people who stood in fire do so because they couldn't even see what they were or weren't standing in? Should guilds have done fund raising to buy better GPUs and monitors to best help progression? Thinking back to when I had a hand in guild leadership, it didn't even occur to me to base any recruitment or raiding roster on PC specs, but it seems so obvious now in hindsight. Too bad I can't go back.
It will come back when all the big players are only offering cloud services, to ensure normies don’t demand that computing be allowed in the hands of everyone again. “It’s so easy to use! Why couldn’t those old PC things get it right? God those were terrible, I’m so glad we subscribe to ChatGPT for $80 a month, and those scary Muslim leftists get ion-cannoned when they have conversations about how they want life to be better instantly now.”
Liquid Glass is WindowsVistaMorphism done wrong not Skeuomorphism.
Skeuomorphism requires the UI to at least approximate real life objects for each use case.
Liquid glass is not skeuomorphism, it's just Windows Aero 20 years later. Simulating the realistic look of single material and using it for all the interface is quite the opposite of skeuomorphism. As such things don't exist in real life. There were never music stereo players made entirely of glass. So they are not imitating anything that has ever existed.
A pretty good chance some luxury model might have been made for such a thing.
Even if not normally produced, some rich guy might have had it custom made.
I had this as a kid. It absolutely did all of those things, and the intro cutscene showed this menu as just one nook in a giant museum with other things to see. I had a few of their other games as well.
I can all but guarantee that a lot of the curiosity and enthusiasm for learning that I had as a kid was directly thanks to these edutainment games. Compared to my overwhelming adult apathy it really stands out.
And a little lizard runs across the bottom every once in a while! I had a Czech version, very painstakingly localized (but nothing beat The Way Things Work).
Packard Bell Navigator. I really tried to make it work when I was a kid, but it was all style and not much function. I miss it, though. It was ambitious.
Seeing this helps me understand older sci-fi better, the ones where people access the computer as a virtual reality office which leads to other things. It makes sense that the authors would assume VR as the natural progression of a UI like this.
It seems like when personal computers were new they tried to replicate the familiar to ease new users in, but now that we're all very used to them we've abandoned the concept almost entirely. I feel like we might be in the beginning of a trend back to it though, now that our internet connections and graphical abilities are more up to the task.
Unless someone is incapable of reading, these labels are not color coded and listed under unique button structures to help them stand out. What part of this is inaccessible?
Yes, people who can't read because they are blind would have accessibility issues...
It is pretty much guaranteed that the images did not have alt text for screen readers and were not set up to be tabbed through for someone who needs to use a keyboard and not a mouse because of dexterity issues. Then there is the problem that there isn't a lot of contrast, the text is angled, it isn't clear what is clickable and what isn't, and a bunch of other stuff that are issues for people well beyond colorblindness.
While it could technically be created in a way for an alternate accessible way to interact they never really were. It takes a ton of work to make anything other than plain text accessible, and even that takes more work than just typing. It takes exponentially more work with something like this.
Nobody bothered to take that time unless they were sued. I am currently getting a state agency through a complete website redesign because we could not feasible make the old one accessible, and that is only happening because we were sued as a state agency is obligated to make their site accessible. The first things to go was shit like this.
I've been using this style of UI literally yesterday on a WinXP machine and every time you hovered the cursor over a button it played back what the button does, and some extra information. But yeah, mouse-only.
And that's the fucking nightmare we seem to have at every web service now. Browsing is nigh impossible because everything will jump your cursor and autoplay.
No, but I did, for some reason, write "question" where I should have written comment. I'll go edit the comment now so that you will be able to reply to it!
It could still be done in an accessible way. Back when this style was popular though, accessibility on the web hadn't advanced much. Now we have all kinds of tools to help
There was this while concept at the time that digital interfaces should mirror familiar physical interfaces in order to be easily understood by users, and it's fascinating and honestly not without value.
Back when all screens were more-or-less the same size and nothing ever had to scale. Your UI was the size it was, and if your screen was too big, too bad! You can either stretch it and deal with the pixelly mess, or squint your eyes to see the teeeny tiny program.
Most of these ran fullscreen and changed the resolution to 640x480 or 800x600, which most monitors supported. I had a widescreen LCD that would always stretch to fill, quite annoying...
Having trouble finding it but I swear my PNY Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 (I think?) circa 2003 came with a Linux 3D desktop/launcher software that sounds like this. (X11 based I guess.)
Not sure if it was bundled with the card, came with the Nvidia drivers, or what...but it worked just fine with Linux at the time (probably Slackware, not positive what I was running then).
These UIs were useful for getting people used to how to do things on a computer that they used to do in real life. A file cabinet to represent the directory structure, a notepad app that looked like a notepad. A photo gallery app that displays your photos on a virtual film reel. Stuff like that. (See the UI to the original iPhone for a perfect example of this kind of design.)
Once computers became ubiquitous, people eventually started using them more than file cabinets, card catalogs, pen and paper, etc., eliminating the need for UIs that represented their real-world counterparts. Everyone stopped using the old methods to do things, which eventually evolved into the minimalist UIs we have today; using real-world representations was no longer necessary, because people stopped associating computer tasks with their oldschool counterparts.
I hide all my apps and so my home screen is completely blank, save for the wallpaper. On my Linux machines there are no icons on the desktop (except I added a calendar applet to my laptop, and the icon for my external drive appears when I plug it in). I can breathe. It's lovely.
I once saw a colleague at a work event who had a home screen completely full of icons that, when more closely inspected, were actually stacks of icons layered on top of one another. I was so anxious just looking at it.
Man the eyewitness learning games were fantastic - I loved the dinosaur one where you'd find bones in the museum and reassemble them and then have them wander round the otherwise empty liminal space of the museum.
I think more than one of them were like this! I just ripped a bunch of old DVDs to my Jellyfin server, and for some movies, I had to first run it in VLC to double-check that I was ripping the right track, which meant navigating through that nonsense... I remember doing it with multiple HP discs.
John ivy did away with the early iOS design leather and glas optics and went non skeomorphism. NobodY knew the word back then. Nobody does now. Hence Google.
This is not the era of the internet I remember fondly. I liked the static internet of the 90’s then when it started getting more minimal in 2010’s when flash was on its way out.
Oh man I remember having a few friends that put so much crap on their MySpace pages that they'd crash my computers. When Facebook showed up with its simple UI I was happy (of course, in the years since...)
Oh look, my grandparents PC circa 2005
I was in the hospital in 2015 and was talking to the person next to me. He realised I was in IT and as he turned his laptop to me he's like I can't seem to view websites anymore with toolbars up the wazoo. It was already a throwback even at that time
Edit: wording
My old motherboard's driver disc from 2015 would install Google toolbar if you weren't careful
Aaah the good old "next next next install" you open the browser some time later with a surprise toolbar
In ~2005 I was at a job that provided tech support to local hospitals. That's the first time I saw this image and ... It didn't strike me as too unrealistic.
At that job I once spent seventeen minutes on the phone trying to help a nurse find the semicolon on her keyboard.
Times didn't change! Anyone that provided any large scale tech support to the actual average person understands that tech is indistinguishable from magic to them
Banzai Buddy!
My neighbor intentionally installed that shit on his family PC when we were like 15.
A lot of people installed this shit. Because they’re visiting fuckmybeaniebabies.net and a popup is like “Install our spam bar for a chance to win herpes!” And they happily click ok.
A lot of people still do that, but it's "Do you want your phone/computer to constantly nag you with browser notifications about our spam?" and they click "Yes!"
Ugh. Yeah, my mom intentionally allows push notifications from Amazon, Temu, tons of fast food chains, and a bunch of other sources on her phone. It goes off like every thirty seconds.
I don't get push notifications unless it's a text or a 2FA email. And for that matter, I don't understand how people get so many emails or, if they start to, why they don't unsubscribe from or block all the spam. I get an average of maybe 3 emails a week on my personal accounts.
I intentionally installed it on other people's PCs...
See you in hell
*bonzi buddy
How'd you get a screenshot of my mom's desktop as I found it when I'd be home from college, cir. 2003?
You can take a sexy single there
I've seen this toolbar hell before. I've had to clean many a pc of this toolbar hell before.
I'd always have to do this crap to our old Sony VAIO desktop (that was mine, until I went to college and my mom took it over). Then my mom would get mad that I "messed up the computer" because I'd delete this crap and apparently she used it?
What's that relevant xkcd about workflows? /shudder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCGD92DDsvc
Oh my Deity
Would you like some help with your search?
I feel like some of the old cluttered WoW UIs might be an example of maximalism, by trying to show as much information as possible.
Eve players: noooo... It's not just a spreadsheet
Veteran WoW players: hmm... I can still see the actual gameplay, lemme add another stat display
And they still wiped.
To be fair, they only had a thirty-two point three three uh, repeating of course, percentage, of survival.
“RIGHT SIDE, MANY WHELPS!! HANDLE IT!!!”
At least I have chicken
-50 D.K.P.
Do you see my mana? What am I supposed to do for you?
🍑💳
One should always wipe. I tell my 6yo this all the time.
I can't tell you how many fleet fights I literally disabled graphics and only had the overview and chat. Especially multiboxing, I might have one with graphics. Not necessary for most.
I don't think I've met a single eve player who doesn't proudly refer to it as a "spreadsheets in space" game XD
Eve online mentioned o7
I miss it sometimes. Then I remember, last time I played it, I didn't have my original log ins and whatnot so had to start from the beginning and it took weeks to get to a level where I could do basic noob stuff without dying right away. I then spent like 18 months of just training skills, I'd log in, fill the queue, log out, log back in a week or so later and fill the queue again. After nearly two years of doing that I just gave up :D
But I still miss it. But I also miss my abusive ex.
The 15 FPS indicator is the icing on the cake.
The standards we used to put up with...
Back when games were measured by how enjoyable they were rather than a little number in the corner.
Or, in this case, but the amount of numbers in every corner 🙃
It's not enjoyable to play at low fps though? I don't get it
It was a different time, the novelty of the experience made up for the lower frame rate. A stable 30fps used to be considered good, and 15fps was fine for a game like WoW which didn't really need to rely on buttery smooth gameplay.
The internet was also just a lot slower back then, too, so in one sense the framerate only needed to be as good as your ping, essentially.
This looks like when you first discover that your Linux desktop environment supports adding infinite taskbars
This takes me back.
WARNING: SEMEN LOW
This is what I would actually consider maximalist UI. OP's is neither minimal or maximal, it's just overstylized UI.
I'm curious to know what it is like these days but not enough to give blizzard more money anymore.
Is that grid or decursive? Looks like they have duplicate frames?
Lol I had all of those and then some but I also had enough resolution/UI scale that it was all tucked to the sides (other than the nice looking hp/mana bars that framed the middle of the screen).
Did the people who stood in fire do so because they couldn't even see what they were or weren't standing in? Should guilds have done fund raising to buy better GPUs and monitors to best help progression? Thinking back to when I had a hand in guild leadership, it didn't even occur to me to base any recruitment or raiding roster on PC specs, but it seems so obvious now in hindsight. Too bad I can't go back.
I really wish I still had time for WoW.. Sigh.
Mmmmm shadow bars
That's not so bad. I have more than this, but with a larger screen you have more space.
So this is a healer. They barely need to see anything anyways.
what do you call someone with no arms or legs in a pool? . Bob
What do you call someone with no arms or legs on the floor in front of your door?
Matt.
What do you call a man with no arms and no legs on the barbeque grill?
Frank.
My wife has only begrudgingly allowed me to maintain a welcome mat that says "Hi! I'm Mat!"
Is this supposed to be on a farm? What’s going on outside that window?
IIRC, you could choose between a number of different themes.
But, yeah, rural America representation in technology was weirdly a thing in the 1990s.
I remember customizing this! What a throwback!
(Is there some open source media player with this kind of skins?)
Winamp has been open sourced https://github.com/alexfreud/winamp
Read their license. It does not meet the definition of open source.
Wow, they prohibit forking and distributing changes, that fucking blows.
Also, doesn't look like it supports Linux natively, which is a shame.
https://skins.webamp.org/
Skin museum
Fun trip down memory lane
XMMS is able to use Winamp skins. This one seems to be WMP, but that one copied the concept of crazy skins from Winamp.
Qmmp might fit the bill, I apply old winamp skins to it for a nostalgia fix
ew windows media player
It's time to bring back skeumorphism
That is probably what the image in the post is about, really.
It's supposed to make the program more accessible for those who are not used to the concept of computer programs at all.
It will come back when all the big players are only offering cloud services, to ensure normies don’t demand that computing be allowed in the hands of everyone again. “It’s so easy to use! Why couldn’t those old PC things get it right? God those were terrible, I’m so glad we subscribe to ChatGPT for $80 a month, and those scary Muslim leftists get ion-cannoned when they have conversations about how they want life to be better instantly now.”
For those who are unfamiliar (like me): Skeumorph
Don't please.
I remember these UIs and learning after many hours that one of the elements was clickable.
This is horrible design from a usability standpoint.
You say that, but that’s what Apple has been doing with Liquid Glass, and tons of people hate it, myself included
Liquid Glass is WindowsVistaMorphism done wrong not Skeuomorphism. Skeuomorphism requires the UI to at least approximate real life objects for each use case.
Like the old Notes app on the iPhone/iPad that looked like it was a yellow legal pad!
Liquid glass is not skeuomorphism, it's just Windows Aero 20 years later. Simulating the realistic look of single material and using it for all the interface is quite the opposite of skeuomorphism. As such things don't exist in real life. There were never music stereo players made entirely of glass. So they are not imitating anything that has ever existed.
Entirely glass no, largely transparent plastic yes.
A pretty good chance some luxury model might have been made for such a thing.
Even if not normally produced, some rich guy might have had it custom made.
How much liquid glass do you encounter in your daily life? Do you live in a kiln?
Don't Get In The Kiln!
As an android user liquid glass is the only apple thing i'm envious of. Android looks boring af, a little playfulness doesn't hurt
And you just know the globe rotates when you hover over Habitats, and the drawers pull out when you hover over those
I had this as a kid. It absolutely did all of those things, and the intro cutscene showed this menu as just one nook in a giant museum with other things to see. I had a few of their other games as well.
I can all but guarantee that a lot of the curiosity and enthusiasm for learning that I had as a kid was directly thanks to these edutainment games. Compared to my overwhelming adult apathy it really stands out.
And a little lizard runs across the bottom every once in a while! I had a Czech version, very painstakingly localized (but nothing beat The Way Things Work).
Packard Bell Navigator. I really tried to make it work when I was a kid, but it was all style and not much function. I miss it, though. It was ambitious.
Seeing this helps me understand older sci-fi better, the ones where people access the computer as a virtual reality office which leads to other things. It makes sense that the authors would assume VR as the natural progression of a UI like this.
It seems like when personal computers were new they tried to replicate the familiar to ease new users in, but now that we're all very used to them we've abandoned the concept almost entirely. I feel like we might be in the beginning of a trend back to it though, now that our internet connections and graphical abilities are more up to the task.
Yeah good riddance on that one
It’s telling that they had to brightly highlight the tab that’s actually active, because users definitely got lost otherwise.
This shit still exists on windows and I fucking hate it
Maximizing everything except accessibility.
Unless someone is incapable of reading, these labels are not color coded and listed under unique button structures to help them stand out. What part of this is inaccessible?
Yes, people who can't read because they are blind would have accessibility issues...
It is pretty much guaranteed that the images did not have alt text for screen readers and were not set up to be tabbed through for someone who needs to use a keyboard and not a mouse because of dexterity issues. Then there is the problem that there isn't a lot of contrast, the text is angled, it isn't clear what is clickable and what isn't, and a bunch of other stuff that are issues for people well beyond colorblindness.
While it could technically be created in a way for an alternate accessible way to interact they never really were. It takes a ton of work to make anything other than plain text accessible, and even that takes more work than just typing. It takes exponentially more work with something like this.
Nobody bothered to take that time unless they were sued. I am currently getting a state agency through a complete website redesign because we could not feasible make the old one accessible, and that is only happening because we were sued as a state agency is obligated to make their site accessible. The first things to go was shit like this.
I've been using this style of UI literally yesterday on a WinXP machine and every time you hovered the cursor over a button it played back what the button does, and some extra information. But yeah, mouse-only.
And that's the fucking nightmare we seem to have at every web service now. Browsing is nigh impossible because everything will jump your cursor and autoplay.
5 downvotes in 7 minutes for a question? Smells like alt account brigading.
Anyway, especially with more modern accessibility tools and frameworks, why can't a design like in the OP be accessible?
It was a loaded question and deserved downvoting.
Lots of wheelchairs around here that assume every one here knows about them.
Could you please elaborate on what you meant with this comment?
You replied to the wrong comment, there's no question mark in mine.
No, but I did, for some reason, write "question" where I should have written comment. I'll go edit the comment now so that you will be able to reply to it!
Shan't be feeding the troll. Bye!
It could still be done in an accessible way. Back when this style was popular though, accessibility on the web hadn't advanced much. Now we have all kinds of tools to help
I've watched a blind person play FF14. Making a fun-looking static UI accessible is a piece of cake compared to that.
There was this while concept at the time that digital interfaces should mirror familiar physical interfaces in order to be easily understood by users, and it's fascinating and honestly not without value.
Skeuomorphism
I can practically hear my external CD drive spinning up just looking at these. Makes me want to play a Sierra game real bad.
Back when all screens were more-or-less the same size and nothing ever had to scale. Your UI was the size it was, and if your screen was too big, too bad! You can either stretch it and deal with the pixelly mess, or squint your eyes to see the teeeny tiny program.
Most of these ran fullscreen and changed the resolution to 640x480 or 800x600, which most monitors supported. I had a widescreen LCD that would always stretch to fill, quite annoying...
"For VGA 640x480 256 colors"
Back when software had a soul...
Is that Truespace?
Bryce 3d
Cheers. Brought back memories, even if they were wrong ones 😉
This has just been a giant nostalgia trip.
Is there a Linux distro or program that would allow me to do this to my desktop?
If you find one, I want to know too. This would be a fun customization.
I remember people writing 3D Wayland window compositors, where you can walk around a room/maze and put application windows on walls.
Maybe it was this: https://github.com/capisce/mazecompositor
AND JESUS WEPT!
Having trouble finding it but I swear my PNY Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 (I think?) circa 2003 came with a Linux 3D desktop/launcher software that sounds like this. (X11 based I guess.)
Not sure if it was bundled with the card, came with the Nvidia drivers, or what...but it worked just fine with Linux at the time (probably Slackware, not positive what I was running then).
The drawers in Lotus Smartsuite
I prefer minimalist ui. This just looks messy.
These UIs were useful for getting people used to how to do things on a computer that they used to do in real life. A file cabinet to represent the directory structure, a notepad app that looked like a notepad. A photo gallery app that displays your photos on a virtual film reel. Stuff like that. (See the UI to the original iPhone for a perfect example of this kind of design.)
Once computers became ubiquitous, people eventually started using them more than file cabinets, card catalogs, pen and paper, etc., eliminating the need for UIs that represented their real-world counterparts. Everyone stopped using the old methods to do things, which eventually evolved into the minimalist UIs we have today; using real-world representations was no longer necessary, because people stopped associating computer tasks with their oldschool counterparts.
I hide all my apps and so my home screen is completely blank, save for the wallpaper. On my Linux machines there are no icons on the desktop (except I added a calendar applet to my laptop, and the icon for my external drive appears when I plug it in). I can breathe. It's lovely.
I once saw a colleague at a work event who had a home screen completely full of icons that, when more closely inspected, were actually stacks of icons layered on top of one another. I was so anxious just looking at it.
You must love Apple Glass. It is so minimalist you can’t even see it half the time.
TBH I prefer the modern minimal UIs. It is easy to understand. Although I don’t mind having an option.
skeuomorphism was all the rage for a while and I loved it
Man the eyewitness learning games were fantastic - I loved the dinosaur one where you'd find bones in the museum and reassemble them and then have them wander round the otherwise empty liminal space of the museum.
This reminded me of the absolutely god-damn-awful DVD menu of the first Harry Potter film
I think more than one of them were like this! I just ripped a bunch of old DVDs to my Jellyfin server, and for some movies, I had to first run it in VLC to double-check that I was ripping the right track, which meant navigating through that nonsense... I remember doing it with multiple HP discs.
Peak skeuomorphism.
Smartphones and mobile phones used to be inventive too.
I loved the more blob / liquid designs like the rio forge
There was more then a few Winamp skins that looked like that
Remember when the Google search trend for "skeomorphism" peaked?
This comment section is the first time I've seen the word, and it's been multiple times.
John ivy did away with the early iOS design leather and glas optics and went non skeomorphism. NobodY knew the word back then. Nobody does now. Hence Google.
Can't say that I do (can't remember something I never knew), but it appears to have been June 2013
Gorgeous
God bless the rains down in Africa...
Gonna take some time to do the things I never had
This is not the era of the internet I remember fondly. I liked the static internet of the 90’s then when it started getting more minimal in 2010’s when flash was on its way out.
Oh man I remember having a few friends that put so much crap on their MySpace pages that they'd crash my computers. When Facebook showed up with its simple UI I was happy (of course, in the years since...)
Let them have fun!
On a side note. There was Magic School Bus game like apps, which were brought to the public by none other than Microslop. What a time was that..
It was fun while it lasted!
It sounded like this. I miss it every day.
I've had LCARS as my phone interface for years and people are horrified when they see all the buttons.