Android used to have a dedicated menu key that would always bring up a menu. It was removed to chase Apple's 100% screen design.

I am fairly bothered about that but the one that really gets to me is the inconsistency of user interfaces across applications.

This precisely coincides with the web developers being allowed to wrap stuff into "apps" in Electron and the like.

Windows 95 was the last release that had serious user testing in controlled environments. (They were also cribbing lots of notes from NeXT, which helped.)

Something fundamentally switched around 1998-2002 in how interface design was viewed and approached. I started my career in software as a design summer intern at a company that made a Windows “groupware” application in 1997. They took pride in following the platform’s guidelines and actually testing their designs with real users being videotaped trying to use it. The company’s UI design department was tiny, but employed both an industrial designer and a cognitive scientist.

Five years later, everybody I met in UI design was a graphic designer who was drawing glossy website mockups in Photoshop. The elder lore of science-based UI design was completely lost when Web 2.0 happened and app designs became vibes-based. Even Apple couldn’t resist the tide. (Indeed Steve Jobs’s return to Apple in 1997 was a major contributor because he had developed a taste for user-hostile skeuomorphism like the brushed metal QuickTime Player.)

This is the part I don't really understand - was the development experience and iteration speed really that much faster moving away from low level languages / APIs? It's in the critical path, it should be stupid fast.

I have some hope that thanks to hardware shortages and AI helping people write software they will rewrite some things back to faster languages. But this is all gut feeling, gut feeling that a lot of modern-day developers are afraid of optimized code.

(I fully acknowledge the hypocrisy, given my bread and butter is JS/TS front-end and I don't like C. But in my defense, there's no market demand for native developers either, barely any Go even, even though a few years ago it looked like a lot of Java backends were getting rewritten)

So do I, but I don't think I'd blame mobile-first designs, and instead place the blame on Microsoft sucking at making decisions, sucking at design, and sucking at mobile. Every bad Windows UI has, imo, been the result of trying to be cool and likeable by dying their hair a different colour to get some attention and getting ahead of or catching up with Apple who was playing a different game the whole time.

Apple meanwhile has made some notable mistakes, but when they do, it's usually a thorough bad bet that's just missed the mark, but if they do, it's all throughout their OS in every corner. Even with their recent Liquid glass blunder, they're not really putting a veneer that looks like wood over a rotting corpse of a house, they're just picking bad materials to update an otherwise decent layout. Microsoft's whole track consumer UI/product record imo is trying and failing to bet small but intrusively on ideas that don't work, aren't cool, and have no longevity. You see it as soon as you open the control panel that still looks like the 90s; it's this uncomfortable amalgam of failed tepid temporary marketing pitches by some department that make no sense

The war on scroll bars has gotten pretty senseless.

The Desktop GUI was perfected with NeXTStep in 1990. Though some might say Smalltalk in 1984 (modulo some nice artwork and colours).

We could even have unified desktop.mobile codebases, with different GUI layouts. 280 North's objective-J/Cappuccino proved this.

IDK what we're even doing anymore.

Although I started with 98, I think Vista / 7 was the peak. It was user friendly enough for newbies but didn't sacrifice advanced controls. Just organized them better to bring focus to the more used parts.

> we lost the menu bar and replaced it with "mobile first" designs

What does this mean? I use lots of apps that still have a menu bar.

Some apps eschew it, like browsers, but not because they are “mobile first”, but because they are trying to maximize screen space.

Working directly with C API in Windows has not been a thing since Vista, as COM took the main role for API delivery.

The Windows SDK samples like Hilo make use of C++ with COM.

How can it be related to perfection to permanently waste a strip of space you rarely (and in some apps never) use?

Windows95 still had failures of UI design, and those weren't fixed until XP.

Wasn't that Windows 8 ?

The Menu + quick access bar was good for developers but terrible for users, at least compared to the ribbon.

Ribbon is absolutely an improvement for users but is more work for the XML layout and learning how to organize it.

I'm rather convinced that Ribbon is still the best way to organize quick actions, show their shortcuts (Alt to see keyboard shortcuts), and also have enough text to describe all the buttons. But it'd be nice if it were easier to make good Ribbons.

Menu was braindead easy, albeit through ancient process of .rc files and whatnot

> The desktop UI was perfected around the time of Windows 95

There’s no need to be hyperbolic or blinded by nostalgia. Yes, user interfaces have suffered several setbacks in the years since, but even if we concede every change was for the worse (they weren’t) it was by no means “perfected” and there was still plenty of area for improvement.

95 feels kinda backwards tbh but 98SE/2000 is outrageously modern. A lot of the windows admin tools are unchanged from 2000 apart from the icons. I really think if you could run a modern browser on 2000 it could be a daily driver for most people

As computers, and smartphones got more popular, the audience got larger and the use scenarios got more and more distant from professional use. Dedicated professionals, like software engineers and stock brokers still prefer CLI and Bloomberg terminal even today. Ordinary office workers late 90s and early 00s window-based interfaces (the ones you're talking about). But smartphone users who just want to play their free games and scroll through facebook actually prefer the mobile-first UIs.

If you see this UI transition through the same lense as CLI-GUI one, a lot of things become more clear, in my opinion.

I agree with you generally but I don't think desktop UI is remotely close to perfected. Unless you mean the desktop as a skeumorphic concept than maybe.

I think we've actually completely stagnate on the human interaction side of OSes and only emacs has made any progress and then only for those willing to put the work in, not as a vanilla user ui.

i agree. i love the 120hz responsiveness of the UI. how fast the app loads, the buttons click. No lazy loading , placeholders, layout re-renders. Open the task manager: half a meg ram used.

Insanely great performance.

> The desktop UI was perfected around the time of Windows 95 and has gotten worse with every iteration since then.

Well that can't be entirely true, the desktop experience on Windows 10 improved on Windows 8 by leaps and bounds.