Re: what was nice about Win2k UI

JJ <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 20 Jun 2026 03:33:23 GMT, Retrograde wrote:
> 
>> From the «UI experts made it worse?» department:
>> Feed: OSnews
>> Title: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000
>> Author: Thom Holwerda
>> Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2026 20:21:34 +0000
>> Link: https://www.osnews.com/story/145346/what-was-nice-about-the-ui-of-windows-2000/
>> 
>> I mean, this is preaching to the choir, but let’s go anyway.
>> 
>> I liked the UIs of the entire era from 3.0 to 2000, really. I’m mostly
>> using Windows 2000 as an example here because it runs so well in
>> QEMU/KVM and that allows me to easily take screenshots.
>> 
>> Some of the following will sound absolutely trivial, but I think it’s
>> worth pointing out.
>> ↫ movq.de blog[1]
>> 
>> Just a series of observations about how much better graphical user
>> interfaces were back in the ’90s and early 2000s. We’ve lost so many
>> affordances based on both common sense and scientific study, and what we
>> ended up with is a confusing, inconsistent mess. It doesn’t really
>> matter where you look – user interface design has deteriorated since the
>> early 2000s, a decline that only accelerated thanks to the arrival of
>> the iPhone, where consistency is a dirty word, and the web, where the
>> advertising people took prominence over the design people.
>> 
>> I just want my buttons to look like buttons man.
>> 
>> Links:
>> [1]: https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-06-16/0/POSTING-en.html (link)
> 
> The worst about "modern" UI is that, it's aggresively not
> keyboard-accessible. The more cool/beutiful it looks, the less
> keyboard-accessible it is.

Also, there are only three colors that can ever be used for coloring 
all UI affordances: 100% white, 99% white and 97% grey.  Such that if 
one does not have a $1500.00 HDR iphone screen, everything just looks 
"white" and nothing can be seen.