Love the idea, but in reality this is a heavy AI-assisted project riddled with weird graphical issues that completely detract from the experience. It's less a window manager, and more akin to a mid-90's CD-ROM puzzle game.
For instance having to turn a key to allow shutting down your machine is a cute idea but the key turn animation plays inconsistently, meaning the state of some of the buttons isn't always obvious.
This is a really enjoyable take, pushing the feeling of what one does on a computer towards actually being at a desk and having to reach for various functions. I feel like that would enable spatial memory to do some cool things.
I miss the 90s chunkiness of switches, buttons, hardware: being able to hear the computer "think" (HDD seeks), the hum of a CRT. Modern machinery feels so insubstantial, emphasizing clean glass and tidy machined chassis. (chassies?)
I have this persistent daydream about a computer setup that feels like the Nostromo flight deck from Alien. I almost want to feel like I'm sitting _inside_ a computer when I'm at my desk, surrounded by powerful feeling electronics with substantial switches and such. Of course there's plenty of inconvenience there too, but something about it appeals to me.
"I miss the 90s chunkiness of switches, buttons, hardware: being able to hear the computer "think" (HDD seeks), the hum of a CRT. Modern machinery feels so insubstantial, emphasizing clean glass and tidy machined chassis. (chassies?)"
That's one of the appeals of mechanical keyboards for me. It's primarily the visual and aural aesthetic (thock thock thock....or clack clack clack) but married to the silent billion or so switches frantically turning on or off on the PC next to me, it kind of gives me the tactile feedback that I want from the process.
Thanks for that. I can understand his disdain. Too many on here worship wealth and bad actors like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Tim Sweeney who only care to propel their own wealth. There is a void of humanity and humility in such people.
Real intelligence must incorporate empathy. Lacking empathy means people lack real intelligence.
I respect people like Jamie Zawinski and Steve Wozniak. It is not about the wealth it about making a good product and solution. That is real value.
Also explains how he has the know it all to setup his site and fingerprint people logged into HN.
Wow, didn't know jwz is wearing his head up his ass now. Sad way to treat your readers by assuming that everyone who reads certain websites is a certain kind of person?
Replace language with an actually sensible one, and press any key to continue!
If nothing else, that is a truly sadistic trivia question. I wonder if there are any other words in the English language whose plural form is spelled the same, but pronounced differently.
If you want to take the weirdness a step further, just look at the plural for "woman". When you write "women" you only change the second vowel, but when you pronounce that same word you only change the first.
It is a french word and it is inherently plural, sort of like pants, by my best guess, having only looked it up just now, singuler chassis would be a case.
So chassis, the thing full of parts, case, same thing but without the parts?
I think all the others that do this are loanwords from French? We keep the silent s at the end in the singular, and make it audible in the plural - faux pas, corps, précis, etc.
There are a bunch of other heteronyms, but I can't think of others that differ specifically in the plural
We just need to add more sound effects tied to system monitor probes to get those HDD noises back, kinda like how electric cars have that parking lot noise to make sure pedestrians are aware of them in lieu of an engine banging away!
Being inside the computer like being at a pipe organ console, or surrounded by screens like a hacker in a dystopian hovercraft!
My desktop is wired up using Ethernet over powerline (was easier than running a cable) and it creates some noise through my desktop speakers.
The issue is easily fixed with better grounding, but I’ve found that I prefer the noise. I can hear my network traffic, and I’ve come to use it as mental input. (“Op, I can hear that my script has reached the write-to-s3 step”)
it's got the right noises and i believe that they are synced up with real disk usage, but it doesn't quite feel the same because i think disk usage patterns have changed over the last 20-some years.
Hey the clunkiness, the slow thinking, the hardware buzz (fans) and the feeling that your computer is a living being (an evil one) is well alive in my worklaptop.
I want more stuff like this. The era 20 years ago (e.g. Enlightenment) was way more fun than the bland monotonic design we have these days. If you like bland modern design, great, that should be an option as well, but we should still have good variety.
I don't know why anybody would. It takes all the lessons we learned about UX from user testing in the late 90s/early 00s and throws it all away to produce something that looks "clean" and "sleek", at the cost of being useful. Discoverability? Who needs it?
EDIT: Though I do enjoy skeuomorphism, I do think the TFA goes a bit too far.
Debatable. IIRC Bell labs conducted a study of whether Unix command names should be changed to something more meaningful than cat, sed, grep etc.
They found that words that convey some meaning related to what the command does had little or no effect on the user remembering what the command does. I strongly suspect skeuomorphism similarly has no claim on functional advantage.
Discoverability is good, but it's probably got a little to do with the icon.
> I strongly suspect skeuomorphism similarly has no claim on functional advantage.
I think it does, but for new users only. I hate playing the "is-this-a-button" on modern designs, not knowing what is clickable and what is not. Other games I hate:
- Lets find the scrollbar
- Guess which window has focus
- (Windows-only) Try to predict the application to get focus on alt-tab, then alt-tab again.
A lot of these don't need skeuomorphism to be solved. It just needs clearer designs. Always showing vital elements like the scrollbar isn't a skeuomorphic choice, it's always a good idea, they only started hiding them because it looked 'cleaner' to some UI designer. The same with using color to show window focus, separate distinct elements or foreground from background. Nowadays everything is just white, but this is just a product of visual design trends, not (anti)skeuomorphism.
> they only started hiding them because it looked 'cleaner' to some UI designer.
They started doing it on mobile in order to give more screen real estate to the content area. This was then translated to desktop apps at the same time desktop screen real estate became a non-issue for everyone (a 32" monitor at 1600x1200 used to be a luxury, now it's mundane). Now no one knows if there is anything "below the fold" without initiating a scroll action, which just encourages people to further only focus on the above the fold content.
Interestingly the response to that was sites adding horizontal "progress bars" across the top of the viewport to indicate how much you had read. And with application and website control of the styling and operation of these standard widgets, everyone is slightly different, which increases time to become familiar.
It's been a race to the bottom, in the name of (the subjective at best) "clean design".
A lack of information density... I felt like I could glean more from the above-the-fold Yahoo.com site in 2001 than any site today.
Note Japan has not embraced the so-called "clean" UI design aesthetic. Check out any Japanese website and it looks like US web sites in 1999, but even more so. I wouldn't mind me some of that.
« This was then translated to desktop apps at the same time desktop screen real estate became a non-issue for everyone »
Exactly. I remember opening a Metro/TIFKAM app for the first time on my new Windows 8 connected to my new 27" QHD monitor, and then staring in bewilderment as it went fullscreen and 95 % of the screen was just monochrome with nothing on it at all.
Wtf were they thinking? That I would enjoy vanilla sauce on my roastbeef because they weren't serving strawberries yet?
Still puzzling to me how such a multi-billion $ company can fuck up so hard.
> Always showing vital elements like the scrollbar isn't a skeuomorphic choice, it's always a good idea, they only started hiding them because it looked 'cleaner' to some UI designer.
There’s a lot of modern design in not happy with, but this is not personally one of them. If I can’t autohide scrollbars I try to turn them permanently off instead of permanently on. For some reason I find them very distracting, and since I anyway use a scroll wheel or trackpad or keybindings, I don’t need it to scroll. (If it’s on autohide, I use it as a progress bar when actually scrolling.).
But there’s a lot of these weird things that seemingly everyone else accepts that just really throws off my focus. Blinking text cursor is another one, I just can’t get any work done until the blinking is off. If an app or OS can’t do that, I won’t use it.
Skeumorphism isn't necessary for consistency in user interfaces, but it generally ensures a level of consistency that is honestly hard in modern interface design.
Absolutely. I keep falling into these traps. I just got a Mac, and it's terrible at these. It's notorious for hiding the scrollbar, but why would they make it hard to find the thing I just downloaded? Or a screenshot I just took? I can open it, but that doesn't take me to the file location so I can actually do something with it. Although Steam is by far the worst at that.
It's almost as if we didn't learn anything about UX in the past 30 years.
What I hate most about mac is the opinionated design. I liked it in the days of Tiger and Leopard but what I didn't like since was some designer deciding that I have to use my computer in a different way every year and forcing changes on me. Opinionated design only works when you as a user have no opinions or if you are a follower.
Personally I do have strong opinions how my computer should work and I'm not a follower. I could never work in an army and take orders either.
The problem was that early OS X used to be pretty aligned with my own opinions so I didn't notice the issues with this model. But after the Mac becoming more frustrating every year I finally dumped it and now I'm really happy with KDE which I can configure how I want.
Steam screenshots end up somewhere deep in the steam folder structure. Not simply in an easily accessible downloads or screenshots directory in my home dir.
Yeah, those are all legit gripes about modern operating system UX, but none of them are automatically fixed with skeuomorphism, and none of them couldn't be fixed with clearer design regardless of approach.
> none of them are automatically fixed with skeuomorphism
True.
But they absolutely need to stop hiding functionality in order to present a "clean" interface.
Sure, I've seen some cluttered interfaces. I recently launched LibreOffice Calc and damn there were a lot of buttons on that toolbar (I may be using an insanely old version).
But like...disappearing scrollbars makes zero sense and should never have been implemented on any interface.
> disappearing scrollbars makes zero sense and should never have been implemented on any interface.
My biggest gripe about the disappearing scrollbars is the layout shifting that can occur when the content changes making the scrollbar necessary or not. CSS has a few options that can take care of that, but it requires some digging for someone to discover them.
Many apps present content in such a way that makes it impossible to tell if there is anything more on the screen until you actually try to scroll. The home screen of the app is so clean and so fitted that there is nothing poking out from the bottom.
>command names should be changed to something more meaningful than cat, sed, grep etc.
cat - con-cat-enates
sed - is a stream editor
grep - global regex print
Not sure you picked the best examples. But trying to think of examples where the name is not related to the function ... ag, unless you're the sort of person to use ag, has an obscure name.
Skeuomorphism isn't the only thing we've lost, and really it's the least important. We're talking smaller ideas, like widgets that aren't just black text on a white background (or if you like dark mode, white text on a grey background), visible scrollbars, menus.
An interesting study, will try to find it, thanks. I've been thinking about "naming things" and it seems the common idea of "good naming" is pretty superficial. I myself would point to MOV in assembly, which is actually COPY, but this never was an issue.
What actually matters is that:
- Names express not only differences, but also similarities.
- Names cannot be totally random; they must have certain pre-baked relations vaguely similar to their relations in the model. But they do not need to be too good. Invented or repurposed names in moderations are perfectly fine.
- The most important thing in naming is the overall consistency. But when the system changes you need more names and the consistency suffers. After a few rounds it gets too bad and you need to redo the whole system. This us why naming is hard.
- Certain physical properties matter, such as equal length.
- Names are very similar to pictograms or hieroglyphs.
Re: too far - it’s interesting, because there’s two reasons skeumorphism “works” - one is because it provides visual cues for how a virtual object will behave when acted upon, which lets our brain build a quick intuitive understanding of how to interact with a foreign object that draws on all our experience outside the computer, and two is because the visual mimicry of the physical object gives our brains immediate cues to understand what it’s seeing and build that interaction model.
This one absolutely over indexes on that second principle, to a borderline cartoonish degree, but I expect the reason it’s resonating so hard is exactly what you’re indicating, that in the industry’s desire to be able to move on from the tether to the shapes of physical objects, they discarded that first principle entirely, instead of figuring out how to maintain the visual cues to form and operation in a new language.
(Here’s where I throw away all that credibility I just got from the prior two paragraphs: I actually think Liquid Glass is getting closer to a “skeumorphism without skeumorphism” than anything else I’ve seen out there.)
Modern design is not synonymous to dis-empowering design.
FWIW I love modern design, and I hate all these too clever skeuomorphs. Modern design is honest to the digital medium. I find its beauty lies, not in the quirky ways it tries to mimic real textures and objects, but by how it provides usable controls and information by applying basic design elements like spacing, alignment, color, typography, discovery, layered info density, etc. well.
None of these requires skeuomorphs. It is like the difference between thinking a website is visually impressive and stunning because it uses a nice background image. That would not impress me. What would impress me are stuff like: does it have an effective information architecture, as reflected in it main menu and general link structure? Does it use a tasteful and usable color scheme? Does it have an interesting and still usable visual grouping? Etc.
I fully agree with this take. I don't think of a monitor / desktop as a tool that I interact with like I would a hammer; there is nothing intuitive about "open this high-definition representation of a day planner by clicking a button with your thumb on this little round plastic box somewhere else." I simply do not understand the appeal of skeumorphism, frankly I think these things look tacky but that is just my preference.
My interactions are with content, generally as strings of text but often as picture/video/audio. I prefer that my 'desktop' apply the principles you've mentioned, to the problem of tastefully and comfortably arranging, displaying, and manipulating that content, and little else. Some types of controls that lean skeuomorphic, like sliders or switches, may be useful and even intuitive in that endeavor; others, like an analog knob or dial, aren't. If I want to watch a video, display it in a minimal, tasteful frame; I do not need a representation of an old 1970s wooden TV or something.
Well, there's really two things going on here: consumer vs professional. Does an electrician need to "discover" the modes on her multimeter? Naw. Do I need to discover where the wiper controls are on the car I just rented? Absolutely! But I'm not a huge fan of UI fluff that helps me discover things on my work machine.
Weirdly, there is some kind of power play happening with OS UI: "MBA finally in position of influence wants to force their taste on everybody" appears to be a thing.
All the multimeters I've seen had pretty bog standard markings for AC and DC resistance, voltage and current. While not an electrician myself, I think one would be pretty annoyed if a "designer" invented new graphics for alternating current or resistance. They might even gotten hurt or damaged some equipment.
So when consistent UX is applied, both a professional and amateur alike can learn and trust that what they learned carries over.
Your rental car comment reminds me of the time I looked like an idiot trying to open the fuel door on a rented Kia K5 for almost 20 minutes. I don't have a smartphone and didn't have my laptop so had no way to look anything up. Ended up finding this video on the gas station employee's phone (she came out to see if everything was okay. It was not okay.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e7lZmbjtNo
If you have to release a tutorial video to open your fuel filler door, and that video includes the one easy piece of user interface to do the thing getting thanos-snapped out of existence, I think you did something wrong.
The cause of my problem was I opened the driver's door before turning off the car. The rental didn't have push-to-start like my personal vehicle, and I don't have "turn and remove key" on the mind when exiting a vehicle. Even locking and unlocking the door didn't unlock the fuel door, I had to turn the car back on, lock the doors, turn the car off, then unlock the doors. Why is opening the fuel door so complicated? There doesn't seem to be any way to do it mechanically, so good luck when the solenoid dies.
Do all those toggle switches and dials and sliders actually help discovery for people who grew up with iPads? Maybe their function is only obvious to us dinosaurs.
It wouldn't be so important if things didn't change so much over the years. The CLI has stayed fairly consistent over the past 40 or so years. Can't say the same about GUI, though.
I wouldn't have to rediscover all functionality if designers didn't shuffle things around for no reason. Though, that's mostly a Windows thing, which I have to use for work.
The UX disaster is not just about looking "clean" and "sleek". It is all about mobile. The choice between bland colored boxes, skeuomorphism and other styles is just looks, it doesn't change the fundamentals.
Here is the problem: smartphones have a small screens and are operated using fat fingers, so you need big buttons and you don't have much space, so you are very limited in the amount of stuff you can put on screen. It also means there is a lot of hidden stuff.
Now that having a mobile app, or a mobile optimized website is often a requirement, the desktop app usually follows the mobile conventions, which is not great, but better than doing it the other way. Having two entirely different apps to make the best use of the platform is possible, but it is expensive, and you want to maintain some level of consistency, so that users switching between desktop and mobile won't be lost. You probably want to maintain branding too.
To me, it is not that designers don't know how to do good UX like they did in the 90s/00s, it is that there are contradictory requirements and they have to make compromises.
These lessons made sense for users born before personal computers, but it's debatable if these lessons are transferable to so called "digital native" users.
Most "flat" designed modern apps fail miserably at discovery. Most hide things in hamburger menus or require weird random swipes in odd directions with zero visual indicators.
I got bit by this recently. Brave on android has no "forward button in the app menu, it only has back. Chrome has both forward and back in the menu. Both browsers support swiping from the right side to go forward in the history stack (although this seems to be overloaded with switching tabs in a tab group), which I discovered by accident. What's odd about this though is that the device has a global back button that is also used for backward history navigation, but that's been duplicated in brave with an additional back action in the menu, but the forward history navigation is entirely hidden and has only one way to invoke it: via swiping.
I think it depends on audience. I think there is a place for the 'Microsoft Bob' s of the world. My 90+ year old grandma would probably use a computer if we sanded down all the hard edges and kept her in a box (computationally speaking). Hell my 70+ year old mother, even though she's had a computer for 35ish years prefers her ipad for just that reason (simpler than her hand-me-down macbooks i keep her supplied with).
As someone who runs a super-boring, stock tiler with zero decoration or bling; couldn't agree more. It's this kind of thing that gets new users interested in Linux. _I_ started using Linux because I saw some video of wobbly windows, and desktops on a giant rotating cube.
I look back at my Enlightenment desktop with joy. I guess many people hated all the tinkering with drivers & settings etc, but I loved it. Spending a few weekends getting a computer running with Linux and Enlightenment exactly like I wanted it to and then actually using that as my main driver for years are very nice memories.
> Spending a few weekends getting a computer running with Linux and Enlightenment exactly like I wanted it to and then actually using that as my main driver for years are very nice memories.
Years? The novelty wore off in a week with Enlightenment's constant crashing :-(
Anyway, I look forward to more Window Managers (Hell, even a whole DE) that put the fun and whimsy back into computing.
I used to use e17 on my daily driver phone. Illume was a nice UI, but you (or your distro) did have to find a good revision to not have it crash indeed :)
My distro was Slackware, prior to any sort of package management, so, yeah, things would crash, but IIRC, Enlightenment, as much as I loved the use, look and feel, just crashed way too often.
Call me insane but I still think xfce and Enlightenment should do a fusion become one project. Get rid of the GNOME shenanigans on GTK and rewrite all xfce apps and stuff in the e libraries.
Is it just a default theme difference, or is the current version actually less themable?
Also, the person you replied to mentioned Moksha; that's a fork of Enlightenment 17 (which is what at least two of your cool-looking example screenshots appear to be from).
I would like a Linux desktop that doesn't suck first, then they can make it pretty. Every Linux desktop I've used in the past decade is either so minimal it's barely usable, or so feature-filled it takes up gigs of ram, or in the middle with broken clunky features (where I am now with LXQt). And the worst thing is, it's all the same goddamn thing as what we had 20 years ago, but somehow keeps getting rewritten to be slower and suckier.
I installed Debian with KDE on a couple of non-techy relatives' mid-range laptops around Covid, and in spite of KDE being notorious for its abundance of features, neither of those relatives have ever complained about slowness or lag. That era seems far in the past now.
Kinda same, I want there to be something reasonable that 99% of people can agree on. It shouldn't be that hard. Things seemed fine back with Gnome2, then, everything changed when the
The main difficulty I see in these "RETVRN TO SOVL" things is not the window-manager or desktop itself but the UI toolkits for the applications. GTK2 had so many excellent themes. Now GTK or libadwaita seem designed to resist themes and introduce constant breaking of selectors or widgets or whatnot. I believe they griefed the themers into just giving up. I have less knowledge about Qt, but I assume it's probably the better pick these days.
To say nothing of client side decorations, which diverge the user interface among apps and remove control from the user to globally customize some aspect of their application window management/theming.
Earlier today I was reading through the KDE 6.8 release notes and I found out about Union [0][1], which is a unified theming system for QtQuick and QtWidgets using a single CSS source file. Hopefully this encourages a bit more creative experimentation, although I'm quite happy with the default theme at this point. It feel very comfy to me.
I was just thinking about this the other week, when I bought an old iPhone, from the skeumorphic era, for nostalgic purposes. I've wanted one for years -- I only had the newer ones that were flat.
I always thought, nah, I'm just seeing thru rose tinted glasses, surely it wasn't that cool, I'm gonna be disappointed...
Well, I finally got one, and oh boy. It's even better than I imagined. There's just so much love and care put into the designs. We really lost something special.
(p.s. if you get a really old iPhone, don't reset the device. It's impossible to activate them now, found out the hard way.)
Every time some permanent downgrade was made to iPhones, everyone said you're afraid of change / it's nostalgia / you'll get used to it. Nope. iPhone 5S (or SE?) running iOS 6 is still the best combo ever. iOS 7 ruined the design, and it never fully recovered. BT is still not a replacement for headphone jack. The swipe gestures get mis-inputted all the time. Liquid Glass actually looked nice, but it introduced Android-level lag and glitches, like 1/3 of the time my camera doesn't load.
Biggest thing though, they broke the keyboard. Thought I was losing my mind after years of using a 6, 6S, 12 mini and still mistyping horribly. Then I picked up my iPhone 5 that hadn't been touched in years since ATT banned it, so there's no way I'm used to it... Instantly typed way faster with 0 mistakes. I'm not the only one, there must be some Ba Sing Se type of denial going on at Apple with the keyboard.
If it's so bad, why am I even using it? I'm kinda not. I use my laptop whenever possible now. I call more often than texting on my phone, and on speakerphone instead of earbuds. It didn't get fixed, just had to adapt. And all of this is practicality, not even touching how special the old iPhone felt.
Man, first Felix Reiseberg[0], then OpenCode 2.0[1], and now this in the last 24 hrs. Really giving off heavy Myst vibes. They are briefly interesting encounters, buy I deeply hope this isn't a legitimate UI trend.
It's hardly even skeuomorphism, it's a almost digital twin rendered with Phong.
I'm typically not a big proponent of skeuomorphism, but it's nice to have actual variety of experimental options, a bit like the crazy things people did with UIs back in the old days.
It seems like the developer is Japanese (the dev log is in Japanese according to the readme) so for once I am willing to believe this is a case of “the dev is not a native speaker” - but yes, I wondered several times reading the readme if this whole thing is vibe coded
Actually, his Japanese is pretty strange too. As a native speaker, it doesn't even feel like Japanese-Claudish. It feels more like it was translated from some other language, or maybe he just didn't bother reviewing the Haiku 3 output at all.
I feel like that was simply a limitation of the hardware at the time. Given modern hardware, I'm willing to bet that people of the 2000s would have made wild stuff.
Totally. Using Windows Vista Ultimate just for using Windows DreamScene ( e.g playing a video as a desktop background). Totally dumb, totally destroyed performance, totally cool :D
I reckon a lot of the people clamoring for these things are gen z or younger first discovering the idea of customizable OS's and are now going through all the awful decisions that were made before. Pretty sure I've seen a version of this skeuomorphic desktop like 15 times at this point.
The children yearn for Microsoft Bob - which took this idea a bit further:
"Microsoft Bob presented screens showing a house, with rooms that the user could visit containing familiar objects corresponding to computer applications, such as a desk with pen and paper and a checkbook. Clicking on the pen and paper would open the system's word processor."
Some level of skeuomorphic design is quite nice, like what we saw from Apple during the Forstall era. It seemed to strike a good balance.
Something like Microsoft BOB takes the metaphor too far and gets weird.
I think this project leans on it a little too hard, but a balanced approach can make the systems quite charming and provide a nice juxtaposition to the very austere hardware we have these days.
That might be the thing. In real life you don't use the same stationary for years. Your desk is a reflection of your mood and evolves almost daily. Maybe that's where these fail?
> In real life you don't use the same stationary for years.
That's honestly just because I can't reuse paper I've already written something on. That's a limitation of paper I'm glad the digital did away with.
I've used some pens for years. Once I found one I liked, I stuck with it.
I switched to Linux to get away from the UI churn. Things changing without my consent does not bring me joy, but it's not like you really have a choice if you run Windows (or a distro with a DE that does do the churn).
I functionally do use the same stationary for years. The only exception is paper, which I try to avoid using due to its real world limitaions. My desk doesn't change depending on my mood. It barely develops yearly, let alone daily.
I stand by that OS X Maverick was the most beautiful of all the macOS releases.
Actually that OS in general is what convinced me to buy a mac in like 2014; it felt like nearly every criticism I had with macOS at the time had been addressed. I miss those days.
I thought Maverick reduced the skeuomorphism, I was glad to see it removed. Apple had got to a point where shadows and reflections weren't consistent between icons and windows and the Dock. Briefly, Microsoft lead good design with Metro and the flat, minimal background noise.
I felt like Mavericks had just the right amount of skeuomorphism. Not enough to be annoying but just enough to be aesthetic.
I was never a fan of the Metro flat design that took over, though admittedly my desktop now is a purposefully unsexy Sway desktop that is completely flat and I do like that.
Agreed, but I also don't really care as long as it's usable. Some flat design made things harder to see/read, but by Sequoia, they'd figured out how much depth needed to be added. Tahoe / Liquid Glass is whatever, I have high-contrast mode which nullifies it.
This is neat, it’s not for me (I prefer extreme minimalism) but I could see how some would prefer it. I like how we’re getting more desktop options now thanks to wlroots.
Love skeuomorphism. This just gave me a reminder to build a paper-like calendar app now, with pencil markings showing events.
I definitely don't want a skeuomorphic desktop, but little web-apps, text editors, chat apps? I say we need a lot more of this type of design there, especially with how good modern CSS is at this kind of thing.
I like this kind of stuff but I think the analogy work the best around objects that are actually on the desk. Wardrobes or steampunk looking instrument is a bit too much.
The entire concept of skeuomorphism on computers is nonsensical. A monitor has a default blank grey or black appearance. EVERYTHING else is skeuomorphic, including the ugly 'modern' color rectangles the people who use this word want to exempt.
the "paper windows" idea doesn't seem to have been done with as much soul as the rest of the ui. Just a turned up corner. I reckon something done there could really tie this together
fwiw that is the standard term for that kind of fold (to the extent that it has its own wikipedia article), but I agree that the claude prose is gross.
I always think about video game UI's when I read the skeuomorphic design arugments. I suspect video games use them, at the very least, because they are delightful and fun; which, in my opinion, is a good reason to do something anywhere.
I will say that a long time ago I installed enlightenment and after about 10 minutes the burning windows felt like they were getting in the way, so I guess, like everything, there should be balance.
Love this so much. I've been thinking of trying to represent my notes in a way like this where categories of material are "stored together" not in folders, but "physical" items that represent the category like a globe for travel notes or a bookshelves of movie reviews etc.
Fantastic. Giving me memories of MS Bob. Put a talking animal assistant in the corner and you’ve got it. Oh, and you could connect the assistant to an LLM of course.
Reminds me of the launcher I build in HyperCard when I was like 10 y/o. It consisted of some graphic of a desk an I could click different objects to run applications.
This looks like something that heavily relies on a pointer device and thus is the opposite of what I want. But it can probably work well for people not minding this detail. Might even work better in VR.
I think AR/XR glasses are going to start to become popular in the next couple of years and I think some mixed reality shells will have more physical/3d interfaces.
Skeuomorphic design was a solution to teaching the customer how to use the digital product, but I wish we have more of its side effects like shadows, icons that pop and other things that are pleasant for the eye and depth.
I don't know if it's just because it was better or am I just tired of the current white (like #FFFFFF white) backgrounds with everything flat and not connected. I would like my browser tabs to be in the shape of a physical tab in notebooks.
Skeuomorphism should make my life easier. But sometimes it goes against that. I want to have a button that prints my document, I don't want to have to operate a virtual letter press. Having a switch to turn something on and off that looks like a switch helps me. A screen door that is the lock activation isn't what I would expect.
Very interesting concept but I doubt it's stable due to the amount of slopped code and I don't like that it requires a hodgepoge of libraries from different DEs.
In Brett Victor's 2011 essay, "A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design", he laid out the foundation for his critique of skeuomorphic design. He believes hands are our future.
On the visual pretense: "Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade."
On touchscreens mimicking real objects without haptics: "Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best."
On why this design path is short-sighted: "To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better."
Yes! Please bring back the soul we had with retro OS GUIs (and the speed)... it's time for a resurgence. Especially with new systems/RAM/GPUs/etc. not being a thing for quite a while for a lot of people now.
The thing I hate with vibed apps the most is zero seconds spend on how things around what is being build are already structured and what problems was already solved, just focusing on shiny result.
`sudo sh scripts/install_debian.sh`, a 583 lines long script, basically now a whole software just to handle the installation of this project on one distribution, seriously?
If we vibecode already, just do the normal packaging.
This project highlights why designers hate skeuomorphism. Skeuomorphism looks tacky unless done very very well. Skeuomorphic design under Steve Jobs looked very good. This doesn't come close.
I miss the 90s chunkiness of switches, buttons, hardware: being able to hear the computer "think" (HDD seeks), the hum of a CRT. Modern machinery feels so insubstantial, emphasizing clean glass and tidy machined chassis. (chassies?)
I have this persistent daydream about a computer setup that feels like the Nostromo flight deck from Alien. I almost want to feel like I'm sitting _inside_ a computer when I'm at my desk, surrounded by powerful feeling electronics with substantial switches and such. Of course there's plenty of inconvenience there too, but something about it appeals to me.
That's one of the appeals of mechanical keyboards for me. It's primarily the visual and aural aesthetic (thock thock thock....or clack clack clack) but married to the silent billion or so switches frantically turning on or off on the PC next to me, it kind of gives me the tactile feedback that I want from the process.
[0] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/12/alien-1970s-city-futura-hel...
The URL only works properly with Firefox in Private mode or with LibreWolf.
Guess the person that runs the community does not like HN.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski
Real intelligence must incorporate empathy. Lacking empathy means people lack real intelligence.
I respect people like Jamie Zawinski and Steve Wozniak. It is not about the wealth it about making a good product and solution. That is real value.
Also explains how he has the know it all to setup his site and fingerprint people logged into HN.
Have a good one!
Edit0: and cool link thanks!
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-sis
If nothing else, that is a truly sadistic trivia question. I wonder if there are any other words in the English language whose plural form is spelled the same, but pronounced differently.
So chassis, the thing full of parts, case, same thing but without the parts?
There are a bunch of other heteronyms, but I can't think of others that differ specifically in the plural
The Artificial General Intelligence (Claude) gives a few more examples (but only after having been prompted with your examples):
- Rendezvous, hors d'eouvre, patois, chamois, bourgeois, glacis, fracas (dialect dependent), debris (rare), pince nez (dialect dependent).
The issue is easily fixed with better grounding, but I’ve found that I prefer the noise. I can hear my network traffic, and I’ve come to use it as mental input. (“Op, I can hear that my script has reached the write-to-s3 step”)
https://disknoice-655ee8.gitlab.io/
it's got the right noises and i believe that they are synced up with real disk usage, but it doesn't quite feel the same because i think disk usage patterns have changed over the last 20-some years.
I love this. And it also reminds me of Magic Desk for the Commodore 64.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Desk
I now have a reason to put Linux on my old Intel Mac.
Fucking piece of shit.
I don't know why anybody would. It takes all the lessons we learned about UX from user testing in the late 90s/early 00s and throws it all away to produce something that looks "clean" and "sleek", at the cost of being useful. Discoverability? Who needs it?
EDIT: Though I do enjoy skeuomorphism, I do think the TFA goes a bit too far.
They found that words that convey some meaning related to what the command does had little or no effect on the user remembering what the command does. I strongly suspect skeuomorphism similarly has no claim on functional advantage.
Discoverability is good, but it's probably got a little to do with the icon.
I think it does, but for new users only. I hate playing the "is-this-a-button" on modern designs, not knowing what is clickable and what is not. Other games I hate:
- Lets find the scrollbar
- Guess which window has focus
- (Windows-only) Try to predict the application to get focus on alt-tab, then alt-tab again.
- How do I find the file that just downloaded?
They started doing it on mobile in order to give more screen real estate to the content area. This was then translated to desktop apps at the same time desktop screen real estate became a non-issue for everyone (a 32" monitor at 1600x1200 used to be a luxury, now it's mundane). Now no one knows if there is anything "below the fold" without initiating a scroll action, which just encourages people to further only focus on the above the fold content.
Interestingly the response to that was sites adding horizontal "progress bars" across the top of the viewport to indicate how much you had read. And with application and website control of the styling and operation of these standard widgets, everyone is slightly different, which increases time to become familiar.
It's been a race to the bottom, in the name of (the subjective at best) "clean design".
Note Japan has not embraced the so-called "clean" UI design aesthetic. Check out any Japanese website and it looks like US web sites in 1999, but even more so. I wouldn't mind me some of that.
Exactly. I remember opening a Metro/TIFKAM app for the first time on my new Windows 8 connected to my new 27" QHD monitor, and then staring in bewilderment as it went fullscreen and 95 % of the screen was just monochrome with nothing on it at all.
Wtf were they thinking? That I would enjoy vanilla sauce on my roastbeef because they weren't serving strawberries yet?
Still puzzling to me how such a multi-billion $ company can fuck up so hard.
There’s a lot of modern design in not happy with, but this is not personally one of them. If I can’t autohide scrollbars I try to turn them permanently off instead of permanently on. For some reason I find them very distracting, and since I anyway use a scroll wheel or trackpad or keybindings, I don’t need it to scroll. (If it’s on autohide, I use it as a progress bar when actually scrolling.).
But there’s a lot of these weird things that seemingly everyone else accepts that just really throws off my focus. Blinking text cursor is another one, I just can’t get any work done until the blinking is off. If an app or OS can’t do that, I won’t use it.
It's almost as if we didn't learn anything about UX in the past 30 years.
Personally I do have strong opinions how my computer should work and I'm not a follower. I could never work in an army and take orders either.
The problem was that early OS X used to be pretty aligned with my own opinions so I didn't notice the issues with this model. But after the Mac becoming more frustrating every year I finally dumped it and now I'm really happy with KDE which I can configure how I want.
In… the downloads folder? How much more obvious does the location need to be?
True.
But they absolutely need to stop hiding functionality in order to present a "clean" interface.
Sure, I've seen some cluttered interfaces. I recently launched LibreOffice Calc and damn there were a lot of buttons on that toolbar (I may be using an insanely old version).
But like...disappearing scrollbars makes zero sense and should never have been implemented on any interface.
My biggest gripe about the disappearing scrollbars is the layout shifting that can occur when the content changes making the scrollbar necessary or not. CSS has a few options that can take care of that, but it requires some digging for someone to discover them.
Many apps present content in such a way that makes it impossible to tell if there is anything more on the screen until you actually try to scroll. The home screen of the app is so clean and so fitted that there is nothing poking out from the bottom.
the image carousel type dots or similar old skool pagination indicators are so much worse than a simple scroll bar.
Used to be a solved problem before some ** messed it up. I hate that game too.
Related: Whoever decided to allow to websites style browser scroll bars, should have their teeth kicked in.
What actually matters is that:
- Names express not only differences, but also similarities.
- Names cannot be totally random; they must have certain pre-baked relations vaguely similar to their relations in the model. But they do not need to be too good. Invented or repurposed names in moderations are perfectly fine.
- The most important thing in naming is the overall consistency. But when the system changes you need more names and the consistency suffers. After a few rounds it gets too bad and you need to redo the whole system. This us why naming is hard.
- Certain physical properties matter, such as equal length.
- Names are very similar to pictograms or hieroglyphs.
Conventions are great for UX.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/devel...
Discoverability in CLI is --help. But you can't discover you have to use --help. So CLI is always fundamentally worse than GUI.
Good luck guessing ‘grep’ from first principles.
This one absolutely over indexes on that second principle, to a borderline cartoonish degree, but I expect the reason it’s resonating so hard is exactly what you’re indicating, that in the industry’s desire to be able to move on from the tether to the shapes of physical objects, they discarded that first principle entirely, instead of figuring out how to maintain the visual cues to form and operation in a new language.
(Here’s where I throw away all that credibility I just got from the prior two paragraphs: I actually think Liquid Glass is getting closer to a “skeumorphism without skeumorphism” than anything else I’ve seen out there.)
FWIW I love modern design, and I hate all these too clever skeuomorphs. Modern design is honest to the digital medium. I find its beauty lies, not in the quirky ways it tries to mimic real textures and objects, but by how it provides usable controls and information by applying basic design elements like spacing, alignment, color, typography, discovery, layered info density, etc. well.
None of these requires skeuomorphs. It is like the difference between thinking a website is visually impressive and stunning because it uses a nice background image. That would not impress me. What would impress me are stuff like: does it have an effective information architecture, as reflected in it main menu and general link structure? Does it use a tasteful and usable color scheme? Does it have an interesting and still usable visual grouping? Etc.
My interactions are with content, generally as strings of text but often as picture/video/audio. I prefer that my 'desktop' apply the principles you've mentioned, to the problem of tastefully and comfortably arranging, displaying, and manipulating that content, and little else. Some types of controls that lean skeuomorphic, like sliders or switches, may be useful and even intuitive in that endeavor; others, like an analog knob or dial, aren't. If I want to watch a video, display it in a minimal, tasteful frame; I do not need a representation of an old 1970s wooden TV or something.
Well, there's really two things going on here: consumer vs professional. Does an electrician need to "discover" the modes on her multimeter? Naw. Do I need to discover where the wiper controls are on the car I just rented? Absolutely! But I'm not a huge fan of UI fluff that helps me discover things on my work machine.
Weirdly, there is some kind of power play happening with OS UI: "MBA finally in position of influence wants to force their taste on everybody" appears to be a thing.
So when consistent UX is applied, both a professional and amateur alike can learn and trust that what they learned carries over.
If you have to release a tutorial video to open your fuel filler door, and that video includes the one easy piece of user interface to do the thing getting thanos-snapped out of existence, I think you did something wrong.
The cause of my problem was I opened the driver's door before turning off the car. The rental didn't have push-to-start like my personal vehicle, and I don't have "turn and remove key" on the mind when exiting a vehicle. Even locking and unlocking the door didn't unlock the fuel door, I had to turn the car back on, lock the doors, turn the car off, then unlock the doors. Why is opening the fuel door so complicated? There doesn't seem to be any way to do it mechanically, so good luck when the solenoid dies.
Plenty of cars have automatic fuel door locks that work seamlessly.
https://embertonimperial.com/products/stc4072-locking-fuel-f...
It wouldn't be so important if things didn't change so much over the years. The CLI has stayed fairly consistent over the past 40 or so years. Can't say the same about GUI, though.
I wouldn't have to rediscover all functionality if designers didn't shuffle things around for no reason. Though, that's mostly a Windows thing, which I have to use for work.
Here is the problem: smartphones have a small screens and are operated using fat fingers, so you need big buttons and you don't have much space, so you are very limited in the amount of stuff you can put on screen. It also means there is a lot of hidden stuff.
Now that having a mobile app, or a mobile optimized website is often a requirement, the desktop app usually follows the mobile conventions, which is not great, but better than doing it the other way. Having two entirely different apps to make the best use of the platform is possible, but it is expensive, and you want to maintain some level of consistency, so that users switching between desktop and mobile won't be lost. You probably want to maintain branding too.
To me, it is not that designers don't know how to do good UX like they did in the 90s/00s, it is that there are contradictory requirements and they have to make compromises.
Most "flat" designed modern apps fail miserably at discovery. Most hide things in hamburger menus or require weird random swipes in odd directions with zero visual indicators.
It hasn't annoyed me enough to disable it just yet, but it's only been a week.
https://github.com/schneegans/burn-my-windows
Years? The novelty wore off in a week with Enlightenment's constant crashing :-(
Anyway, I look forward to more Window Managers (Hell, even a whole DE) that put the fun and whimsy back into computing.
Enlightenment today (https://www.enlightenment.org/_media/aa/shot-2021-12-13_17-4...) looks nowhere nearly as cool as it used to:
https://imgur.com/enlightenment-are-we-posting-throwbacks-de...
http://robert.thegeakes.co.uk/images/elive.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:E17_screenshot.jpg
https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/fq4y3c/e17_found_...
Also, the person you replied to mentioned Moksha; that's a fork of Enlightenment 17 (which is what at least two of your cool-looking example screenshots appear to be from).
That's the main thing we lost, isn't it? Options. I remember playing with so many different themes back in the day.
https://www.bodhilinux.com/moksha-desktop/
https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php
Cinnamon (comes with Linux Mint) is a modern refresh that's very functional and not at all heavy or slow.
If you don't want a desktop, I guess there are many good WMs to choose from.
[0] https://quantumproductions.info/articles/2026-08/union-summe...
[1] https://akselmo.dev/posts/union-qtwidgets/
I was just thinking about this the other week, when I bought an old iPhone, from the skeumorphic era, for nostalgic purposes. I've wanted one for years -- I only had the newer ones that were flat.
I always thought, nah, I'm just seeing thru rose tinted glasses, surely it wasn't that cool, I'm gonna be disappointed...
Well, I finally got one, and oh boy. It's even better than I imagined. There's just so much love and care put into the designs. We really lost something special.
(p.s. if you get a really old iPhone, don't reset the device. It's impossible to activate them now, found out the hard way.)
Biggest thing though, they broke the keyboard. Thought I was losing my mind after years of using a 6, 6S, 12 mini and still mistyping horribly. Then I picked up my iPhone 5 that hadn't been touched in years since ATT banned it, so there's no way I'm used to it... Instantly typed way faster with 0 mistakes. I'm not the only one, there must be some Ba Sing Se type of denial going on at Apple with the keyboard.
If it's so bad, why am I even using it? I'm kinda not. I use my laptop whenever possible now. I call more often than texting on my phone, and on speakerphone instead of earbuds. It didn't get fixed, just had to adapt. And all of this is practicality, not even touching how special the old iPhone felt.
There's easy jailbreak options to bypass the activation for those and have a functional device, nowdays.
It's hardly even skeuomorphism, it's a almost digital twin rendered with Phong.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50082470
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094994
> The room is ray-traced
imho, part of the charm of iOS6 was that everything was baked into native-resolution textures.
They dropped the ball:
DESk would have been Desktop Environment, desk, and Skeumorphic in one word.
"Microsoft Bob presented screens showing a house, with rooms that the user could visit containing familiar objects corresponding to computer applications, such as a desk with pen and paper and a checkbook. Clicking on the pen and paper would open the system's word processor."
Fun, but most themes were basically unusable.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidoscope_(software)
Some samples: https://web.archive.org/web/20110709175639fw_/http://www.kal...
(The one I used the most, was Ozymandias II).
Something like Microsoft BOB takes the metaphor too far and gets weird.
I think this project leans on it a little too hard, but a balanced approach can make the systems quite charming and provide a nice juxtaposition to the very austere hardware we have these days.
That may have more to with the skills of the implementors, as opposed to the concept, as a whole.
I do find modern "flat" design to be less "fun," but I get a lot more done with it.
That's honestly just because I can't reuse paper I've already written something on. That's a limitation of paper I'm glad the digital did away with.
I've used some pens for years. Once I found one I liked, I stuck with it.
I switched to Linux to get away from the UI churn. Things changing without my consent does not bring me joy, but it's not like you really have a choice if you run Windows (or a distro with a DE that does do the churn).
Actually that OS in general is what convinced me to buy a mac in like 2014; it felt like nearly every criticism I had with macOS at the time had been addressed. I miss those days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(design_language)
https://www.macworld.com/article/222218/get-to-know-os-x-mav...
I was never a fan of the Metro flat design that took over, though admittedly my desktop now is a purposefully unsexy Sway desktop that is completely flat and I do like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Desk
The calculator is a sheet of paper..
Compaq Presario 486 1994, I was 10.
And yes, played Myst on it.
Tempus fugit…
We bought a bunch of TabWorks-based Compaqs back then for a medical office where I was doing IT work. I thought it was slick at the time.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Logitech_3_buttons_m...
I definitely don't want a skeuomorphic desktop, but little web-apps, text editors, chat apps? I say we need a lot more of this type of design there, especially with how good modern CSS is at this kind of thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_ears
I could read it comfortably, whereas usually I can't make it through even a paragraph from an LLM.
> The room is ray-traced, and one desk lamp lights all of it.
> The first login draws the room once: a few seconds on a GPU, longer without one. After that it starts at once.
> Nothing here is a symbol for a thing on a desk.
> each is drawn to look like the real thing set down there
I could go on...
I will say that a long time ago I installed enlightenment and after about 10 minutes the burning windows felt like they were getting in the way, so I guess, like everything, there should be balance.
Indigo Magic or CDE is as close as I'd want to go with that concept.
2004 was a long time ago, and I suppose what is old can be new (again).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQQPTtdzBig
Hopefully no.
iPhone 4s with native resolution textures felt truly magical.
not this flat on flat, grey and text as buttons shite that has pervaded UI for the last decade+
In the past ui development was so hard and none of the app developers had the expertise or appetite to do it properly.
LLMs changed that overnight. A good engineer can build great UI for their app.
https://github.com/CoreBedtime/playground
(Bonus points for not throwing AI-tells at everyone in the README - much appreciated).
This makes it interesting. I may try it out. Moksha uses 200 MB to 300 MB of RAM
As for the post / the repo itself, this analysis:
https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector/50103338
suggests it is LLM-generated. Not sure what to make of it.
I don't know if it's just because it was better or am I just tired of the current white (like #FFFFFF white) backgrounds with everything flat and not connected. I would like my browser tabs to be in the shape of a physical tab in notebooks.
I don't know if this is accurate, but I blame Windows 8 and, especially, Windows 10 for popularizing this extremely bland and boring design.
I'm not sure if I feel the same way about skeuomorphism as a general design philosophy. Maybe this is just the wrong metaphor?
https://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDes...
On the visual pretense: "Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade."
On touchscreens mimicking real objects without haptics: "Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best."
On why this design path is short-sighted: "To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better."
`sudo sh scripts/install_debian.sh`, a 583 lines long script, basically now a whole software just to handle the installation of this project on one distribution, seriously? If we vibecode already, just do the normal packaging.
I don't hate skeuomorphic design but come on man