cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/2823044
This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/nostalgia by /u/Character-Emotion237 on 2024-05-02 22:39:26.
cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/2823044
This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/nostalgia by /u/Character-Emotion237 on 2024-05-02 22:39:26.
Yep. It feels weird to be nostalgic for windows 7, but it was honestly not bad. I think the reason why the loss of aero glass feels cold and sterile is because it honestly is. The whole metro/material design thing is just garbage. I don’t want buttons that look like abstract squares, I want buttons that look like buttons. What brain-dead designer honestly likes minimal design over skeumorphism?
I’m no designer (although I might be brain-dead), but I prefer minimalist UI over skeumorphism.
Eh, I was being hyperbolic when I probably shouldn’t have been. It just feels very lifeless to me. I understand the arguments for it, it just feels soulless and lifeless.
You want your computer to have soul?
But also win 7 had little to do with skeumorphism
Perhaps could be considered “frosted glass?”
Frutiger Aero is commonly used to describe it
From what I’ve read, Frutiger Aero is considered to be a form of skeumorphism, or at least skeumorphic-adjacent.
Damn I missed NT 4’s clean style back then…
I like them in different places. I minimalism in car screens because the focus should be the physical interior. But skeumorphism is way better for usability on a PC.
They were trying to unify their desktop and tablet UIs (touch-driven) which itself was fucking stupid since people interact with them totally differently.
I remember having a Wacom usb tablet at the time, and Windows kept slapping a virtual keyboard in the middle of my screen. It was infuriating, to say the least.
Especially at the time, and even somewhat still today, it saves bandwidth on virtual connections. Some places run thousands of virtual desktops for their users.
I liked Aero better, too
Counter-point, you could do that with skeumorphism via procedural generation by sending the base algorithms instead of icons and then rendering the icons client-side. It’s already done to a limited extent when it comes to games. Substance Designer and Painter are industry standards when it comes to creating textures and materials, and they can generate textures with resolutions anywhere from 128x128 to 8192x8192 without requiring any additional effort due to their procedural workflow. Granted, the textures are usually “baked” before actually being imported into the game engine, which is why you can’t tell a game to generate 8k textures (the game only has the rasterized textures, not the original procedural ones); however, the technology is already kinda there. That said, it can be hardware intensive, but it could be done.
This is actually pretty close to what macOS does.
I agree, I never really liked Metro and the minimalism of Material design doesn’t vibe with me either. It’s mostly a personal taste thing though, I know several others who do like minimalism.
About it being weird to be nostalgic for Windows 7, it’s not to me, but I think it has to do with how it was the last OS I used that didn’t involve either several awful bugs to the point of unusability (Windows 10) or requiring extensive knowledge of how the system works (Linux) to daily-drive it; so I guess I look at it fondly as the last time I was “computer-innocent”, so to say.