Classic Software Design

software is increasingly becoming 'appified' with hamburger menus, lack of keyboard shortcuts and tooltips, 'responsive design', and other horrific paradigms antithetical to productivity on a desktop system. microsoft continues to try to kill win32 and their legacy software while trying to push their UWP. meanwhile, developers have flocked to node.js and electron as a means of having a single codebase on all platforms at the expense of performance and usability. things are starting to look dark for those of us who value time-tested design created through the process of research in human computer interaction.

i've begun to formulate the idea of creating a suite of software for windows, completely free and open source, to stand up for classic design. it will include a web browser, desktop mail client, text editor, and chat client with the hope of expanding to video and audio editors and an office suite. it's no simple task, but there are plenty of FOSS libraries such as ffmpeg which can make this happen.

Sup Forums, are you currently happy with the selection of desktop software available right now or do you feel like there is room for a project like this?

>current direction of desktop software

Lol wtf are you 30 or something? Only old people can't use modern UI

>underage
>likes apps and botnet
why are you here

Use GNUstep, retard.

They do this because it takes no effort. Skeumorphic looked waaaay better because it had actual shading but pixel-shit indie artists can't draw so... you get this pajeet art instead.

Win10, Mac, GNOME3, it all looks like horseshit. Can't tell what's clickable and what isn't, shit is scatter all over the place, inconsistent and hard to use, buttons "animate" and move out of place.
Imagine controlling this app shit with just a keyboard, can't do it.

talking specifically about windows

linux will always have a wide variety if design paradigms and so for the most part you don't have to worry

Why build a whole OS on top of Windows? It's fucked.

Use ReactOS or get off, Microsoft clearly hates so much that they are kicking you off their OS by making it unusable. You aren't the only one who doesn't want to use a tablet on their desktop.

b-but modern apps are so good, i can browse the store in the music player

Spot on

Electron apps make me want to shit my intestines out.

>buy high-DPI monitor
>alright! now I have all this space to play with, and I can even scale if it becomes too small

>*Google releases new UI*
>*Your brand new display only shows 10 objects on screen at any given moment
>most other people have to buy a new display just to read more than 3 letters at a time.
These people use Macs with Retina displays, they assume everyone else has the 30inch iMac at 1440p. Being autistic little millennials, they are incapable of conceiving that others might not share their experience.

>i've begun to formulate the idea of creating a suite of software for windows, completely free and open source, to stand up for classic design.

Of you just could use Linux

...

>'responsive design', and other horrific paradigms
usually I would agree with these kinds of threads but actually going and calling the idea of designing software to look good with any display resolution and aspect ratio just tells me you're just a nostalgic fucktard who knows nothing about design but wants us to think he does to circlejerk and farm (You)s (here (You) go)

but yeah, go ahead and write a fucking browser, mail client, text editor, chat client, video/audio editor, and office suite from scratch, we'll see how committed you are to that nostalgia when it actually comes time to populate your shithub repo with something more than a readme

there are already solutions for half of this shit anyway, since when were things like SeaMonkey and Vim "appified"? what exactly has become "appified" about modern desktop office suites? where is the "appification" in audio/video editors and production suites? have you ever stopped to consider that maybe some simplification is actually good design practice because nobody wants to use a piece of software that devotes half of their screen real estate to a bunch of discrete buttons for every function?

What a damaged looking individual. Probably balding, maybe a cuck or even some kind of artist but too naive and quirky (and thus insecure) to actually grow and strengthen himself into a real man.

Some people of this archetype are shitbags, other are pitiable when you recognize that they could have become normal people if only they lived in a different age.

first of all pajeet, i have no idea how to read half your post

second of all, seamonkey has been abandoned, and vim is a command line application.

the only point i'll concede here is that yes, office suites and video editors are generally not as bogged down by the new age tablet design, however there currently aren't good open source lightweight alternatives to the massive hogs that are microsoft office and the adobe suite.

for example, say you have a video file you just want to cut or crop, but not re-encode. a small and simple gui using ffmpeg as a library is better than most of the software solutions out there and would be very simple to make.

similarly, something akin to an open source wordpad rather than a big suite of software like libreoffice

>to stand up for classic design

I am deeply sympathetic to that cause. Mind you, I'm deeply sympathetic to the cause of DOS-based database data acquisition because it's easier to get old fucks to remember the keystrokes that navigate the menu system for a given purpose.

It's not the classic design that is of value: it's the interaction it had with the human who grew up with it

Godspeed anyway OP

>created through the process of research in human computer interaction.

How do you know these new designs aren't created in a similar way? Times have changed old man, people use software on screens and form factors of multiple sizes and designs need to be usable on all of them.

There are legit complaints like , but OP is just a hardcore nostalgia fag who's getting left behind.

Nice bait. Perhaps you should try to get job security on Reddit instead.

Those retards think Windows 10 looks like something other than some autistic nigger using the fill-tool

i know because i'm an HCI major and modern design is very much not being developed with research, but rather aesthetics. we have graphic designers doing UX now.

also i'm 21, not that i don't have nostalgia for old interfaces but i've watched normies try to use apps and it's not pretty

>first of all pajeet, i have no idea how to read half your post
don't think I'm the Pajeet here if you literally cannot understand English
>second of all, seamonkey has been abandoned
2.48 beta was just released last month
>and vim is a command line application.
use np++, gvim or any other editor, there are fucking thousands of them to choose from
> however there currently aren't good open source lightweight alternatives to the massive hogs that are microsoft office and the adobe suite.
it's almost as if gimped garbage for toasters is sub-par compared to their fully fledged counterparts, really makes you think
use an older version if it bothers you so much
>similarly, something akin to an open source wordpad rather than a big suite of software like libreoffice
abiword has been a thing forever

What purpose do you think your project would serve? I mean, museum exemplar of a style? Support to a whitepaper? A product to sell? Something most people haven't heard of but with fanatical neckbeard users, like Apple?

I think the best way to go is to find something non-distracting.

That means that yes, probably the colors used in classic themes are best and the clear emphasis on elements along with utilizing space properly, but the rest is just people purely jerking off to nostalgia.

Flat shit is cancer, specially both material design and the trash Windows 10 has. The latter, along with Youtube's new design are probably the worst things these days. When you need a dark theme to be able to work with certain elements you're doing it wrong.

it's not really the flat look that makes those designs trash, it's all of the other ideas that come with the flatness, like shit information density, poor color choices, oversimplified controls, poorly emphasized controls, and tons of other retarded "simplifications" that you can design flat interfaces without

For me there's nothing worse than a button that doesn't have borders. I'm sorry, they don't get to call it a button when it's just a fucking bunch of letters on a white background. It could be as big as the entire screen and I don't have the obligation to assume that it is any smaller.

In all seriousness I know it's not specifically the flat look, but the most common flat designs aren't usually good looking, convenient or useful. It's in many cases more about looking modern, samey and being able to "fit" with other things. I understand that it's hard to achieve cohesion but you just don't turn everything into white blocks and call it a day.

>I understand that it's hard to achieve cohesion but you just don't turn everything into white blocks and call it a day.
it wasn't hard to achieve cohesion when using the native toolkit

Well yeah

I don't tend to criticize macOS just that much, because you can't change a damn thing about its design but most if not all applications achieve this cohesion. I don't dig the icons though. But nobody liked skeuomorphic icons either.

don't even disagree really, it would be nice if in the future they start tackling those issues and adding some kind of border to controls

I am convinced that in less than 5 years things will change quite drastically in those terms. It's just the wait is painful. Windows 10 manages to be a pain in the ass since every slightly big update breaks custom theme support, and the defaults look just disgusting. The new file explorer "app" here is idiotic and I wish that the person that even thought of this stupid shit got fired and couldn't manage to get a job ever again in his fucking life. I mean it.