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I’ve had LCARS as my phone interface for years and people are horrified when they see all the buttons.
There was this while concept at the time that digital interfaces should mirror familiar physical interfaces in order to be easily understood by users, and it’s fascinating and honestly not without value.
Skeuomorphism
Is there a Linux distro or program that would allow me to do this to my desktop?
If you find one, I want to know too. This would be a fun customization.
I remember people writing 3D Wayland window compositors, where you can walk around a room/maze and put application windows on walls.
Maybe it was this: https://github.com/capisce/mazecompositor
Having trouble finding it but I swear my PNY Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 (I think?) circa 2003 came with a Linux 3D desktop/launcher software that sounds like this. (X11 based I guess.)
Not sure if it was bundled with the card, came with the Nvidia drivers, or what…but it worked just fine with Linux at the time (probably Slackware, not positive what I was running then).
AND JESUS WEPT!
TBH I prefer the modern minimal UIs. It is easy to understand. Although I don’t mind having an option.
Oh look, my grandparents PC circa 2005
I was in the hospital in 2015 and was talking to the person next to me. He realised I was in IT and as he turned his laptop to me he’s like I can’t seem to view websites anymore with toolbars up the wazoo. It was already a throwback even at that time
Edit: wording
My old motherboard’s driver disc from 2015 would install Google toolbar if you weren’t careful
Aaah the good old “next next next install” you open the browser some time later with a surprise toolbar
In ~2005 I was at a job that provided tech support to local hospitals. That’s the first time I saw this image and … It didn’t strike me as too unrealistic.
At that job I once spent seventeen minutes on the phone trying to help a nurse find the semicolon on her keyboard.
Times didn’t change! Anyone that provided any large scale tech support to the actual average person understands that tech is indistinguishable from magic to them
How’d you get a screenshot of my mom’s desktop as I found it when I’d be home from college, cir. 2003?
Oh my Deity
Would you like some help with your search?
Banzai Buddy!
My neighbor intentionally installed that shit on his family PC when we were like 15.
*bonzi buddy
A lot of people installed this shit. Because they’re visiting fuckmybeaniebabies.net and a popup is like “Install our spam bar for a chance to win herpes!” And they happily click ok.
A lot of people still do that, but it’s “Do you want your phone/computer to constantly nag you with browser notifications about our spam?” and they click “Yes!”
I intentionally installed it on other people’s PCs…
See you in hell
Oh neat. Chance to win a free lobster dinner. Gonna click it.
You can take a sexy single there
I’ve seen this toolbar hell before. I’ve had to clean many a pc of this toolbar hell before.
I’d always have to do this crap to our old Sony VAIO desktop (that was mine, until I went to college and my mom took it over). Then my mom would get mad that I “messed up the computer” because I’d delete this crap and apparently she used it?
What’s that relevant xkcd about workflows? /shudder
(Is there some open source media player with this kind of skins?)
Winamp has been open sourced https://github.com/alexfreud/winamp
Read their license. It does not meet the definition of open source.
Wow, they prohibit forking and distributing changes, that fucking blows.
Also, doesn’t look like it supports Linux natively, which is a shame.
Qmmp might fit the bill, I apply old winamp skins to it for a nostalgia fix
XMMS is able to use Winamp skins. This one seems to be WMP, but that one copied the concept of crazy skins from Winamp.
The OG winamp is still available and fully working
ew windows media player
Gorgeous
I feel like some of the old cluttered WoW UIs might be an example of maximalism, by trying to show as much information as possible.
That’s not so bad. I have more than this, but with a larger screen you have more space.
So this is a healer. They barely need to see anything anyways.
Eve players: noooo… It’s not just a spreadsheet
Veteran WoW players: hmm… I can still see the actual gameplay, lemme add another stat display
And they still wiped.
To be fair, they only had a thirty-two point three three uh, repeating of course, percentage, of survival.
“RIGHT SIDE, MANY WHELPS!! HANDLE IT!!!”
At least I have chicken
-50 D.K.P.
Do you see my mana? What am I supposed to do for you?
🍑💳
One should always wipe. I tell my 6yo this all the time.
I don’t think I’ve met a single eve player who doesn’t proudly refer to it as a “spreadsheets in space” game XD
Eve online mentioned o7
I miss it sometimes. Then I remember, last time I played it, I didn’t have my original log ins and whatnot so had to start from the beginning and it took weeks to get to a level where I could do basic noob stuff without dying right away. I then spent like 18 months of just training skills, I’d log in, fill the queue, log out, log back in a week or so later and fill the queue again. After nearly two years of doing that I just gave up :D
But I still miss it. But I also miss my abusive ex.
I can’t tell you how many fleet fights I literally disabled graphics and only had the overview and chat. Especially multiboxing, I might have one with graphics. Not necessary for most.
The 15 FPS indicator is the icing on the cake.
The standards we used to put up with…
The standards we used to put up with…
Back when games were measured by how enjoyable they were rather than a little number in the corner.
Or, in this case, but the amount of numbers in every corner 🙃
It’s not enjoyable to play at low fps though? I don’t get it
It was a different time, the novelty of the experience made up for the lower frame rate. A stable 30fps used to be considered good, and 15fps was fine for a game like WoW which didn’t really need to rely on buttery smooth gameplay.
The internet was also just a lot slower back then, too, so in one sense the framerate only needed to be as good as your ping, essentially.
This looks like when you first discover that your Linux desktop environment supports adding infinite taskbars
This takes me back.
This is what I would actually consider maximalist UI. OP’s is neither minimal or maximal, it’s just overstylized UI.
I really wish I still had time for WoW… Sigh.
WARNING: SEMEN LOW
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Healing back in the day was definitely like this.
Is that grid or decursive? Looks like they have duplicate frames?
Not sure. I used Healbot, which looks similar to what’s on screen, but it’s been so long I have no idea if it can be configured to look like that.
I’m curious to know what it is like these days but not enough to give blizzard more money anymore.
Oh WarCraft stopped being a passion project a long time ago - Blizzard’s enshittification is pretty rampant.
If you get the itch to play WoW, 100% do so on a private server set to one of the earlier expansions.
Lol I had all of those and then some but I also had enough resolution/UI scale that it was all tucked to the sides (other than the nice looking hp/mana bars that framed the middle of the screen).
Did the people who stood in fire do so because they couldn’t even see what they were or weren’t standing in? Should guilds have done fund raising to buy better GPUs and monitors to best help progression? Thinking back to when I had a hand in guild leadership, it didn’t even occur to me to base any recruitment or raiding roster on PC specs, but it seems so obvious now in hindsight. Too bad I can’t go back.
Mmmmm shadow bars
Man the eyewitness learning games were fantastic - I loved the dinosaur one where you’d find bones in the museum and reassemble them and then have them wander round the otherwise empty liminal space of the museum.
Is that Truespace?
Bryce 3d
Cheers. Brought back memories, even if they were wrong ones 😉
Peak skeuomorphism.
Smartphones and mobile phones used to be inventive too.
I loved the more blob / liquid designs like the rio forge
There was more then a few Winamp skins that looked like that
what do you call someone with no arms or legs in a pool? . Bob
What do you call someone with no arms or legs on the floor in front of your door?
Matt.
What do you call a man with no arms and no legs on the barbeque grill?
Frank.
My wife has only begrudgingly allowed me to maintain a welcome mat that says “Hi! I’m Mat!”
Is this supposed to be on a farm? What’s going on outside that window?
IIRC, you could choose between a number of different themes.
But, yeah, rural America representation in technology was weirdly a thing in the 1990s.
I remember customizing this! What a throwback!
Packard Bell Navigator. I really tried to make it work when I was a kid, but it was all style and not much function. I miss it, though. It was ambitious.
Seeing this helps me understand older sci-fi better, the ones where people access the computer as a virtual reality office which leads to other things. It makes sense that the authors would assume VR as the natural progression of a UI like this.
It seems like when personal computers were new they tried to replicate the familiar to ease new users in, but now that we’re all very used to them we’ve abandoned the concept almost entirely. I feel like we might be in the beginning of a trend back to it though, now that our internet connections and graphical abilities are more up to the task.
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And you just know the globe rotates when you hover over Habitats, and the drawers pull out when you hover over those
I had this as a kid. It absolutely did all of those things, and the intro cutscene showed this menu as just one nook in a giant museum with other things to see. I had a few of their other games as well.
I can all but guarantee that a lot of the curiosity and enthusiasm for learning that I had as a kid was directly thanks to these edutainment games. Compared to my overwhelming adult apathy it really stands out.
And a little lizard runs across the bottom every once in a while! I had a Czech version, very painstakingly localized (but nothing beat The Way Things Work).
