Windows used rounded corners on its buttons from 1.0 to 3.11, then switched to square ones until XP's themed UI, where they were slightly rounded again, until 8 went back to square, and now with 11 they are again rounded:
I still think windows 2000 looks the best out of that bunch, if not for the lack of font antialiasing.
Windows 10 does a pretty good job too if not for the mess that is finding yourself in a universe of completely different UI paradigms that suddenly lurch from one to another, especially when navigating settings.
Windows 2003 Server was the pinnacle - it looked and felt like Windows 2000, but had XP-era improvements, including ClearType (subpixel font antialiasing).
I agree that Windows 2000 looks the best. I inherited a system that was running Windows Server 2003 that we have since replaced with up-to-date software. We needed to do it, of course but, the Windows 2000 UI was way better than what we have today. It was simpler but also more consistent.
What really bothers me is they removed the possibility to set the interface to the good old windows nt interface after windows 7. Okay, Microsoft wants to implement sim crappy new UI. At least give me the option to make it right
Sharp corners are dangerous, I always feel like those windows will draw blood if I touch them with my mouse wrong.
Strangely enough, I stayed in an East Asian hotel (I think with Tibetan influences?) and I remember the corners of the room all being rounded. It just felt better, more soothing? It would be hella expensive to get a craftsman to round all the corners in your room here in the west, you could do it with plaster but it wouldn’t last more than a decade and wouldn’t add any resale value.
Here in the UK it was pretty common up to say the 1940s for plasterers to curve the corners on outward pointing walls in hallways. This usually extends from the skirting up to the picture rail. There is a lovely transition from the curve to a point just below the picture rail, which is very elegant, but a total pain if you are hanging wallpaper, well, that's my experience anyway!
I've always felt it was one of those details that a plasterer could show off their skill, and you are right, it softens the corner in a very pleasing way.
> I remember the corners of the room all being rounded. It just felt better, more soothing?
It's funny. Here in the United States, I find houses with bull-nosed interior walls discomfiting. Something about all the rounded corners causes me mild distress. I find it much more comfortable being in houses with sharp-edged meetings of walls.
Hmm. We do it to ceilings (coving). I think you maybe need wooden coving, mounted vertically. Then you can make a feature of it, skim it, paint it, whatever.
It's also funny how the later examples almost look like they could be terminal UIs. Based on this trend, I predict that the next version of Windows ("Windows One") will look like DOS.
it's interesting to see all the windows theming over the years. I personally prefer the UI that looks like little chunks of titanium and steel rather than the boring flat RGBCMYK-like color palette. It was even in the name, glass, to convey the materiality.
I just wonder why developers can have design color palettes like solarized; yet Microsoft imposes its will and subjugates everyone to the same godawful blueness. F** the blueness because I know some corporate peon had conversations like "Yellow is too cautionary, orange is too obscure, red is too angry, purple is too edgy. Blue is safe."
That's a very nice image. I think XP is the best one. Just the fact that it's yellow instead of gray makes all the difference.
I hate how modern widgets don't have shading. They're trying to be modern but it just feels very lazy.
Note how buttons suddenly became twice as big and there was margin/padding everywhere since Windows Vista/7. It's getting ridiculous how much space UI wastes.
I’ve enjoyed this story over several decades, but what stands out to me now is the fact that Bill Atkinson was working from home during the creation of the Macintosh.
There's a puzzle in philosophy, where a philosopher points to a bear and says, "That's a bear". Except it's only a life-size cardboard cutout of a bear. But behind the cutout is a real bear. Is the philosopher speaking the truth when he points and says there's a bear there?
Steve Jobs is appropriately highly praised, but by many people who don't know why he should be praised -- to them he's like a movie sort of figure, Elon Musk in his post-Twitter phase, a larger-than-life jerk who says smart words and allegedly does things. But Jobs actually is that sort of genius that a lot of wannabes pretend to be. So is he highly praised? Is the philosopher telling the truth when he points to the fake bear, having confused it for a real one but not knowing there's a real one behind it?
I’m not sure “underrated” is exactly the best term here. He’s pretty much lauded as the greatest “visionary for design and innovation in the technology industry”, ever.
I agree that every time one of these anecdotes comes up, it’s a shock to remember. Of all the narcissists we have running the world, he’s the one I’ll most fondly remember.
Maybe not "underrated" but "Jobs only did marketing, Woz did all the technical work" is a very persistent comment I see on the internet when he's brought up.
He was a genius that had that flaw of being a narcissist.
The problem is all the people using him as a reason to praise narcissism itself. And almost never even in people that are genial, since very few people are genial.
I will not define Jobs as narcissistic (thinking on himself). Quite the opposite, Jobs was focussing on what people needed, and he was right: People needed rounded corners way more than ovals.
Jobs was obsessed with the customer experience and that was what made him a great CEO.
Did he cared more about the product or the customer than his own people? This is something that you should ask the people that worked with him.
One example of rounded rectangles added purely for aesthetic purposes was the desktop window of the old Mac. When the display turned on during boot, it was naturally square, but then one of the first things the software did was to round its corners. Then they stayed this way until maybe another software switched into full screen. There was nothing like that on Windows and it was obviously a “useless” thing to do. I liked that detail.
> Over the next few months, roundrects worked their way into various parts of the user interface, and soon became indispensable.
At which point we realized they are just a fad like any other design ever was and went to sharp corners and flat design. And back to round corners, and back to sharp, and back to..
Hell, I can see this circle of hell happening in front of my very eyes. I think a year ago someone at Chrome had the brilliant idea to "refresh the design" as happens so often in big organizations and suddenly the tabs got round and we got little round corners around the navigation bar and..
rounded corners are actually a significant accessibility factor and powerful gestalt mechanism in design. The border radius of a rounded rect makes it discernable at a glance the boundaries of the element and what is inside and what is out. Concentric rounding can clearly communicate parent child relationships in an astutely gestalt fashion.
The only thing constant in modern web design seems to be the ever-increasing amount of margins and paddings. Everything else goes in cycles.
When Google fully-rounded the corners of a rectangle, they added even more margins and paddings. When texture comes back in style, I bet we'll see even more margins and paddings.
The ‘hack’ part isn’t drawing round windows; that is just using the operating system APIs to create a new window look.
The hack is injecting that code in the Finder. A way to do that is to store the WDEF inside the desktop file on a floppy disk. Then, inserting that floppy would be enough to give new windows that look.
The Finder would open the resource fork of that file to get info about files on the floppy and keep it open. When you opened a window, the Finder would ask the Resource Manager for “WDEF #0”, and the Resource Manager would find it (or rather, a WDEF pretending to be ‘it’) in the desktop file. Writing a Trojan for that OS wasn’t very difficult.
Readit News
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/7389110/64139289-3...
I still prefer the sharp corners.
Windows 10 does a pretty good job too if not for the mess that is finding yourself in a universe of completely different UI paradigms that suddenly lurch from one to another, especially when navigating settings.
Strangely enough, I stayed in an East Asian hotel (I think with Tibetan influences?) and I remember the corners of the room all being rounded. It just felt better, more soothing? It would be hella expensive to get a craftsman to round all the corners in your room here in the west, you could do it with plaster but it wouldn’t last more than a decade and wouldn’t add any resale value.
I've always felt it was one of those details that a plasterer could show off their skill, and you are right, it softens the corner in a very pleasing way.
It's funny. Here in the United States, I find houses with bull-nosed interior walls discomfiting. Something about all the rounded corners causes me mild distress. I find it much more comfortable being in houses with sharp-edged meetings of walls.
And also drives home that I don't give one iota of care about rounded vs square.
I just wonder why developers can have design color palettes like solarized; yet Microsoft imposes its will and subjugates everyone to the same godawful blueness. F** the blueness because I know some corporate peon had conversations like "Yellow is too cautionary, orange is too obscure, red is too angry, purple is too edgy. Blue is safe."
> (looks at username)
Username checks out.
I hate how modern widgets don't have shading. They're trying to be modern but it just feels very lazy.
Note how buttons suddenly became twice as big and there was margin/padding everywhere since Windows Vista/7. It's getting ridiculous how much space UI wastes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19238322
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Round rectangles are everywhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28679496 - Sept 2021 (26 comments)
History of Rounded Corners - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7062706 - Jan 2014 (1 comment)
Steve Jobs and Rounded Corners - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3096927 - Oct 2011 (1 comment)
The story of round rectangles - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636358 - Aug 2010 (77 comments)
Steve Jobs is appropriately highly praised, but by many people who don't know why he should be praised -- to them he's like a movie sort of figure, Elon Musk in his post-Twitter phase, a larger-than-life jerk who says smart words and allegedly does things. But Jobs actually is that sort of genius that a lot of wannabes pretend to be. So is he highly praised? Is the philosopher telling the truth when he points to the fake bear, having confused it for a real one but not knowing there's a real one behind it?
I agree that every time one of these anecdotes comes up, it’s a shock to remember. Of all the narcissists we have running the world, he’s the one I’ll most fondly remember.
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The problem is all the people using him as a reason to praise narcissism itself. And almost never even in people that are genial, since very few people are genial.
Jobs was obsessed with the customer experience and that was what made him a great CEO.
Did he cared more about the product or the customer than his own people? This is something that you should ask the people that worked with him.
At which point we realized they are just a fad like any other design ever was and went to sharp corners and flat design. And back to round corners, and back to sharp, and back to..
Hell, I can see this circle of hell happening in front of my very eyes. I think a year ago someone at Chrome had the brilliant idea to "refresh the design" as happens so often in big organizations and suddenly the tabs got round and we got little round corners around the navigation bar and..
When Google fully-rounded the corners of a rectangle, they added even more margins and paddings. When texture comes back in style, I bet we'll see even more margins and paddings.
The hack is injecting that code in the Finder. A way to do that is to store the WDEF inside the desktop file on a floppy disk. Then, inserting that floppy would be enough to give new windows that look.
The Finder would open the resource fork of that file to get info about files on the floppy and keep it open. When you opened a window, the Finder would ask the Resource Manager for “WDEF #0”, and the Resource Manager would find it (or rather, a WDEF pretending to be ‘it’) in the desktop file. Writing a Trojan for that OS wasn’t very difficult.