Unlike the Hot Dog Stand theme, the "Plasma Power Saver" theme also featured in the article actually was function over form, not just an aesthetic choice (or lack thereof). It was to reduce burn-in on the plasma displays of old portable computers, e.g. here [0].
I'm amused she said they included it "in case somebody out there liked ugly bright red and yellow" and that "the 'Fluorescent' theme was also pretty ugly, but it didn't have a catchy name, so I've never heard anything about it."
In practice lot of applications hard-coded some elements' color while following the theme for other elements, making dark theme unusable because you end up with black text imposed by the developers over the black background you choose for your theme, and other similar issues.
People can self sabotage by choosing a bad theme, and then they engage with the app less or even churn. Designers need to be careful to not give people rope for them to hang themselves with.
> Designers need to be careful to not give people rope for them to hang themselves with.
No, they don't. It's my system, and the look should be what I want it to be, period. What designers actually need to do is learn to respect their users, even when they disagree with the user's choices.
Certainly that's a good reason to force a legible version of settings, and the path to settings...
But if the user sets the system to hot dog stand, the apps should be hot dog stand. If the user wants the system text font to be wingdings, they're in for a nasty time, but that doesn't mean an app should force a different font
> and then they engage with the app less or even churn
I wasn't aware engagement maximisation is the reason we don't get customization options anymore, but it makes perfect sense.
No one used to care about this because it was at the discretion of the user whether they want to keep using the app or not. Whereas today, it's the company objective to keep the user in the app as much as possible.
That’s clearly bullshit because
if the user sets a system wide theme and your appLICATION follows that theme, then your appLICATION is not going to be any harder to use than the system itself nor any other appLICATION using native widgets.
What is actually happening is designers are forcing non-native controls, in part because web technologies have infested every corner of software development these days. Unsurprisingly, those non-native widgets break in a plethora of ways when the system diverges even marginally from the OS defaults.
And instead of those designers admitting that they fucked up, they instead double down on their contempt for their users.
Also, can we please not call desktop applications “apps” in response to an article about an OS that predates smartphones by several decades.
As much as we love to hate on Apple's more user-hostile policies, it's only due to Apple's fiat that we've been able to claw back the smallest bit of user theme control --- light and dark mode --- from the "don't theme my app" people.
I haven't really used Windows for anything serious in more than 20 years (and I recently had to mess with Windows 11 and it was terrible), but I'm not sure you'd be very happy going back to Windows 3.1.
It was a 16 bit system (it could run in "Enhanced Mode" which involves 32 bit protected mode, but in reality Windows itself, and the applications, were still 16 bit).
That means the resource constraints were very real. Even if you had a lot of actual memory in your machine, the memory that was actually available for "general purpose" was effectively a few hundred kilobytes. There was also the notion of finite (and very generically-named) "system resources", and you could see in the "About" box how many percent of those you had free. Once they were gone, you were in trouble:
USER.EXE and GDI.EXE each have a data segment (that is, heap) limited to 64K. The 8086/80286 platform architecture imposes this 64K limit. Program Manager checks the percentage of free heap space for both USER.EXE and GDI.EXE. It then reports the smaller of the two percentages.[1]
All applications ran in the same address space. A broken application meant a total crash at best, subtle data corruption at worst. Multitasking was also cooperative, so apps could hold up other apps indefinitely, or just hang the entire system.
Since it was not based on paging, to accommodate the very limited memory, entire segments could be swapped out, or even relocated, within the address space. As a programmer, that meant dealing with stuff like "locking pointers" so Windows wouldn't move your data segment under you. As a user, that could mean general slowness.
It was firmly based on DOS. So many problems that you had in DOS, drivers or whatnot, would exist in Windows as well.
There were better systems at the time that you could wish yourself back to, some number of them based on UNIX in some way or other.
But Windows 3.11 had really pretty icons. The prettiest, in my mind.
I agree, and Calmira LFN 3.3 and Microsoft Office 4.3
Would Notepad++ work?
What would you use as a graphical www browser?
I mean even with win32s and modern ssl support somehow built-in it'd be challenge.
My sway setup is everything as all black as I can get but with any accents as small and bright - neon green and eye bleeding magenta - as possible. So Fluorescent speaks to me.
I remember as a kid using 3.11 and win 95 and cycling through the themes, trying them all out for a day or two to decide which I wanted to use. You know, important decisions. Anyway, in an eternal black mark on my character I didn't even consider Hot Dog Stand.
It's actually pretty boring. When I say "accent color" I mean a single pixel border around the selected container. The waybar is text, and the text is all bright green on a black background. The active desktop has a single pixel magenta stroke around it. I've thought about turning that into just magenta text as well. Every window element I can make #000000 black without making things more confusing is.
Default text in the terminal is green, and if I select it with a mouse it's magenta. It's more of a "terminal" vibe than the win 3.1 Fluorescent vibe. I said that because they share garish colors.
Also, I'm always on the lookout for even more minimalist graphics to use in my config, if anyone has hyper-minimal things they like about theirs...
A non-obvious reason that I think the yellow background would've looked especially bad to people at the time, is that most people doing non-gaming on PCs at the time were using MS-DOS programs in text mode, with 4&3-bit color, where it was very unusual for the background color to be bright.
(It was technically possible to get a bright background color on PCs in text mode, but very few programs did that.)
Readit News
[0] https://retro.swarm.cz/20170331/windows-31-running-on-ibm-ps...
Because I loved the Fluorescent theme.
[1] - E Is for Ecstacy - BBC Everyman Documentary https://youtu.be/jyrhcjRc3TU?si=Qn9qG2z8wQzD-llJ&t=812
No, they don't. It's my system, and the look should be what I want it to be, period. What designers actually need to do is learn to respect their users, even when they disagree with the user's choices.
But if the user sets the system to hot dog stand, the apps should be hot dog stand. If the user wants the system text font to be wingdings, they're in for a nasty time, but that doesn't mean an app should force a different font
I wasn't aware engagement maximisation is the reason we don't get customization options anymore, but it makes perfect sense.
No one used to care about this because it was at the discretion of the user whether they want to keep using the app or not. Whereas today, it's the company objective to keep the user in the app as much as possible.
What is actually happening is designers are forcing non-native controls, in part because web technologies have infested every corner of software development these days. Unsurprisingly, those non-native widgets break in a plethora of ways when the system diverges even marginally from the OS defaults.
And instead of those designers admitting that they fucked up, they instead double down on their contempt for their users.
Also, can we please not call desktop applications “apps” in response to an article about an OS that predates smartphones by several decades.
If your content is so poor that a change of colors can make people leave, then perhaps your content is not worth having.
See Win 95 resolution change workflow.
This was 20 years ago. A lot of knowledge was lost since then.
Why would someone changing app colors to ones they specifically chose make them use the app less? There is no logic in that statement.
https://imgur.com/gallery/every-windows-3-1-theme-SsVYqM1
at least half were painfully ugly
as long as it has trumpet winsock
It was a 16 bit system (it could run in "Enhanced Mode" which involves 32 bit protected mode, but in reality Windows itself, and the applications, were still 16 bit).
That means the resource constraints were very real. Even if you had a lot of actual memory in your machine, the memory that was actually available for "general purpose" was effectively a few hundred kilobytes. There was also the notion of finite (and very generically-named) "system resources", and you could see in the "About" box how many percent of those you had free. Once they were gone, you were in trouble:
All applications ran in the same address space. A broken application meant a total crash at best, subtle data corruption at worst. Multitasking was also cooperative, so apps could hold up other apps indefinitely, or just hang the entire system.Since it was not based on paging, to accommodate the very limited memory, entire segments could be swapped out, or even relocated, within the address space. As a programmer, that meant dealing with stuff like "locking pointers" so Windows wouldn't move your data segment under you. As a user, that could mean general slowness.
It was firmly based on DOS. So many problems that you had in DOS, drivers or whatnot, would exist in Windows as well.
There were better systems at the time that you could wish yourself back to, some number of them based on UNIX in some way or other.
But Windows 3.11 had really pretty icons. The prettiest, in my mind.
[1] https://ftp.zx.net.nz/pub/Patches/ftp.microsoft.com/MISC/KB/...
https://computernewb.com/wiki/How_to_browse_the_web_on_very_...
My sway setup is everything as all black as I can get but with any accents as small and bright - neon green and eye bleeding magenta - as possible. So Fluorescent speaks to me.
I remember as a kid using 3.11 and win 95 and cycling through the themes, trying them all out for a day or two to decide which I wanted to use. You know, important decisions. Anyway, in an eternal black mark on my character I didn't even consider Hot Dog Stand.
Default text in the terminal is green, and if I select it with a mouse it's magenta. It's more of a "terminal" vibe than the win 3.1 Fluorescent vibe. I said that because they share garish colors.
Also, I'm always on the lookout for even more minimalist graphics to use in my config, if anyone has hyper-minimal things they like about theirs...
(It was technically possible to get a bright background color on PCs in text mode, but very few programs did that.)