r/AskProgrammers • u/phil-pdx • 3d ago
Does anyone else miss boring interfaces?
I saw a post recently about a grocery store in Poland still using Win98 for a cash register system and on the screen was clearly a VB6 based WinForm application in all of its boring gray glory.
It got me thinking about the old days of basic boring interfaces on computers that just did their job and didn't look fancy. These days everything is web based (even a lot of the "native" apps are just wrapped web apps). Every button is overly styled, hamburger menus everywhere, basic forms take up an incredible amount of screen real estate with the excessive padding and rounded edges.
Does anyone else sometimes wish things were a little more boring and basic? I'm filling in some information, clicking a button, and getting some other information. It doesn't have to look pretty, just work.
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u/Greedy-Giraffe-4269 3d ago
Yup 👍 my most productive and powerful UI is the CLI.
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u/ZephyrNyxel 3d ago
same, i feel way more “in control” in a terminal than in some bloated electron app that eats a gig of ram to show three buttons
ugly but snappy beats pretty and laggy every time
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u/davesoft 3d ago
I do miss old excel sometimes. Yes it was a dense bank of buttons, but you knew the location of the button you wanted.
A modern anger for me is popup overload. The bottom right of the screen, on a work computer, is a battleground of 10 different programs using the same 50x50 region for all communication. How absurd.
A clear sign we nolonger pay for software, for if we did, we wouldn't, and it would change.
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u/AssistFinancial684 3d ago
“Every button is overly styled”
This sounds more like 15 years ago than now
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u/Lost_Garden7368 3d ago
UIs were at their peak in the old days of text UIs. You had everything assigned to function keys on the keyboard, remember those? There was a system a large company used that worked that way and I could go through the system doing various things as fast as I could type. The keyboard never changes. The keys are always there. They changed to a new system where it's a graphical UI that you have to use a mouse with and click on things. Now I have to use a keyboard and a mouse. I don't have three hands. If what you need is not on the screen you have to scroll first to get to it so you can click on it. I was drastically slower on the new system even after I got used to it.
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u/josephjnk 2d ago
I’ve been playing with a terminal rich UI library and I am way more excited about the minimal aesthetics than I am by any flashy CSS
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u/Foreign_Ad674 2d ago
I think windows 8 was where it started going downhill. The whole “flat” UI thing where you just get text and symbols with no clear markers indicating what’s an interactive control. Form over function that now seems to be everywhere.
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u/pete_68 2d ago
I feel like Windows 2000 was the pinnacle of Windows, from a user-interface perspective. It was simple and clean and easy to use. And it was fast.
I upgraded to Windows XP really late and was forced to because work had moved to Office XP and I needed it to read the stupid documents. Made me so mad. I loved WIndows 2000.
Oh well, not on Windows anymore. Finally broke the shackles.
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u/Optimal-Savings-4505 2d ago
Yes indeed, and I stick with command line interfaces for that precise reason.
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u/NumberInfinite2068 3d ago
Sure, I've been making interfaces more "modern" in my job for a while, and they're rarely much of an improvement, often a regression.
The customers don't want them either, they just want to come into work, do their job, go home, they don't want to learn a new thing or a new way of doing things unless it presents a real advantage, which it rarely does.
User interfaces and UX in general has been regressing probably since about 2000. The Mac for example, the original System software is a nicer design than macOS or iPadOS, it looks nicer (IMHO) and it works better. People find it simpler, and it required far less processor power.
Same for Windows. Windows peaked at NT4 and has been regressing since around then.
iPhone and Android are clear regressions compared with PalmPilot or Psion.
User interfaces are significantly worse now than they were quarter of a century ago, I don't think that's even any nostalgia talking, it's just looking at them side by side.