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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
This reminded me of the absolutely god-damn-awful DVD menu of the first Harry Potter film
I think more than one of them were like this! I just ripped a bunch of old DVDs to my Jellyfin server, and for some movies, I had to first run it in VLC to double-check that I was ripping the right track, which meant navigating through that nonsense… I remember doing it with multiple HP discs.
And you just know the globe rotates when you hover over Habitats, and the drawers pull out when you hover over those
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).
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.
This has just been a giant nostalgia trip.
God bless the rains down in Africa…
Gonna take some time to do the things I never had
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.
Gorgeous
I’ve had LCARS as my phone interface for years and people are horrified when they see all the buttons.
(Is there some open source media player with this kind of skins?)
XMMS is able to use Winamp skins. This one seems to be WMP, but that one copied the concept of crazy skins from Winamp.
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.
ew windows media player
deleted by creator
Qmmp might fit the bill, I apply old winamp skins to it for a nostalgia fix
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
AND JESUS WEPT!
I can practically hear my external CD drive spinning up just looking at these. Makes me want to play a Sierra game real bad.
It’s time to bring back skeumorphism
For those who are unfamiliar (like me): Skeumorph
That is probably what the image in the post is about, really.
It’s supposed to make the program more accessible for those who are not used to the concept of computer programs at all.
It will come back when all the big players are only offering cloud services, to ensure normies don’t demand that computing be allowed in the hands of everyone again. “It’s so easy to use! Why couldn’t those old PC things get it right? God those were terrible, I’m so glad we subscribe to ChatGPT for $80 a month, and those scary Muslim leftists get ion-cannoned when they have conversations about how they want life to be better instantly now.”
You say that, but that’s what Apple has been doing with Liquid Glass, and tons of people hate it, myself included
Liquid Glass is WindowsVistaMorphism done wrong not Skeuomorphism. Skeuomorphism requires the UI to at least approximate real life objects for each use case.
Like the old Notes app on the iPhone/iPad that looked like it was a yellow legal pad!
How much liquid glass do you encounter in your daily life? Do you live in a kiln?
Liquid glass is not skeuomorphism, it’s just Windows Aero 20 years later. Simulating the realistic look of single material and using it for all the interface is quite the opposite of skeuomorphism. As such things don’t exist on real life. There were never music stereo players made entirely of glass. So they are not imitating anything that has ever existed.
Entirely glass no, largely transparent plastic yes.
A pretty good chance some luxury model might have been made for such a thing.
Even if not normally produced, some rich guy might have had it custom made.
As an android user liquid glass is the only apple thing i’m envious of. Android looks boring af, a little playfulness doesn’t hurt
Maximizing everything except accessibility.
It could still be done in an accessible way. Back when this style was popular though, accessibility on the web hadn’t advanced much. Now we have all kinds of tools to help
Unless someone is incapable of reading, these labels are not color coded and listed under unique button structures to help them stand out. What part of this is inaccessible?
5 downvotes in 7 minutes for a question? Smells like alt account brigading.
Anyway, especially with more modern accessibility tools and frameworks, why can’t a design like in the OP be accessible?
Lots of wheelchairs around here that assume every one here knows about them.
Could you please elaborate on what you meant with this question?
You replied to the wrong comment, there’s no question mark in mine.
No, but I did, for some reason, write “question” where I should have written comment. I’ll go edit the comment now so that you will be able to reply to it!
Shan’t be feeding the troll. Bye!
It was a loaded question and deserved downvoting.
Yes, people who can’t read because they are blind would have accessibility issues…
It is pretty much guaranteed that the images did not have alt text for screen readers and were not set up to be tabbed through for someone who needs to use a keyboard and not a mouse because of dexterity issues. Then there is the problem that there isn’t a lot of contrast, the text is angled, it isn’t clear what is clickable and what isn’t, and a bunch of other stuff that are issues for people well beyond colorblindness.
While it could technically be created in a way for an alternate accessible way to interact they never really were. It takes a ton of work to make anything other than plain text accessible, and even that takes more work than just typing. It takes exponentially more work with something like this.
Nobody bothered to take that time unless they were sued. I am currently getting a state agency through a complete website redesign because we could not feasible make the old one accessible, and that is only happening because we were sued as a state agency is obligated to make their site accessible. The first things to go was shit like this.
I’ve been using this style of UI literally yesterday on a WinXP machine and every time you hovered the cursor over a button it played back what the button does, and some extra information. But yeah, mouse-only.
Let them have fun!
