
Graphical User Interface Gallery - Kristine1975
http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html
======
russellbeattie
It's my opinion that the Windows Control panel (pictured here:
[http://toastytech.com/guis/win10control.png](http://toastytech.com/guis/win10control.png))
is the single worst designed user interface of all time.

Why? It is the only - and I mean only - list of items on a screen organized
horizontally in any OS I can think of. Any time you resize the window, every
single item in the list is now reorganized into different rows and columns.

Ever wonder why you can never seem to find what you want in the Control Panel?
It's not just because Microsoft loves to subtly change the names of core
settings every year or so, but because they're constantly moving and shifting
around.

Seriously, give me an example of a horizontally organized list like this in
any OS - past, present, desktop, mobile... I can't think of any. Nothing else
is so dumb. There must be special code in this particular window to keep it so
moronic, that Microsoft continues to maintain, year after year. Amazing.

/rant

~~~
jszymborski
Not sure if this is what you meant, but Ubuntu mimics this in Unity... in fact
I think most Linux DEs now come with something similar...

[http://imgur.com/80Pl4tx](http://imgur.com/80Pl4tx)

~~~
bshimmin
That's much more like a copy of the Mac's System Preferences, really.

~~~
iambateman
But crucially the mac pane can't be resized or reorganized.

In practice, I use search for the configuration option every single time on
mac. It's great.

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scandox
I don't know when it happened but at some point I just fell completely out of
love with the whole concept of a graphical interface. I think around Windows
2000 (Server) I remember thinking: "this is quite nice", but since then
nothing.

I ought to at least feel some nostalgia around all these interfaces, but
actually I don't. I just feel like, why on earth did I think Windows 95 was a
good thing? Why didn't I see what a huge step backwards it was - at least for
a user like me. The beginning of moving away from understanding the machine I
was using.

I know too, the Terminal+Browser existence I have now is far from perfect, but
I just feel liberated to know I don't need to spend most of my computing time
navigating visually - it just doesn't suit me at all. I think the only
interface now I feel as negatively about as the Windows-style interface is
maybe the filesystem. Not for any rational reason I can explain - I feel like
there's something wrong with our whole way of thinking about that. But I'm
like a rat in a maze and can't imagine what outside of the maze might look
like.

~~~
aembleton
Looking back at Mandrake 9.0 with KDE 3.0.3 brings back some warm memories for
me
[http://toastytech.com/guis/mkde.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/mkde.html)

~~~
reitanqild
Loved Mandrake Linux :-)

It wasn't perfect but it was amazing I think.

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saw-lau
I particularly enjoyed the thoughtful and reasoned critique of Windows 10:
[http://toastytech.com/guis/win10.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/win10.html).

~~~
CodeMage
I am not entirely sure how much of your comment is sarcasm. Most of the
author's complaints about Windows 10 are on point. Comparing Windows 7 and
Windows 10 leads me to similar conclusions: the UI is more cluttered, there's
unnecessary (and unwanted) marketing all over the place, the level of built-in
privacy intrusion is worrying and the attempts to lock you into Microsoft's
online services are blatant.

~~~
stronglikedan
And let's not forget the ridiculous need to install third-party software just
to be able to tell which window has focus by the color of its title bar.

EDIT: I guess they fixed that. I didn't follow up after I installed some
third-party software a while back. I guess it wasn't third-party either, but
messing with the themes [0]. I've been chugging along in blissful ignorance
ever since. My bad.

[0][https://www.howtogeek.com/222831/how-to-get-colored-
window-t...](https://www.howtogeek.com/222831/how-to-get-colored-window-title-
bars-on-windows-10-instead-of-white/)

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
> And let's not forget the ridiculous need to install third-party software
> just to be able to tell which window has focus by the color of its title
> bar.

They added back the "active window titlebar color" feature in the 2nd Windows
10 update in late 2015: [https://www.howtogeek.com/232176/whats-new-in-
windows-10s-fi...](https://www.howtogeek.com/232176/whats-new-in-
windows-10s-first-big-update-the-windows-10-fall-update/)

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username223
Pour one out for BeOS. Unix-based, lightning-fast GUI, process isolation, and
no user isolation on a single-user machine. They got quite a few things right
20 years ago.

~~~
pjmlp
BeOS doesn't have anything to do with UNIX.

No user isolation on a single-user machine, via type safe languages, was
already done in Xerox PARC workstation written in Mesa/Cedar.

Actually had Apple adopted BeOS and succeeded in doing that, there wouldn't be
any major UNIX desktop to talk about.

~~~
derefr
Presuming everything else went the same way elsewhere in the ecosystem, Unix
greybeards might have become very excited about Android or ChromeOS and the
"developer hype" might have pushed Google into making one or the other a
workstation OS.

(Or we could call W10 a Unix desktop. Is that allowed?)

~~~
pjmlp
There is a big difference between being a UNIX and just supporting POSIX
syscalls, regarding OS architecture.

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bshimmin
I quite miss RISC OS sometimes... Macs seemed great when I switched from
whatever vague succession of Linux distributions I was using in around 2004,
but for quite some years now Macs have annoyed me in a way that I don't recall
RISC OS ever did. Probably just rose-tinted glasses!

~~~
LeoPanthera
RISC OS solved the "file open/close dialogues are a different view on the same
objects" problem. In RISC OS, a save dialog is just an icon in a box. You pick
up the icon and drag it into a folder window to save. Done.

You could even do simple OLE by dragging the icon into another app, instead of
a folder.

I so wish other OSes would copy that model.

~~~
derefr
Heck, Windows 3.1 had the start of something even more interesting: there was
no real distinction between an icon and an _iconified_ (minimized) window.

If we had carried through with that metaphor, and kept a 1:1 document:window
relationship, we could have evolved a modern OS where a generic WIMP
"document" icon was just the representation of a portable, disk-hibernated GUI
process holding the memory-state of that document, rather than having a 1:1
mapping to a POSIX-filesystem file containing a custom-serialized
representation of said state. (Sure, we could also have those, but maybe only
"for interchange." Like how computers have directories/folders locally, but
use archive files for interchange.)

Most of the time, when you were done with something, you wouldn't close it;
you'd iconify it. Either it'd return to where you previously un-iconified it
from; or it'd land on your Desktop; or it'd get stuck to your cursor as if you
were dragging, and you'd have to drop it somewhere. It'd be _sleeping_ at
first (so, basically a minimized window); and then hibernated later. It'd just
be a difference in restore-time: events, like chat-notifications from a chat-
client window, would still appear even under hibernation (i.e. background
services would still run for hibernated documents, unless you right-clicked
and "froze" or "muted" the document or something.)

Imagine if bookmarks were just... iconified browser windows. Or if git repos
were iconified IDE/text-editor sessions (which would then contain further
icons for things like shell sessions spawned inside the repo.) Or—remember old
MacOS?—"folders" would literally _be_ iconified file-manager windows, separate
from the underlying file-system concept of a directory (which might not be
exposed in the GUI at all.)

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rbanffy
These days I was looking for the Burroughs ICON. I wonder if any Canadian
retrocomputist is around.

Another I've searched over and over in vain is a GUI I used on graphical
terminals connected to a SINIX server. It was called Collage and looked a bit
Mac-like.

~~~
michrassena
That's an interesting one I've never heard of. I'd be curious to see some
photos as well.

~~~
rbanffy
ICON is easy: [http://www.old-
computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=971](http://www.old-
computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=971). Later there was a more compact
version, [http://www.poprewind.com/it-came-from-canada-unisys-icon-
com...](http://www.poprewind.com/it-came-from-canada-unisys-icon-computer/).

The Collage GUI, I have no idea. I could never find anything about it.

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StillBored
He has some good ones, my favorites though are the ones that run in <64k of
memory. In particular the Apple ][ desktop
[http://toastytech.com/guis/a2desk.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/a2desk.html),
which he comments on finding on a IIGS, but in reality it would run on the IIe
and IIc as well. Although, it qualifies more as a "launcher" than a
GUI/desktop because outside of the apps it comes with I don't think anyone
every wrote anything for it. Meaning all its apps were just normal 8bit prodos
applications that took over the whole machine. Given the timeframe though, the
mac didn't have the multifinder until system 6 a couple years later.

(whats pretty scary is that I've run (or at least booted) nearly all of them,
all the apple and x86/PC ones for sure, plus quite a number of the others).
GEOS was pretty cool too.

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cdcarter
I wish there were more complete collections of industry specific software
GUIs. For example, the Bloomberg Terminal is a very specific and near complete
sub-UI:
[https://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/economics/images/bloomberg...](https://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/economics/images/bloomberg/CGB0347a_edited-1.jpg/view).

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justinzollars
cool! I loved this!

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aphextron
I really enjoyed his fantastic GUI design advice here
([http://toastytech.com/guis/uirant.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/uirant.html))

