

Ask HN: Communication for oldies? - resdirector

Here is an email I recently received from my aging father and the frustration that old people have with ever changing UIs. I thought it might make an interesting Ask HN. Here is his email slightly edited:<p>&gt;<p>The other day we were discussing with Susie how challenging it is to keep up the ever changing GUI with things like MSOutlook, Mobile phones, even landline handsets, ....<p>Even for early adopters like Claude [OP&#x27;s late grandfather] with his Amstrad, there comes a time when oldies give up on going to the latest way to interact with Technology. Susie said that there should be a way that Oldies can retain the interfaces that they are using  “at the point when they will give up on the next change”.<p>All this begs the question:  can a buck be made out of selling types of interface devices that will retain a connection between old interfaces and the latest that the younger ones are using?
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inthewind
I think this is a great topic.

I imagine from the email that they want to install Foo OS and the latest and
greatest apps, but they want their desktop and apps to behave like they did
under a previous OS.

If they had a great workflow with a previous product and OS then good for
them, why break it? Sometimes modern doesn't always mean better. A stupid
phone might actually be easier to make calls on.

I see this again and again. Foobar2000 being an example of an app that had
many useful features for me. I found it difficult to replace under Linux, even
apps that came out years after didn't satisfy my needs. I was even thinking
about using it today for adding replay gain to a folder of music. And as such
I have it installed under wine.

The other classic example is users forced to transition form WordPerfect to
Word. My Dad reckoned he could do everything in WordPerfect (and told me time
and time again), and loathed Word with a passion. He'd mastered his tool. And
once you have done that, you are reluctant to change. And in that case there
wasn't that much of advantage for him in using something else (there may well
have been for his sysadmins).

In an ideal world apps would be built with a software interface that you could
programmically explore to build your own UIs around, so you could build a UI
in a certain style. Then under your distro you could flip a behaviour switch -
to emulate an Amstrad desktop say, and Firefox there would just blend in. My
gut says that the toolkits used to build apps are too tightly coupled with the
code to do so, but that's just a guess.

To get the feel of an OS of old, you'd want to replace your file manager and
launchers too. But why not!

I don't know about monetising the idea. There might be a solution for them in
using an emulator. Sadly though there are some constraints with older
programs, perhaps they don't support newer protocols or lack security patches.

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quantumpotato_
I've thought about a protocol for web content. How many sign up forms have we
seen? Users could design their own (or download from a free store) for
specific purposes eg. "Registration", "Signing In", "List of things" etc. For
a variety of reasons I don't think this is practical.

It sounds like they're looking for a dead simple webmail client that has
consistent (unchanging) UI.

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quantumpotato_
This just happened to me.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6286127](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6286127)

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quantumpotato_
To answer your question, maybe. I would rather that "technologists" (eg,
readers and posters on HN), encourage people to understand the technology they
use. Explain what an e-mail client is, dive into the "black box" of what an
inbox is, a pop3 server etc.

