On tech forums like r/linux or hackernews, you'll frequently see posts by (presumably) old guys reminiscing about how great the user interface of their youth was.
"Oh how tasteful were these pixel art icons!"
"How utilitarian and consistent were the 3D effects!"
"How very intuitive are these menus!"
"It's all gone downhill since $PRODUCT. It's all flat and empty and useless now!"
Bollocks. These user interfaces sucked. The menus were a mess, because trying to shove 50 random items into 6 hierarchical categories, two of which are preordained to be "File" and "Edit", cannot be done in any way that isn't arbitrary and confusing. Thus you looked through all the little menus with your terrible mouse hoping to find something that sounded like it might be what you need, trying not to make a sudden move that made the submenu disappear.
Under the menu bar were between 30 and 200 tiny pixel art icons. They were just as incomprehensible as today's minimalist ones, only there were more of them and most of them looked like ass.
Oh and so many popup windows. Everything you did created a popup window. Why does the settings popup only use one third of the screen while having three tabs? Why can I see my document underneath it, half-obscured, but I can't actually click on anything there? Why do half the operations create an "OK" popup for me to click on?
Nothing about this was "functional" and yet it also looked grey and cramped and ugly. Like it was designed by C++ programmers (who by their choice of programming language have already proven that their opinion cannot be trusted, especially not in matters involving good taste), which of course it was.
Fucking brain worms, all of them.
In my experience as IT tech support, the most "user-friendly" UI is the UI you've been using for years and the least "user-friendly" UI is the UI you've never seen before. As far as I'm concerned, all UI suck equally. The grey box era sucked, the skeuomorph era sucked, and the current flat era sucks.
Nothing will ever replace CLI no matter how much semi-literate users bitch and moan about it. Actually existing illiterate computer users are equally as baffled by CLI as they are by GUI. To test this, try writing user guides using only cmd commands instead of GUI screenshots. The amount of "uh, I don't understand what the guide is trying to say" support calls is largely the same amount when I switched from GUI screenshots to cmd commands. Given that they're equally baffled and ignorant by both, what profit is there to teach them the more limiting option?
The major great leap forward since 2007 was having the option to search for what you want within the program itself instead of going to the help menu and searching through there. There should just be a giant search bar and when you type something like
computer <3 pls print out my document :)The program would just do what you politely asked it to do. There would be an option for more savvy users to assign their own idiosyncratic string of characters to a command so that
:s|p-5would mean "save the current document and print out 5 copies of it" for a particular user after they assigned that string to save the current document and print out 5 copies of it.
This is what computing should be like. No more menus and submenus and subsubmenus. No more 10 pointless windows asking whether you want to see another window asking if you want to do something. No more hamburger bullshit that shoves 50 items into a single menu. No more fugly skeuomorphic and flat garbage that's only there so an aesthetic can pushed to consumers. No more esoteric shortcuts that you won't remember because you don't use the program 40 hours a week. No more magic spell commands that refuse to run because you had an extra character in a 50+ character command.
I haven't bought new software in a while. Are skeuomorphs on their way out? Fantastic. Some of the ones that started showing up in pro audio software around the turn of the 2010s were fucking nauseating.