For those of you who never thought about old computers and modern interfaces, I want to remind you that "simple" and "flat" interfaces of modern operating systems rely on high resolutions and 24-bit colours a lot.

Take Gnome 46, for example.

1920x1080 in VGA palette looks somewhat okay, but

640x480 in modern 24-bit colour looks like it's losing quite a lot of details, and

640x480x4bpp VGA 16 of the said interface is simply unusable. Perhaps this is why modern OSes demand at least 800x600 in True colour.

So, uh, do you know what you usually end up when you try to make your interfaces look OK in default palette and resolutions of 640x350 or 640x480?

🧵 2/10

At best, you end up with things that look a lot like Windows 95. This is FreeGEOS, which I am aiming my UI/UX upgrade for, but you could take any OS that officially supports 640x480 in 16 colours, and it will look more or less like that.

The palette is very limited, and if you try to add custom drop shadows with dithering, you run out of resolution very quickly.

That means eye-candy and smooth corners can only take a few pixels at best. In the previous thread, I've explored my approach to making Windows and Titlebars, and this time I want to show you how I took a stab at making the next UI staple - The Button.

Previous thread btw: https://tech.lgbt/@nina_kali_nina/112518604838598161

🧵 3/10

I took my default window as a canvas (note yellow-white window background, it is quite unusual for OSes of the era, but not unthinkable, and it looks kind of nice on a CRT), and made a bunch of buttons.

It quickly becomes obvious that:
1) Gradients don't work, take too much space
2) Motif-like buttons work, but look dated
3) Coloured buttons don't work
4) Monochrome buttons look meh
5) Overly-round buttons look meh

🧵 4/10

I chose two designs I liked the most, dark and light, and tried to invent variations of the buttons for Inactive-Selected-Hover modes of the button.

This was the moment I realised why Windows 95 required a VGA monitor, and why Mac Classic and Windows 1/2/3 interface font was so bold. Mac Classic and Windows 1/2 were supposed to work fine in monochrome.

Curiously, Windows 3.1, which dropped official CGA/monochrome support, sometimes "loses" UI elements on monochrome displays.

🧵 5/10

After trying out different button designs on a real display, I decided that I like dark button better, but I need a better design for "inactive" buttons.

Especially considering how fonts are super important on low resolutions, and how much I don't want to make UI font to be bold by default just to make text on inactive buttons readable.

🧵 6/10

@nina_kali_nina Did you try to look at video games from that era?

Many use highly customized user interfaces. But I also remember some with at least rudimentary widgets that resemble a real UI. And at 320x200 in 16 or 256 colours, they really made use of the available pixels?

The obvious example is Sierra adventures from around then. Those choices are maybe too rudimentary.