Mac OS X and Windows had their best design language from 2007 to 2011. Windows Aero and Mac OS X Aqua during these days were truly beautiful graphical shells. Everything since has been a barren wasteland of boring, overly white flat GUIs. The squircle-ifying (and on Android, circle-ifying) going on is just another step in this path towards the eternal uniformity of the heat death of fun, intuitive UIs.

The icons for Leopard-era programs were outstanding. Look at that dark indigo ink jar for Pages, or that wormhole graphic for Time Machine. The comforting smooth grey gradient of window title bars, contrasted with the large, globular traffic light buttons. A typeface that worked well with the lower-resolution displays of the time, and unique icons for everything at every single size. Apple actually had a massive human interface guidelines document, which was promptly binned with Yosemite.

On Windows, that dark blue Start orb and the cool dark task bar, signalling a whole new OS experience. The new Welcome Centre. Freshly rewritten programs and new ones like Windows Media Player and Windows Photo Viewer, and the absolute beauty that was the Windows Media Centre. Flip 3D, customising the glass window borders, and the huge, high-resolution 512 × 512 icons of the high-quality, no-ads games shipped with Windows Vista and 7, which still stand up to this day.

Happy to die on this hill defending this opinion.

I'll die right there with you on that hill.

For all it's flaws: Vista was a truly breathtakingly beautiful operating system. I still remember fondly the matte frosted dark tinted hue from the start menu and the strong deep red of the shutdown button. Everything shimmered and refracted, with almost a tactile feel. My first iPhone felt like I was interacting beyond the current dimension, the retina display with the skeumorphic design made it feel like I wasn't just interacting with software, I was interacting with another digital world... and my first Macbook was similar; every application was gorgeously rendered natively: something even Windows couldn't manage despite having the lions share of developers.

All this, on LCD panels that were comically abysmal compared to the colour accuracy of the displays we take for granted today, and with less than a quarter of the pixels.

The thing is: I think the same issue plagues software also, that when it becomes a place where good money can be made, you attract people who want to make money and, by necessity, push out all the people who were there for the passion.

Diminishing quality of art and engineering sort of go hand-in-hand if MBAs need to make room for themselves and set up fiefdoms.

I prefer the less-so but still skeuomorphic designs that pre-dated that period. The default Windows 2000 theme, as well as Mac OS 9, both had just enough drop shadow to make it clear what was and was not clickable, and used just enough color to show what was currently selected or active, without going into the angry fruit cocktail color schemes that pre-dated it in command line programs and followed it up in the super-saturated hyper-skeuomorphic themes of the mid to late aughts.

Luna has better colors, Aero is pale slime colored. Luna has bright green colorful checkbox, Aero has pale slime colored checkbox. Luna has nicely drawn light blue scrollbars, Aero has pale slime colored scrollbars. Luna has colorful warm orange window background, Aero has cold pale slime colored window background. Luna has colorful orange button highlight, Aero has cold slime colored button highlight. Luna has an awesome Power Blade style progress bar, Aero suddenly has a colorful progress bar, but with gimmicky animation of a spinner doing nothing. Luna has colorful gradient window caption, Aero has pale slime colored window caption with gimmicky gloss. Also Aero has too thick window borders.

I'll stand right there with you (though I think XP was fine too, and flip 3D was a pointless gimmick compared to the current Win-Tab)

But by God do I miss when icons actually used to represent something visually

IIRC Vista had a HIG document to par with Apple's and it's not surprising because they really wanted to change interface and kept it unified. Which worked for the most part but event today, in flat style era there are still 9x widgets deep down below that cannot be rooted out. What they could do was flattening these down.

But with release of Office 2007 and Windows Live suite they started changing interface again and Windows 7 was based upon slight plastic flatness and ribbons all over the place.

There was a community ran project Windows Taskforce that tried to catch up all sorts of interface quirks and with provided mockups they wanted MS to further polish their flagship project between Vista and 7. Sadly all these efforts were gone when MS decided to go Metro in Windows 8.

ios 7 was when it all went wrong.

some low points:

- low-contrast low-color shading

- thin fonts that are less readable

- hidden toolbars requiring multiple taps or drag to expose

- links or buttons with no visual clue they are selectable

I think the only thing I hate more is "touch anything in ios phone app to immediately place a call, even to a phone spammer"

unfortunately all of this got picked up by tesla, where you get all of these "features", but while driving a moving, bouncing car you have to control.

> Look at that dark indigo ink jar for Pages, or that wormhole graphic for Time Machine.

Do you have screenshots of the particular versions you're talking about?

It's interesting, I always see a lot of love for the more "blobby" (for lack of a better word) UIs from that era, whereas I've always preferred flat UI design. I just think it looks cleaner personally. If the actual functionality of windows wasn't so garbage, I'd really like its more flat UI design in recent times.

Its the same with websites, where I routinely see people unhappy with flat website design, but I deliberately made my website a lot more flat because I think it just looks better. Not to detract from your opinion at all, you can like what you like, but I've just never understood the appeal of vista/xp era UI design over flat design

[dead]