Re:Windows 98 Icons are Great
by RedShift1 on Sunday January 15, 2023 @09:31PM
(#34396104)
Aaah look at that nice title bar gradient. Always liked that, they even took that away from us :-(
[ Parent
| on HN ]
The Watercolor placeholder theme[0] for Windows XP was such a beautiful evolution of that Windows 2000 look and feel: much more professional looking than Luna, modern but obviously Microsoft, and very space efficient. I recently reinstalled XP on an old computer for some retro gaming and the first thing I did was find Watercolor and the anxiety induced by Windows XP instantly gave way to joy.
Windows 2000 will always be my favorite Windows, but XP with Watercolor is the best looking, imho.
0 - https://www.deviantart.com/alecu222/art/Watercolor-4-3-Visua...
Watercolor is great! I used it too "back in the day". That crisp Tahoma font, those refined little squares where the 2 colors in the title bar meet... So elegant.
Speaking of Tahoma, I think that one was a big part of why Win2K looked so much better (the 9x series used Microsoft Sans Serif as its default UI font). It's not much to look at today, but it was amazingly readable on low-res screens back then.
I wonder sometimes just how much effort went into manually hinting it at all the standard UI sizes to make it pixel-perfect.
Re:Windows 98 Icons are Great
by mostlysimilar on Sunday January 15, 2023 @10:05PM
(#34396345)
So beautiful. We've fallen so far in modern UI.
Every six months or so I look for the ability to skin Windows 10 to look like this, or like Windows Classic at least. It seems to be largely impossible.
> much more professional looking than Luna
Coincidentally "Professional" was a code name for the theme, I guess making Luna "Home"? Glad there's a signed copy: https://archive.org/details/winxp-watercolor