You should look at them on a monitor from that year to get the right impression in either case. Aqua especially will look weird on a modern actually-good LCD or OLED.

Aqua had a lot of aesthetic positives. 3D skeuomorphism blends more easily with the real world compared to flat UIs, which lack presence and make computing feel less tangible and more disposable.

You could easily manipulate the scroll bars in Aqua, which is a useful feature that has been lost in recent updates.

And it was just plain fun and relatable, while flat UIs are more corporate and functional.

Flat reminds me of 1950s/mid century corporate design - inoffensive, but claustrophobic.

There's a happy medium, though. Overly-photorealistic controls are actually counter-productive, especially when incompetently chosen. For example, at the height of Apple's cheeseball skeuomorphism was Game Center, which featured such things as "velvet" card-table surfaces with "painted" labels on them... but those labels were actually controls in some cases. Now who sits at a blackjack table and tries to interact with the paint on the velvet in front of him?

Another example was the "LCD" display at the top of iTunes, depicted as having a transparent cover over it with a sheen and highlights. Unbeknownst to most users (I suspect), some of the labels in that display were actually clickable controls. WTF? I've owned numerous audio components with displays behind clear plastic windows, and I've never tried to poke at one with my finger.

I think mid-'90s GUIs hit the right combination of graphical (not photographical) with universal visual cues. Buttons had only three or four monochrome shades, but had beveled edges whose shadows inverted when the button was "depressed."

I'm glad to see some backlash against the lazy obscurity of "flat UI," and a return to some proper demarcation of controls.

Generally agree here. However the Apple icons of the pre-flat-design-era, even the really skeuomorphic ones, were always pretty great; I always thought they summed up most of their respective apps pretty well. For instance, for Gamecenter, the icon for it before iOS7 was quartered, with a chesspiece, baseball bat, rocket ship and dart board in each quadrant.

They really didn't need to change it. It's now just 4 coloured bubbles, which symbolises...what? I always thought it was just so...random. It's the most irreverent icon of the iOS home screen since iOS7.

Oh yeah, I'm not lumping icons in with controls. Their icons were fine.

Oddly, Game Center is missing from my phone, so I'll take your word that the new icon sucks. I like to scorn the Photos icon: a multicolored Spirograph. Why?

I agree - I love the old '3d' interfaces, and Aqua in particular. The new 'cell phone' interfaces are just a PITA. Really hard on my old eyes - no real indication/border around buttons, no color cues, often not even a place to grab the window and drag it around. Everything is just the same drab shades with no differentiation between elements.

As the 'cell phone' folks get older and eyesight gets worse, I think we'll see things shifting back. I basically don't use a cell phone for anything except 2fa cuz the silly lil screens are too hard to read.

I think I have some cognition issues, and can only read eink and off of crisp OLED. Love touch screens, pointers etc. But don't much like Apple iOS style.

heh - I have fat fingers on top of everything else, so touch screens always turn into "where did I leave the #$%#$%^ stylus" :-D

TBH - I work from home, so I'm never more then 20 feet from real monitors. So I just use the phone for 2FA stuff...

Oh God I am still pretty fat fingered on a phone. But I do like the 'tactile' simplicity. I still think touchscreen UI / OS is in its infancy, and could be better. But am amazed in some ways that it's as good as it is.

Hot take: the current mobile flatness we see all around mostly serves dark patterns schemes and it's anti-user by default. It's easier to hide options within an interface that has no clearly distinction between link and the button, the interactive object and just the decoration. That helps trick users to pick something they didn't want or make them keep the defaults that works against them.

And by the way, may I suggest you try to search on the Internet what GNOME desktop environment developers did to theming with their libadwaita and flat Adwaita design. For a start: https://www.osnews.com/story/133955/gnome-to-prevent-theming...

Thats another pet peeve of mine - web pages where every pixel is some sort of link/hotspot. Like I just wanted to activate the window, or grab some whitespace and scroll. Not switch tabs, not maximize the window and definitely not navigate away to some ad or whatnot.

Also, am I the only one sketched out by the javascript ads with the internal 'x' close buttons? Its obviously part of the ad, and not the program chrome/controls. For all I know, it's just a redirect to pwnme.com :-P

> web pages where every pixel is some sort of link/hotspot

Or while trying to copy a link or text on page - you gotta grab it perfectly otherwise everything else gets selected. So you're maneuvering like under microscope at the very beginning or end of the text.

Similar thing I'm experiencing on Xfce: some themes use this very slim window borders which are almost impossible to grab to resize. And since there's no grab to resize widget in the bottom right corner (it used to be once a standard, I'm pretty sure), upper right corner near the close button is the way.

Sometimes its easier to select stuff from the end to beginning... I thought it was my imagination, but then a browser developer wrote about it in their blog or something.

I was always camp KDE - but that libadwaita thing sounds horrible... Maybe Rasterman is due for a comeback - enlightenment desktop looks pretty nice!

libadwaita disallowing themes is not a user-hostile decision (rather an accessibility one), nor are themes impossible. https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2021/09/18/the-truth-they-a...

I think the opposite. The Metro UI of Zune and Windows Phone from more than a decade ago still look so futuristic. They feel like sci-fi screens. The design language may not have been adapted to desktop in the best way, but they look great too IMHO, especially after Windows 11 overhaul.