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Why did UI's turn from practical to form over function?
E.g. Office 2003 vs Microsoft 365
It's easy to remember where everything is with a toolbar and menu bar, which allows access to any option in one click and hold move.
Seriously? Big ribbon and massive padding wasting space, as well as the ribbon being clunky to use.
Why did this happen?
I was a moderator on the Paint.NET forums for a long while in the mid to late 00s. You would be surprised at how many questions we got about when Paint.NET would get "the new ribbon UI!"
The answer was never, incidentally.
Wow, I still use paint.net. My needs are pretty humble, and it still hits that sweet spot between MS Paint and Gimp.
I would like to see them add something like the VSCode command pallette. That way if I know the name of the tool but can't remember or don't want to go click for it, I just just type the name and fuzzy find it.
Ohhh I have a feeling you will enjoy this video:
It's about a dofferent piece of software, but still highly relevant.
I have no problems with it, so I guess I'm some sort of savant? There is such thing as good and bad UI, but I think this is a case of 'what you're used to' causing problems with 'what is.'
I bet it's capitalism.
The answer for enshittification of the entire reality seems to always be
capitalism.
There's been a trend towards simplicity/minimalism in UX for a long time. Sometimes it works really well. Other times it makes it difficult to find things like setting preferences (or they just don't implement them because the assholes think they know better than you).
For me, MS is a mixed bag. Some of the UX changes are good, some of it is horrible.
But I love a well done minimalist UX. Obsidian and Reaper are two examples that come to mind.
Probably so since jackass in a suit could double his annual bonus.
