For me it's the difference between "this is a computer" vs "this is a computer trying to be a cell phone". I think that's what everything from the last 15yr is trying to be--a phone. And not everything is a phone. On a computer we have a keyboard and a mouse, which are much, much more precise tools than vague gestures on a touchscreen.
EDIT: I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say this is basically everything that's wrong with the computer(-adjacent) industry. We can appreciate the problem statement by asking "why would anyone want to make a computer be a phone?" The answer is a terminal case of a particularly defensive form of groupthink. It goes something like this:
(1) "everyone is talking about the iPhone"
(2) "i need to feel relevant, ergo i must make phone noises too"
then they rub these two neurons together, and since it's the only two they got it isn't hard for them, and this process repeats a few generations and like a nuclear chain reaction soon enough the entire industry is trying to make everything be a fucking phone.
It shouldn't be like that.
EDIT2: As a species we don't play these games with other tools. Cars--some super early attempts had weird shit like tillers for steering but we quickly outgrew that idea and settled on the steering wheel, levers for the other hand, and pedals
for the feet. Same with airplanes and tracked vehicles (bulldozers, tanks, etc). Same with machine tools. This stupid game people are playing with computer interfaces these days is fundamentally inhuman.
It's so obvious now that you wrote it, but it never occurred to me as such. New desktops, be it macOS, Gnome, Win.. they all look like damn phones and not computers.
If you're under 25ish, you probably had a smartphone while still in diapers. When/if you later learn to use a desktop, it being like a smartphone makes it familiar.
Sucks for us geezers that learned things the other way around though!
People seem to forget that "smartphones" (in the post-iPhone sense) are barely old enough to drive. The first iPhone came out in 2007, android doesn't drop till the following year, and the first iPad doesn't come out till 2010.
If you were a kid with a video-playing smartphone before about 2012, your parents were pretty damn well off, and likely early adopters too
I don't think that helps support the argument, though. Despite using a stylus-driven touchscreen, the Palm Pilot UI had a lot more in common with the desktop UIs of the 90s than with today's smartphone UIs or even today's smartphone-tainted desktop UIs.
Palm pilots had ui/ux more closely resembling today’s smart phones than you think. The swiping keyboards, for example, more closely resemble the script used for fast typing on a palm pilot. The ui was meant for touch, not for precision. At least the games didn’t have ads back then.
Today's swiping keyboards are nothing like the original Graffiti or Graffiti 2. Those used shapes/gestures derived from the actual letter shapes, while the swiping gestures supported by the on-screen keyboards of today rely on gestures derived from the QWERTY layout of the on-screen keyboard. Because both were simplifications of the completely different input methods they were emulating: pen vs keyboard.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Palm Pilot UI (all the parts that were actually on the screen instead of below it in the dedicated writing area) looks thoroughly 90s: the basic buttons, drop-down boxes, tabs and dialog box layouts, scrollbars that aren't trying to hide from you. The main UI elements missing from the Palm Pilot that were present in eg. 90s Mac OS or Windows are the free form desktop layout (instead of the smartphone-like app launcher grid), and the persistent on-screen menu bar or taskbar.
The Palm Pilot UI was unquestionably designed around the assumption of higher precision than today's touch-oriented UIs. The stylus was not considered optional. The lack of capacitive touch sensing for gesture recognition meant the UI was much more reliant on precise button taps where today's smartphones would use swipes and other gestures for stuff like scrolling or "back".
Um. Swiping is almost exactly like the gesture letter shapes, except now they are word shapes. Swiping “shape” is always the same gesture on the keyboard, you can learn these gestures and type really fast.
To your second paragraph: of course it looks “throughly 90’s”. It was the 90’s. Did an LLM tell you to say this? I have no idea what scroll bars have to do with anything. I can tell you they were a pain to use. That hasn’t changed.
To your third paragraph: the stylus wasn’t optional. They didn’t just “lack” capacitive screens. It didn’t exist yet at scale. This was what Apple brought to the market. You couldn’t really have them if you wanted them. That being said, I used these interfaces while walking, riding in a car, and sitting still. I never had trouble tapping the right thing because the buttons were huge in the UI.
You do bring up a good point about there not really being swipe gestures to go “back”. I don’t use them today, so I’m not as familiar with that type of behavior other than to say it is really annoying when done by accident, usually while picking up the device.
>If you're under 25ish, you probably had a smartphone while still in diapers
Circa 2004, when 25 year olds would probably be migrated out of diapers, smartphones were palm treos and Sony Ericsson K700s. I don't think they would be great distractions for kids, there certainly wouldn't be any endless Spiderman/Elsa YouTube to lock them in.
More like ~18 and under. The post-2007 zoomers and nearly all alphites are ipad kids, but that drops off dramatically as you get to the older zoomer segment and millennials.
Regarding your second edit, there was 100 years of automobile development (or more, depending on how far back you consider things to be in the lineage of a car, vs the predecessors of them) before the first car had a steering wheel. It's just ahistorical to say we quickly outgrew the tiller. We're less than 100 years from the first emergence of digital computers and screens, let alone putting those two together and needing an interface on them.
I think your broader point is accurate, but computers aren't old enough yet to really compare the evolution of their interfaces to other technologies.
Once we settled on the steering wheel, though, we didn't keep trying to make tillers work. That's what I was trying to get at--in other examples of human-machine interfaces we generally don't regress once we've figured it out. But with computers that's exactly what we're doing.
Yeah but we can take lessons from that 100 years of car experience of how humans interact with objects and apply a lot of it to computers. Its not like we are starting from scratch like we were 200 years ago.
They weren't starting from scratch 200 years ago either. Tillers were standard in boats for thousands of years, it was a perfectly reasonable way to steer a vehicle.
Likewise, at first a purely textual interface was a perfectly reasonable way to interact with a computer terminal, but the addition of mice changed the game, as did higher resolution displays and widespread adoption of touchscreens. We're 80 years into screens, 60 years into computer mice, and 20 years into touchscreens. Clearly lots of interface changes are just to keep the designers at a company busy, but it's also silly to be confident that we've nailed UX/UI standards.
what would you say makes a UI look as if it's for a computer (genuine)? aside from purely(!) cosmetic things, like the skin on the windows 11 taskbar vs. 10. i think to windows <= xp, or tiling window managers (bar hyprland, probably) as the two most popular evolutions of mouse- vs. keyboard-based UIs (plan 9 probably fits well under the former, too). i guess i'd prefer if macos looked like dwm, but i wonder what else would need to change for the friction i feel with it to disappear.
Font rendering with the same hinting as the system you grew up with. Whitespace in the same proportions.
Can't learn an evolution of the UI paradigm if you subconsciously feel your eyes are working wrong.
Hence, the person afraid of the computer changing who was described upthread.
(I was entirely surrounded by such cases when learning computing. So it was a moral and emotional battle at every step besides the sheer figuring things out - on dated, semi-functional miracles of engineering.
Now consider how, them people somewhere who "keep changing da computah", it's their job. It's us, in fact. And we're more knowledgeable, better organized, and make more than the average user. Plus chances are we're an entirely different part of the globe now where we follow an entirely different culture from our consumers, so things with the baseline mutual comprehensibility are so-so at best.
And... that's always been the case? And it's what's been giving our computerphobe friends all the right to be afraid. What reason does a FAANG dev even have, to care about your Grandma's eyesight, user experience, or sanity? Or yours? They gotz plenty to care about already, as exhibited by all the thoughtful comments poured into this site.)
These massive ""finger-friendly"" buttons don't make any sense on a traditional desktop with a mouse, but it makes a ton of sense when you realize the designers were likely designing for mobile and/or touchscreen integration at the same time.
A system which embraces the abilities of the mouse and keyboard without pandering to the limitations of the touchscreen. To wit, you have the ability, with a 3 button mouse + scroll wheel, to trivially select any nearby point in 3-space and label it with any one of 3 colors. More if you also allow your other hand to operate a keyboard. I dare you to attempt this with a touchscreen. I doubledare you motherfucker. Say what again.
EDIT: I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say this is basically everything that's wrong with the computer(-adjacent) industry. We can appreciate the problem statement by asking "why would anyone want to make a computer be a phone?" The answer is a terminal case of a particularly defensive form of groupthink. It goes something like this:
(1) "everyone is talking about the iPhone" (2) "i need to feel relevant, ergo i must make phone noises too"
then they rub these two neurons together, and since it's the only two they got it isn't hard for them, and this process repeats a few generations and like a nuclear chain reaction soon enough the entire industry is trying to make everything be a fucking phone.
It shouldn't be like that.
EDIT2: As a species we don't play these games with other tools. Cars--some super early attempts had weird shit like tillers for steering but we quickly outgrew that idea and settled on the steering wheel, levers for the other hand, and pedals for the feet. Same with airplanes and tracked vehicles (bulldozers, tanks, etc). Same with machine tools. This stupid game people are playing with computer interfaces these days is fundamentally inhuman.