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Just to derail things, am I the only one who despises this trend toward flattening everything?
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but I enjoy flattening cockroaches, flies, mosquitos...
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No, you are not the only one.
Everyone despises it. 
Well, I despise it. It's terrible.
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I used to like it. On my Atari ST[^] back in 1986. At least they tried to add some shadows to let the windows float 'above' the desktop.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
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I think we all do.... I also suspect the rationale behind it is because such designs work better on mobile phones (less clutter), and Microsoft have a bee in their bonnet about have the same OS for desktops and mobiles ("One OS to rule them all...")
IMO, they should accept that they missed the mobile boat and give up on it - and concentrate their efforts on the desktop environment and its users.
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This was exactly my thoughts.
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Makes sense. Seems to me that the two environments are so different that one shoe does not fit all.
That and I spend enough time making sure my monitors are clean that I'd be seriously annoyed to see a bunch of fingerprints on them. No, I do not have touch screens on anything buy my phone and ipad.
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For me, less graphical details = much better.
The words are still the same and it's less distracting.
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I agree, we should all just use command line interfaces
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I'd rather bit-bang my cpu instructions.
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Nope, just about every developer I know really dislikes the flat UI that Microsoft is using. They also dislike the Windows 10 'Start Menu', all of them have replace it with Classic Shell or an equivalent. Now, this is all on their desktop machines, they basically had no problem with it when they had (work supplied) Windows phones (all now have Android phones).
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It isn't just mobile.
Why does Outlook give you the choice of these desktop themes on a 1900x1200 color monitor?
Dark Gray
Light Gray
White
Really, I spend money for a color monitor and you offer me monochrome?
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Less congestion?
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." - James D. Miles
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David Crow wrote: Less congestion?
That's funny.
Imagine an analogy to the spoken word.
"I...don't...want...to...clutter...up...the...air...with...sound...waves..." 
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FTFY: "I...clutter...air...sou..."
Software Zen: delete this;
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I keep saying - It took us decades (and I've bought at least one of each) to go from mono to CGA to EGA then VGA and [whole alphabet]GA to HD to UHD. And now that we have ultra-high resolution displays that can display millions of colors, people are designing UIs that would look at home on 4-color CGA monitors.
Who are they trying to accommodate???
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dandy72 wrote: Who are they trying to accommodate???
Good question.
The terrible answer is: Phones (I guess).
But, like you said, even phones have these screens that are HD. I don't get it either.
And, I don't like it.
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As opposed to what? Skeuomorphic designs? Visually noisy pseudo-3d elevations? Amiga Demos hardware color scrolling?
I, for one, accept our clean UI overlords. Just don't try and make text act like a button (looking at you Apple and Microsoft).
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André Pereira wrote: As opposed to what?
MS still had the right idea with Windows 7. It all went downhill after that.
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I'm not playing that game.
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My bad, I wasn't trying to be a dick.
Let me try again: what do you think got worse?
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No worries, I'm happy to have a grown-up discussion.
As you mentioned, skeuomorphic design (however you spell it) is going overboard. Fortunately MS never went all out on this, unlike that fruity company.
I liked what MS had going with Windows 7 - taking advantage of the high-resolution, high-color graphics capabilities that everybody finally had at their disposal. Look at a "modern" UI, and it almost looks like something you should've been able to do back when CGA video cards could display a mere 4 colors. I find I have to look at Visual Studio icons longer than I used to because--being mostly black and white--only their shape sets them apart from one another, and some of them look very similar (think different file types in the same tree in Solution Explorer). It's not as bad now as it was back when they had just started experimenting, but still, with so little distinctiveness, it used to be easier when they had a full color palette at their disposal.
Metro apps...or whatever they're called this week...I can never easily tell where one control ends, and the other begins. Heck, at times I don't even realize something on the screen is clickable; at other times, something that's NOT clickable looks like it should be. I'm not sure who decided that scrollbars that hide themselves were ever a good idea. Buttons that would've been at home in a toolbar sometimes are at the bottom of the screen, sometimes they're at the top. So-called hamburger menus...sometimes on the left...sometimes on the right...sometimes it's a "..." on the right end of a horizontal menu. It's all incredibly inconsistent. Discoverability - which defines one's ability to discovery an unfamiliar app's functionality through familiarity with other, consistent apps - has gone out the window. Is something right-clickable? That's anyone's guess.
All this UI "simplification" was done in the name of less-capable, smaller real-estate tablets and phones that had to be made usable for big fat fingers. Retrofitting this paradigm to a computer operating system running on 27" and larger monitors doesn't make sense. On an actual PC, you just end up with huge, wasted, empty areas that could've been used to display more information without scrolling, or going to another screen, etc.
Of course I could go on, but I'm sure this is already sounding like some madman's nonsensical rant. I guess the bottom line might be that I'm primarily not a fan of the inconsistency that now exists, and feel like today's UIs have taken multiple steps backwards because we're trying to accommodate multiple devices that clearly don't have the same capabilities. So we're catering to the lowest common denominator.
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Thank you for you long winded reply. Though I mostly disagree with your conclusions and sources of problems, I agree with your identified symptoms.
I don't think inconsistency is caused by Tablet/Touch restrictions, but rather it happened at the same time as the mass influx of sh*tty mobile app developers. 99% of Android Apps are still utter sh*t today, even the "big" ones.
And remember none of this happened without legacy. Hell, people still download Winamp with it's fully custom skin (that was still a thing with XP apps, remember?): talk about integration...
And I don't think there was any simplification at all. I think that proper native app development lost focus at around the same time (API hell times, you were always between a rock and a hard place, deciding the target API, with no clear future tech and ecosystem silos). It was around that time I switched stopped working on Windows MFC software, and most developers kept going on the web side. I absolutely detest web-development, so I ended up making apps, which usually are only targeted towards mobile with only use case being: using the website is too difficult on small screen with no mouse.
Meanwhile, OneOne UWP is one of the best pieces of software ever and it's a "mobile" app. UWP is not the problem, quite the contrary, it's a (possible) solution! I've built (and published) a few UWP apps and they're a bliss to develop on, compared to Android. Don't like it C#, XAML .net? Cool, use centennial and just wrap the bloody thing on a UWP sandbox and you get most of the benefits.
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I've been somewhat intrigued by UWP, but given that this means an app wouldn't run on Windows 7 or Server OSes from that era, that makes it a non-starter for me. Generally my apps don't need the latest and greatest OS features, and it's taken me forever to drop support for XP (of all things) as a target platform. Heck, even then, if I just reverted back to the .NET 2.0 runtime, most of my code would still compile and run on it.
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