The history of Graphical User Interface — part 2
Hello again! If you came here to continue our journey through the history of Graphic User Interface, don’t bother and go ahead. And if you are new here, be sure to check out the part I first (or you can be a rebel and start here, but you will lose some interesting facts!)
Medieval Age
1995
As I presume, most of us worked with this one at some point. After the success of Windows 3.1, Microsoft focused on creating the operating system that would be truly consumer-oriented. Windows 1995 had significantly redesigned GUI, introduced the signified Start button and task bar, and shortly after its launch became the most popular desktop operating system.
Between 1997 and 1998, Nokia launched two of their iconic mobiles, called Nokia 6110 and Nokia 5110. They got a calculator, clock and calendar, four colours, profile settings, excellent battery, were slim and lightweight by 90s standard, and what’s most important — had Snake included.
1998
Going on with the theme, Microsoft launched their new operating system named Windows 1998. It introduced the Web browser called, you guessed it, Internet Explorer. For the first time Microsoft offered a free update of used software. Its GUI wasn’t really revolutionary, still offered some new functionalities such as Disk Cleanup that enabled users to clear their disks of unnecessary files.
2000
When the millennium changed, Microsoft offered a new operating system once again, with the predictable name of Windows 2000. The same year Apple announced Aqua, the GUI and visual theme for macOS operating system. Its name came from its original concept of the interface reminding the drops of water. It had very characteristic visuals, with tones of bright blues and subtle grays assigned to specific windows and bars. It had an option of customization, though — if you weren’t the biggest fan of liquids and prefered something more stable, you could choose the graphite theme. The later versions had even more glossy and gel-like appearances, to the point where David Pogue, former technology columnist for The New York Times, described them as “lickable globs of Crest Berrylicious Toothpaste Gel”.
In 2000, Nokia launched the mobile phone we all once possessed — Nokia 3310.
As for the very first websites that appeared between 1995 and 2000, those had very simple, text-based design, with lots and lots of clickable elements, such as text menus, buttons and links. Apparently everybody loved to click these days.
Modern Age
2001
25th of October 2001 was the day that brought us Windows XP. XP was extremely visual-centred, with tons of alpha compositing effects, drop shadows and other eye-candies. The Start menu got really intense in the XP, with the two-column layout and lots of new abilities. It even had a mascot in a form of a dog that helped you search for the files you need. What’s interesting, the amount of visual effects enabled was determined by the operating system based on the computer’s processing power.
2002
In 2002, Samsung showed the world the very first mobile phone to use a thin-film transistor active matrix LCD display. Nobody knew at the time that one day Samsung will be one of the biggest players in the game.
2007
Six years after the launch of Windows XP Microsoft finally released their new system, Windows Vista. It had four distinct visual styles, named Areo, Vista Standard, Vista Basic and Standard. Areo introduced support for translucency effects and was overall really fancy, and as such it had higher hardware requirements. Vista Standard can be called “Areo lite” as it was still pretty but without all the translucency and animation things. Vista Basic was even simpler and it was a default graphic mode for computers which video cards weren’t powerful enough to support Windows Areo. Standard had design similar to the one of Windows 2000, so it was really simple and pretty out-datish.
In January the same year, Steve Jobs announced the first Iphone, calling it the most advanced mobile phone in the world, “five years ahead of any other”. Steve Ballmer responded by calling it also the most expensive phone in the world.
In November, Google announced offering Android operating system for anyone willing to use and change it. Asked about the existence of Google mobiles in the future, head of Android said that there will be millions of them.
2008
In July, Apple released their second generation’s iPhone named 3G, the successor to the original iPhone. It was originally loaded with the concurrently launched iPhone OS 2.0 which introduced the access to newly made App Store.
In November 2008 Android launched its first mobile phone named G1. For its GUI, it had slide-out keyboard and not all touchscreen capabilities were available. One month later Microsoft decided to kill off his Windows Mobile because it couldn’t compete with Apple’s and Android’s products. They didn’t give up, though — and started to develop a whole new mobile operating system — Windows Phone.
2009
Less than three years after the release of Vista, which got very poor ratings, Microsoft launched Windows 7. Originally it was intended to be just an update to Vista, but turned out to be a whole new operating system — moreover, system being praised and appreciated by critics, as it increased in performance and had more intuitive interface.
2010
In April 2010 Apple introduced their newest idea for a product — a tablet computer named iPad. It took the world by storm, as it was innovative, fancy and simply beautiful. Apple sold 300 000 iPads only on its first day of availability.
The first iPad was already full of user-centered interactive effects, was able to understand the complex gestures using multi-touch and introduced the use of many intuitive gestures, such as zooming the screen on and out by “pinching”.
Years from 2003 to 2010 were called the times of Web 2.0. It was the time of everything shiny, bubbly and eye-catching. Everyone loved gradients, contrasts, bright colours, translucency — and buttons. Big, clickable call-to-action buttons.
Graphics were oversized and visuals dominated the content. People were trained to react to all of the “click here” and “learn more” phrases, as web was growing and users had to follow the idea of navigating through it.
Stay with us as we will continue our journey on the next part — see you soon!
