Windows used rounded corners on its buttons from 1.0 to 3.11, then switched to square ones until XP's themed UI, where they were slightly rounded again, until 8 went back to square, and now with 11 they are again rounded:
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/7389110/64139289-3...
I still prefer the sharp corners.
It's underrated how great Steve Jobs's taste was, and how sincere the "liberal arts + technology" line is
I’m not sure “underrated” is exactly the best term here. He’s pretty much lauded as the greatest “visionary for design and innovation in the technology industry”, ever.
I agree that every time one of these anecdotes comes up, it’s a shock to remember. Of all the narcissists we have running the world, he’s the one I’ll most fondly remember.
Maybe not "underrated" but "Jobs only did marketing, Woz did all the technical work" is a very persistent comment I see on the internet when he's brought up.
Woz is a technical genius, no doubt about it.
But Jobs is who made the boxes something that non-nerds wanted to have in their homes. There were dozens of computer companies at the time, some (not many, but some) of which had Woz-level engineers (e.g. Jay Miner and team at Atari). But only Apple survived.
Someone once said there would never have been an Apple if there had been only one Steve, and I agree.
Was he a jerk sometimes? Yeah, definitely. But he's not the first genius who's been a jerk. At the extreme, Isaac Newton was a horrible person.
But he's not the first genius who's been a jerk. At the extreme, Isaac Newton was a horrible person.
Luckily, we had a spare: Leibniz (and others) covered much of the same ground as Newton.
The calculus, sure, but not the physics.
Newton didn't do everything that Leibniz did, nor did Leibniz do everything Newton did.
Other people did other stuff. Once calculus was around, much of Newtonian physics would have come naturally sooner or later.
Eg even just re-doing an analysis of Galileo's free fall experiments with calculus would have gone a pretty long way.
That’s a great way to put it, ha ha. Toxic human, but hard to deny the results.
Success like he had is a filter. To be there you have to go through a lot of “sure you’ve done well so far, but you’ll never make it to the next level” conversations in your life. By the time you’re Steve Jobs, you’ve been right in the face of doubt thousands of times. Type of thing that makes someone think they can cure easily treatable pancreatic cancer with crystals or whatever.
I will not define Jobs as narcissistic (thinking on himself). Quite the opposite, Jobs was focussing on what people needed, and he was right: People needed rounded corners way more than ovals.
Jobs was obsessed with the customer experience and that was what made him a great CEO.
Did he cared more about the product or the customer than his own people? This is something that you should ask the people that worked with him.
This is something that you should ask the people that worked with him.
No need to ask around, lots of people who worked for Jobs have gone on the record as saying he was the worst person they have ever worked for. If you ran into him (or worse, had to present something to him), you never knew if you were going to get Nice Steve or Angry Steve. Nice Steve would thank you for your work and politely inform you of changes or refinements that he wanted you to make. Angry Steve would verbally berate you in front of your manager and peers.
He had a set of close associates that he never or rarely treated badly, it is not hyperbole to say that most everyone else got the brunt of his wrath.
Straight from Woz, if you don't want to take my word for it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/08/steve-woz...
I don't disagree that it's important, but I don't think it's underrated. I think it's very highly rated.
There's a puzzle in philosophy, where a philosopher points to a bear and says, "That's a bear". Except it's only a life-size cardboard cutout of a bear. But behind the cutout is a real bear. Is the philosopher speaking the truth when he points and says there's a bear there?
Steve Jobs is appropriately highly praised, but by many people who don't know why he should be praised -- to them he's like a movie sort of figure, Elon Musk in his post-Twitter phase, a larger-than-life jerk who says smart words and allegedly does things. But Jobs actually is that sort of genius that a lot of wannabes pretend to be. So is he highly praised? Is the philosopher telling the truth when he points to the fake bear, having confused it for a real one but not knowing there's a real one behind it?
Does the philosopher know that there’s a bear behind it? If not, it probably depends on your take on the Gettier problem :)
Various non falsified interpretations of quantum theory say there both is and isn’t a bear there until it is observed. So I say he’s right.
And watch out, there’s a bear behind you.
I think most philosophers would be fine with treating "there is no bear there" and "the amplitude of the probability density function of a bear is negligibly low there" as the same statement for this discussion :)
An entire bear spontaneously tunneling across a large distance or spontaneously forming out of vacuum fluctuations is really, really quite unlikely.
The modern take on that dilemma; What if it's a man hiding behind a bear cutout to appear less threatening?
And then he tried curing cancer with fruit juice.
Who’s perhaps underrated is Bill Atkinson. He famously left it all behind, but QuickDraw, MacPaint, and HyperCard are a helluva hat trick.
his girl friend and child's mother Chrisann Brennan was an artist. its all in her book.
Rounded corners are one of the common things on macos that make it look modern and cheerful. iphone icons are more pleasing because of this.
other platforms should add more of this.
It is standard for web elements. Very easy to set border radius
That hasn’t always been true!
I remember with great displeasure the bad old days of creating a 3x3 table for every container and jamming a rounded corner gif into each of the four corners to create this effect.
See also the old sliding doors article breathlessly making rounded tabs:
A list apart was my go to resource for a long time. Css zen garden was great
I dunno, I look back on the <table>-based layout days with fondness, probably because I was young and the Web was nothing but rolling green fields and endless potential. I didn't see the limitations, only the opportunities for inventiveness. I'll never feel the same satisfaction as I did when those first few website designs came together.
I feel like responsive websites killed that magic, because now it's way too complicated to make interesting designs.
In games you had to do this 9 piece slice, one slice for each of the 4 corners, all 4 straight sides that can be repeated as a pattern and the middle background piece
Nine-patch image scaling[0] is still a thing, and is only orthogonally related to setting a border radius (it's a hell of lot more versatile than that).
Indeed, CSS border-radius was introduced around year 2010. I was both browsing the web and writing pages before that time. https://caniuse.com/?search=border-radius , https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/border-radi...
Bill Atkinson wasn’t aware of that feature.
Also, Susan Kare didn’t know about vector graphics. That’s why all her icons ended up pixelated! But it was… quite iconic at the time.
Whatever Susan Kare knew about vector graphics, that's not why the icons were pixelated.
It was because she had only two colors to work with, black and white, and only two icon sizes, 16x16 and 32x32.
Steve Jobs and Bill Atkinson only got 32x32 B&W icons for their own portraits:
https://www.folklore.org/Steve,_Icon.html
Icons were only 32 by 32 black or white pixels, 1024 dots in total
Susan posted more examples here:
(I think that was the joke)
Do you not remember a time before border-radius? Or -webkit-border-radius? I remember including a premade rounded rectangle button in Flash just to get that visual effect.
To be fair, the original comment said other platforms should add this, and border-radius has been widely supported for at least 15 years. You'd have to look hard for a browser that needs it to be added.
ahh yes good ol border-radius, more popularly known as web 2.0
Not only on macos, on the hardware as well. Macbook that I'm typing this comment on has a screen with rounded corners on top, and it just feels better than right angles on the bottom.
That effect is 100% done in software. Full black on screens is just really good now. If you don’t believe me look at a photo in full screen while zoomed in.
I'm pretty sure it's a screen cutout - the corners are still rounded when fullscreen zooming, and on asahi linux. There's also another cutout for the notch at the top of the screen. Also, it's not a great panel and the blacks aren't very good - you can still see light coming from the monitor with a full back image in fullscreen and it changes based on brightness.
So if it is software, then it's very low level and with darker blacks than anything else on screen, and has a super tiny bezel right at the corner. I'm pretty sure it's a cutout.
I'm not sure that's true that it's (always) done in software. For example, the newest Framework Laptop 13 has higher resolution screens that come with rounded corners, because whatever supplier had a large stock of them lying around. If it was just software, the concept of having a "rounded corner screen" from a supplier wouldn't exist.
Not just rounded rectangles, but squircles too. Every icon or rectangular element in Apple software and hardware is a squircle.
Apple uses quintic superellipses. Very similar to squircles but not quite.
What does quintic mean in this context? My first thought would be something like (x/a)^5 + (y/b)^5 = 1, but that doesn't seem to work. I only get meaningful shapes when I use even exponents.
Try for yourself here: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/bfqku2rcw0
|x|⁵, |y|⁵
Ah that makes sense, thanks. Obvious, in hindsight.
Surely a MacBook is a rounded rect and not a squircle.
Nope, it's still squircle.
https://www.apple.com/v/macbook-pro/ak/images/overview/close...
https://www.apple.com/v/macbook-pro/ak/images/overview/close...
https://www.apple.com/v/macbook-pro/ak/images/overview/close...
Those don't look like squircles to me. If they are squircles, they're so close to simple rounded rectangles that there's no meaningful difference left.
The keys could, maybe, be squircles, but I'm having a very hard time seeing the outline, the touchpad, the outline of the keyboard as anything other than rounded rectangles.
How does that work for rectangular elements? As far as I understand it, squircles are defined by an equation similar to (x/a)^n + (y/b)^n = 1, as in https://www.desmos.com/calculator/yllozptlmt.
That works well for squares (a = b), but for rectangles the corners aren't round anymore, they become elliptic, as in https://www.desmos.com/calculator/bzxyu6ygz3. That doesn't like as nice in my eyes, but more importantly I have the impression that the rounded corner of Apple's rectangles are circular, not elliptic. I don't have any Apple devices, but in screenshots like https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:4800/format:webp/1*oBI... it seems to me the corners of rectangular elements are very much not elliptic. Or certainly not nearly as obvious as in my second Desmos link.
So I don't understand what's really going on. It doesn't seem to me Apple's rectangles really are superellipses.
(And actually the squares in that screenshot look like simple rounded squares to me, not squircles/superellipses. The sides look too flat for squircles. I could be wrong though.)
They're definitely not superellipses these days, but to answer your question in a more interesting manner: you don't have to stretch the superellipse. You can just split it so that the corners are rounded with a 1:1 aspect ratio and cheat by stretching the lines in the middle.
TIL about squircles: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squircle
"No, there's no way to do that. In fact it would be really hard to do."
Why would Bill say this? Why would his ellipse optimization not be trivially applicable to a quarter-circle?
Helps explain why Jobs turned out the way he did, when perfectly capable people behaved this way around him.
I wonder whether, prior to this conversation, Steve had ever communicated to Bill that rounded rects would be nice.
Maybe he didn’t realize he wanted it until he saw it without it
I think as Andy writes, Bill was showing off a very impressive demo, and was maybe miffed that Steve wasn’t appreciating it.
Also, the question had just been sprung, and literally no one had ever done this before.
This was my interpretation as well. Internally I would be thinking "Look, I've just worked my ass off and produced something incredible. Can't we just put it straight into production?"
Is it actually true that "no-one had ever done this before?". As far as I know, the midpoint circle algorithm, being a straightforward extension of Bresenham's line algorithm, was already well-known by 1981. Indeed, here's a paper from 1967 that does basically the same thing: https://academic.oup.com/comjnl/article-pdf/10/3/282/1333509...
I asked the same question years ago. :)
The probable answer is that he thought about modeling the rectangle with rounded rects with a single mathematical expression. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15073696
That's probably impossible (as rounded rects are not continuous) but also completely unnecessary as you can handle the quarter circle segments and line segments separately.
as you can handle the quarter circle segments and line segments separately.
Possibly, but that is tricky in the presence of blitting modes such as XOR; the movement you accidentally draw a pixel twice, it would get flipped twice (nowadays, with anti-aliasing, it gets really tricky, but they didn’t have that problem yet)
You may want to draw the four circle segments in one go, too, as that allows you to share large parts of the computations for what pixels to touch.
The algorithm used to draw the ellipse should not have any issues with accidentally overdrawing even by a single pixel if your arcs are defined in 90-degree increments.
And you can, in fact, draw the four circle segments in one go, since they will all be mirror images of each other. If, instead of the absolute coordinate of the pixel, you compute the offset from the starting point, then you can compute it once, negate it as needed, and draw 4 pixels on each step.
Also, for the most common cases this probably wasn't even needed - I bet they just stored the "masks" for rounding the corners hardcoded, as that would have been much faster.
In day camp in Brooklyn, we always had woodworking. In successive summers, we had an instructor who wanted us to round the corners and edges of everything, and another instructor who insisted we keep everything as square and sharp as possible.
And lo you learned both! :)
╭─────┐
│ Yep │
╰─────┘/;;;((————//————————-$$ — % I never learned woodworking \
Context matters, as usual. Sharp corners in soft wood can easily get dented and look bad if they are on the edge of a table or cutting board. But if two corners are going to meet they'll look better if they are both square.
Rounding edges is also a great way to “intentionally” fix a piece that got dinged on the workbench.
It works well for the Mac OS, but for all that it's a core part of the Mac OS identity, I really hate that Microsoft is using round rectangles to the point that device manufacturers are painting the underside of laptop and tablet glass screens so as to cause a physical rounded effect at the corners, and I'd liefer have the crisp square Windows 10 screen appearance than the rounded Windows 11 (though the overall increase in consistency is nice otherwise).
Painting? As demonstrated by Framework's new display option, there are displays that physically do not have pixels there. The the actual mask they use for printing is already rounded. It's not painted over, it's just not there.
If the displays don't have the pixels, then they should discount the price based on them being missing.
I'm pretty sure they do. You get maybe a few cents based on the physical area that the rounding leaves out. Of course, you can't just pay the few cents for a non-rounded screen if they don't already have masks for non-rounded screens. That's why Framework decided to compromise on the rounded option, as that one had already been commissioned by another customer, but if they wanted the same thing but without rounding they would have had to pay for brand new tooling.
That's even worse --- back in the days of the original Mac there were apps which would make use of the dark corners for various status notifications.
It's not like you can use the notch for status notifications on phones with a screen cutout. To be fair though, I've always been hostile towards phones with notches or cutouts of any kind. Even my current phone (OP7Pro) with its rounded corners is pushing it.
Aren't Apple rounded rectangles now squircles? https://medium.com/minimal-notes/rounded-corners-in-the-appl...
Yes, they changed into squircles with iOS 7 I believe.
I wonder if they were inspired by Meego SwipeUI on the Nokia N9? It was visually quite different from everyone else at the time.
No. iOS switched to squircles because their product designers use squircles[0]. If you extrude a rounded rectangle you get a shape that has harsh breaks in the highlights at the point where the rounded part meets the rectangle part. To smooth this off you need a curve where the tangents are smooth. This is also known as "C2 continuity", and you get that level of continuity by ensuring that the second derivative (acceleration) of the curve has no gaps between points.
Absolutely none of these properties matter for icons, of course.
[0] Or at least some curve with similar tangency properties.
Original(?) older article: https://www.figma.com/blog/desperately-seeking-squircles/
Every time I see this story, I try counting the round vs square rectangles, and in practice they seem about even in my life. Door frames, picture frames, books, cabinets, and windows are all actually squared off.
(And natural things aren’t rectangles at all!)
I had the same thought, but I’m actually currently on a passenger VIA train carriage, and almost everything in this “fully designed” environment is rounded off— the windows, the seats, the tray tables, the vent holes, even the bodywork itself. An airplane would be similar.
I feel like that is due to physical constraints (are glass panes weaker at the corners?) than actual design-to-be-pleasing-to-look-at.
And natural things aren’t rectangles at all
Pyrite would like a word!
Round rectangles can look not round enough on low-DPI displays, and the colors can also be wrong due to incorrect averaging in non-linear color space. Example: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/33453#issuecom...
It is similar to how subtle gradients look striped and dirty on many websites if displayed with only 24-bit color: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/91316
I don't think that's quite right.
The round rectangles are still perfectly round.
But in the example given, the outline becomes fainter on the rounded sections, because gamma isn't taken into account.
In other words, the shape is perfectly correct, but the antialiasing is buggy.
(It also has nothing to do with gradient striping -- that's an unavoidable artifact of 24 bit color that has nothing to do with gamma. It becomes more noticeable if you don't dither, which generally isn't done in 24 bit color, or when compression is bad, like low-quality JPEG.)
On the 1 bit Macintosh display it wasn’t much of an issue.
I’ve enjoyed this story over several decades, but what stands out to me now is the fact that Bill Atkinson was working from home during the creation of the Macintosh.
IIRC he did the more complicated stuff at home so he wouldn't be disturbed. But he also worked from the office. A healthy split!
Where would you rather take LSD, at home or in the office?
Over the next few months, roundrects worked their way into various parts of the user interface, and soon became indispensable.
At which point we realized they are just a fad like any other design ever was and went to sharp corners and flat design. And back to round corners, and back to sharp, and back to..
Hell, I can see this circle of hell happening in front of my very eyes. I think a year ago someone at Chrome had the brilliant idea to "refresh the design" as happens so often in big organizations and suddenly the tabs got round and we got little round corners around the navigation bar and..
The only thing constant in modern web design seems to be the ever-increasing amount of margins and paddings. Everything else goes in cycles.
When Google fully-rounded the corners of a rectangle, they added even more margins and paddings. When texture comes back in style, I bet we'll see even more margins and paddings.
rounded corners are actually a significant accessibility factor and powerful gestalt mechanism in design. The border radius of a rounded rect makes it discernable at a glance the boundaries of the element and what is inside and what is out. Concentric rounding can clearly communicate parent child relationships in an astutely gestalt fashion.
Mac OS ROM hack to generate fully circular windows: https://web.archive.org/web/20201209143138/https://macgui.co...
The ‘hack’ part isn’t drawing round windows; that is just using the operating system APIs to create a new window look.
The hack is injecting that code in the Finder. A way to do that is to store the WDEF inside the desktop file on a floppy disk. Then, inserting that floppy would be enough to give new windows that look.
The Finder would open the resource fork of that file to get info about files on the floppy and keep it open. When you opened a window, the Finder would ask the Resource Manager for “WDEF #0”, and the Resource Manager would find it (or rather, a WDEF pretending to be ‘it’) in the desktop file. Writing a Trojan for that OS wasn’t very difficult.
Can someone explain the technical detail a bit more detailed than on Folklore...?
I didn't read it in detail but I did find this version of the same anecdote followed by a commentary on the original ROM code: http://wg20.criticalcodestudies.com/index.php?p=/discussion/...
the underlying algorithm to draw an octant of an arc may have been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midpoint_circle_algorithm
You "just" need to draw 2 octants of an oval at each corner of the rectangle, plus the remainder of the 4 sides of the rectangle, and correctly account for fill/edge flags while doing so. This likely leveraged the existing "region" code in the Apple QuickDraw, but to be sure you'd have to get down into the code or find a more complete commentary.
Yeah, but how?
Wow. So this is why Apple's campus visitor center literally has no corners in it. Even the stairwells have all rounded corners.
Take a closer look at the tables.
Related, fun post: https://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/roundy.html
they are everywhere indeed because sharp corners can hurt people.
I wasn't even aware that the Mac existed at the time, but I always had a fondness for rounded rectangles because the Amstrad CPC character set had 16 characters that represented all possible combinations of a central dot with N, E, S, W spokes. They were rounded for the 4 cases that represented 90 degrees, and the rounded rectangle look was perfect for using as borders around things.
This was 1984, so wouldn't have been long after the original Mac but was maybe influenced by it. As far as I know, no other 8-bit computers have rounded container characters like this. I later used PCs, and the CGA text mode had its nice 1/2 line variants, which were good for variety, but they were square so I never found them as appealing as the rounded ones I knew from the Amstrad.
iPhone rounded boxes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxgg_kW3QLU
"No, there's no way to do that…”
This is the key line to me. It turned out it could be done and in less than a day. Even very smart and talented people sometimes need a jerk to tell them to make it happen. Sometimes it backfires and sometimes it doesn’t.
I viewed this on my RoundRect
Round rect technique aside (fascinating stuff!), the storytelling here is really charming. Reads like a clever short story
Bill returned to Texaco Towers the following afternoon, with a big smile on his face. His demo was now drawing rectangles with beautifully rounded corners blisteringly fast, almost at the speed of plain rectangles.
Loved it. Will remember this everytime I add "rounded" in tailwind. :)
Then he pointed out the window.
…which hopefully was still a non-rounded rectangle.
I wish I knew about this in the microcomputer days. I started off with SIN() and COS() for circles which were very slow. I realized that you can just scan down a pixel at a time in the Y axis and use Pythagoras for the X. Also for a circle that calculation does 4 points.
But the way posted here would much much faster than that!
Rounded corners is much like semicolons, and rebasing / merging something impossible to discuss. Most people either strongly dislike the one or the other and are unable to reconcile.
Oooof, so the rounded corners in UIs is just another Jobs-fetish by UI designers, got it ;(
The thing I like is that Bill Atkinson didn't spit the dummy when he didn't get the expected reception to his ovals. Instead he took on the challenge of round rectangles and came up with a solution.
This conversation exemplifies every positive interaction I've ever had with any of my really good advisors or bosses. It's exactly what I want from my boss - to be told "that good, but not quite good enough, and I know you can do better even if you don't know it yet".
And then I go off and think some more and outdo myself.
Related:
Round rectangles are everywhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28679496 - Sept 2021 (26 comments)
History of Rounded Corners - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7062706 - Jan 2014 (1 comment)
Steve Jobs and Rounded Corners - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3096927 - Oct 2011 (1 comment)
The story of round rectangles - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636358 - Aug 2010 (77 comments)
Learning how to design models for 3D printing now, and rounded corners are a matter of necessity as much as aesthetics. Objects with sharp corners are uncomfortable to hold, even risk of injury with some materials. They are also unhygienic and pain to clean dust out of. On the flipside, math to generate rounded corners on arbitrary shapes is messy and printing these out often requires supports and postprocessing to remove those and polish the curves with sandpaper.
Can we add (1981) to the title please
Related post discussing the rounded shapes (and squircles) in design tools:
Love the story, could have added more in terms of how the round corners feature was solved
One example of rounded rectangles added purely for aesthetic purposes was the desktop window of the old Mac. When the display turned on during boot, it was naturally square, but then one of the first things the software did was to round its corners. Then they stayed this way until maybe another software switched into full screen. There was nothing like that on Windows and it was obviously a “useless” thing to do. I liked that detail.
I much rather prefer the old UIs that were highly responsive at the speed of thought.
Sharp corners are dangerous, I always feel like those windows will draw blood if I touch them with my mouse wrong.
Strangely enough, I stayed in an East Asian hotel (I think with Tibetan influences?) and I remember the corners of the room all being rounded. It just felt better, more soothing? It would be hella expensive to get a craftsman to round all the corners in your room here in the west, you could do it with plaster but it wouldn’t last more than a decade and wouldn’t add any resale value.
I know nuclear power stations have no sharp corners to make them easier to clean.
Do you have a source for that fact?
Your fridge has no sharp corners inside.
Mostly because it is injection molded, and that sharp corners on plastics are prone to crack.
I spent two summers as a cleaner at a pharmaceutical company in my late teens. The "round corners are easier to clean" were a thing there as well, reason I was told was that sharp corners will scrape off some residue from the cleaning cloths when you drag them over the corner.
Oh, ya, I can see this being really nice for the kitchen sink or the stand in shower. Right now, oil build up gets trapped in corners that require a brush to work out, which is tricky in the shower where it’s all calked.
You know, I remember seeing this on older pictures, but I tried to come up with an example and couldn't, all recent pictures I could find had regular floor moldings.
It’s definitely true for some hospitals here in the UK.
I don't know about power stations, but it's a common feature in medical devices.
E.g. keyboards have a flat or nearly-flat surface so they can be easily cleaned by wiping without leaving any germs behind in a groove, or on an edge.
I suppose something similar makes sense in an environment that could produce radioactive dust.
I was curious and went looking. This is the closest I found after a quick google search. It refers only to lighting options in the reactor chamber not the hallways and such.
https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/analysis/featurehow-to-choo...
"There are some obvious considerations: all underwater nuclear lights should be crafted from stainless steel with rounded and smooth surfaces for easy decontamination, and have no sharp or jagged edges to reduce the risk of workers tearing safety gloves or clothing. "
One of the houses I lived in during college had rounded room corners, and it was a very old house. I'm not sure how it was done.
With a round trowel and/or a wood template.
I have some experience plastering. Round corners are somewhat easier than sharp ones. The plaster/joint compound tends to pile up quickly in corners and it is hard to skim it thin.
Traditionally it was done here in eastern block with a beer bottle. A tool always within reach of a builder.
How do you make a round corner with a beer bottle? I mean an actual corner (three walls meeting), not an edge (two walls).
Beer bottles to make rounded corners? Brilliant!
You should try staying in a yurt. No corners at all, felt like I was back in the womb. (I imagine)
Hmm. We do it to ceilings (coving). I think you maybe need wooden coving, mounted vertically. Then you can make a feature of it, skim it, paint it, whatever.
Here in the UK it was pretty common up to say the 1940s for plasterers to curve the corners on outward pointing walls in hallways. This usually extends from the skirting up to the picture rail. There is a lovely transition from the curve to a point just below the picture rail, which is very elegant, but a total pain if you are hanging wallpaper, well, that's my experience anyway!
I've always felt it was one of those details that a plasterer could show off their skill, and you are right, it softens the corner in a very pleasing way.
It's funny. Here in the United States, I find houses with bull-nosed interior walls discomfiting. Something about all the rounded corners causes me mild distress. I find it much more comfortable being in houses with sharp-edged meetings of walls.
My wife's grandmothers house here in the US, built around 1952, has rounded corners in a lot of the ceiling and doors. It is quite nice.
Bullnosing drywall isn't much more expensive then square corners?
I still think windows 2000 looks the best out of that bunch, if not for the lack of font antialiasing.
Windows 10 does a pretty good job too if not for the mess that is finding yourself in a universe of completely different UI paradigms that suddenly lurch from one to another, especially when navigating settings.
Windows 2003 Server was the pinnacle - it looked and felt like Windows 2000, but had XP-era improvements, including ClearType (subpixel font antialiasing).
You could easily switch WinXP to use the classic theme, which made it look the same as Win2003.
Win7 with the Classic Theme was the peak of UI/UX, IMO.
Even the default out of the box color scheme of WS 2003 was fantastic. Indeed the pinnacle of Windows UI design.
Black text on Grey background was nice. I am not sure why we switched to dark grey text on white background or light grey text on black background.
I used to run this modded distro of Windows2003 called "tiny2003". It was my favorite Windows experience.
I agree that Windows 2000 looks the best. I inherited a system that was running Windows Server 2003 that we have since replaced with up-to-date software. We needed to do it, of course but, the Windows 2000 UI was way better than what we have today. It was simpler but also more consistent.
What really bothers me is they removed the possibility to set the interface to the good old windows nt interface after windows 7. Okay, Microsoft wants to implement sim crappy new UI. At least give me the option to make it right
Wonder how it syncopates with the high skirt / short skirt fashion cycle
that ended about the time engelbart first publicly demonstrated hypertext (i'd say windowed guis but sketchpad and grail had windowed guis)
They're is no end to a cycle. I'm not suggesting you go and check current skirt trends, but I guess it might be useful.
it's interesting to see all the windows theming over the years. I personally prefer the UI that looks like little chunks of titanium and steel rather than the boring flat RGBCMYK-like color palette. It was even in the name, glass, to convey the materiality.
I just wonder why developers can have design color palettes like solarized; yet Microsoft imposes its will and subjugates everyone to the same godawful blueness. F** the blueness because I know some corporate peon had conversations like "Yellow is too cautionary, orange is too obscure, red is too angry, purple is too edgy. Blue is safe."
The highlight color in Win8+ is customizable, although that only applies to apps using the new XAML-based frameworks.
Username checks out.
That image really drives home how much we've lost with flat GUIs are and how important drop shadows are to buttons.
And also drives home that I don't give one iota of care about rounded vs square.
It's also funny how the later examples almost look like they could be terminal UIs. Based on this trend, I predict that the next version of Windows ("Windows One") will look like DOS.
Microsoft not being able to make up their mind resulting in a cluttered and nearly unusable UI? Who has ever heard of such a thing?!