Modern GUIs are often not great. Back in the days™, it was mostly pre-installed crapware and printer utilities that used idiosyncratic controls and their very own colors and window decorations because, well, just because. Somewhere along the road, common buttons, checkboxes, title bars, and window controls went out of fashion, and when everything became a web-app or was styled like one, things took a turn for the (even) worse. Nowadays, you cannot even tell if a window is active by looking at its title bar, let alone drag or resize it easily.

Yes, this is…

• the rambling of a grumpy nerd,
• a platitude,
• covered in tons of opionated articles already,
• and true. :)

Recently, I especially enjoyed reading this post about the downfall of native GUIs and these thoughts on the shortcomings of “invisible” design.

I’m currently working on a long-overdue Coppenheimer update – the last one was nearly two years ago, and its recent popularity gave me a little nudge. As I’m not a wasm, emscripten, or C++ guy, progress is slow (i. e. getting it to compile again after the vAmigaWeb merge and making sure everything still works), but I’ve got to the point where I’m thinking about new features. That’s where these blog posts struck a nerve: One thing I certainly won’t change are the GUI elements!

Originally I chose AmigaOS 2/3-inspired buttons for some authentic retro feeling, and because I wanted to try out the border-image CSS feature (I love what modern browsers can do out-of-the-box with plain HTML and CSS).

But looking back at it now, having oldschool buttons and checkboxes with classic fake-3D borders makes for a nice user experience as well. As in: The interface communicates clearly what is clickable and where, you don’t need to hover with your mouse pointer over possible controls, guess the meaning of minimalist icons, or guess-click (I hope). It was also a huge help when making the GUI: I just crammed in all the buttons I needed and balanced them a little with spacing and alignment – done! It’s a mess and not very logical, but you quickly find your way around if you try.

Or maybe I just like the look, and it amuses me how its approachability is a breath of fresh air in 2026? Although it’s 35 years old now?

Probably that, yes. :)

PS: I did notice one thing I might change: I applied the “disabled” state inconsistenly – with the authentic ghosting pattern for checkboxes, and an opacity change for the pause/step buttons. Tsk, tsk…