> I think in general we are losing a lot of functionality especially since the phone UIs are slowly creeping into the desktop. Discoverability and consistency are simply horrible compared to how things worked around 2000. I think it's a huge regression.

Indeed. Remember when every icon had a tooltip that told you what it would do? Remember when it shipped with a book that also told you what each thing did?

I recently used an app that was a unified phone/pc interface and I was pretty sure that somewhere in a list of icons was a thing I wanted, but wasn't sure which. I picked the wrong one and then had to figure out howto undo what I had just done.

Oh yeah, phone UI infecting desktop design is a real shame as well. These are just different types of devices.

I think I lightly disagree. Phones are just not good for complex use-cases. I don’t want a context menu on my phone, the depth of interactions in a browser for example should be… slide the webpage this way, slide it that way, poke a link (or, I guess, to be leave room for what I’m doing now, poke a text box to write in it). Dumbing down the UI was a good idea.

>and a universal menu bar equivalent

webOS, the poster child for simple and consistent UI, did all of this.

Much like the Amiga, this OS is always imitated, never copied, even though Android should have thrown out everything after Honeycomb to adopt what it brought to the table.