Totally agree and I think the root cause are today's larger screen sizes, less constraints. Win95 was designed at a time when 800x600 and 1024x768 have been the standards to work with.
Claude helped me to rewire my first digital Märklin model train. It pulled the documentation of the control keyboards 6040 and told me how to wire them properly to the routers.
And I restored an old vintage amp with the help of schematics, multimeter and Claude. That was really cool.
I'm studying old operating systems, because it's very interesting how we've been so productive with less screen pixels than we have today. It's basically mind blowing that 800x600 pixels have been a long time enough to get work done.
Currently I'm typing this on an iPhone 17 with a larger screen and after all the years there is nothing like a good charting, dashboarding or spreadsheet on it.
Looks interesting, but missing notarization and source code gives me a headache in this world of vibe coded apps. But glad you enjoyed the afternoon with Claude and get a personal reincarnation of Winamp for your box.
I totally agree with the author that Windows GUIs and MacOS GUIs are getting worse with every iteration. For my own side project I used ImGUI and it's working great for my purpose.
It's by far not as beautiful rendered as the native OS layers, but easy to navigate and a good foundation for cross platform GUI development. And I got it even approved for the MacOS app store. Here's my write up: https://marchildmann.com/blog/imgui-mac-app-store/
LOL ... I can absolutely feel your pain. That's exactly why I created for myself a graphical approach. I shared the first version with friends and it turned into "ColumnLens" (ImGUI on Mac) app. Here is a use case from the healthcare industry: https://columnlens.com/industries/medical