[HN Gopher] Hello Mac OS X Tiger
___________________________________________________________________
Hello Mac OS X Tiger
Author : ronyfadel
Score : 301 points
Date : 2022-01-17 12:38 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bunn.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (bunn.dev)
| j4yav wrote:
| I don't know if it's nostalgia but somehow this interface looks
| more lively and friendly to me than modern MacOS which feels
| flatter and has less personality (to me personally).
| nly wrote:
| I agree. Modern UIs are soulless
| petepete wrote:
| I agree to an extent but the thought of having an application
| spread across seven or eight windows makes me feel nauseous.
| ptx wrote:
| It helps that you can press Command+Option+H to hide all
| other windows (from other applications) to reduce clutter.
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| It can be a good way to make use of smaller screens (e.g.
| on laptops). Multiple "virtual desktops" makes it easier to
| manage
| dijonman2 wrote:
| I use many, many windows and tools to help me switch
| including virtual desktops. Carryover from X11 days.
| abraxas wrote:
| Yeah, it's like everyone fell in love with the X/Athena
| widgets all of a sudden. I'd never have guessed that after
| all these years we'd go back to UIs looking like this: https:
| //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Athena_Widgets#/media/File:S...
| sneak wrote:
| Apple's post-Steve brain drain is real, and a lot of the
| internal redesign projects are now simply resume-driven
| development.
|
| A lot of the people working on these systems weren't working
| professionally when 10.0 came out. Most of those people have
| moved on. Apple is not the same humans.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| A corporation is neither a human nor an AI.
|
| A corporation is a shield behind which humans plot and
| practice their most deliberate, libidinous schemes of
| avarice, moderated not by morality or community, but only by
| laws and markets. And for that, corporations have lawyers,
| resumes and advertising.
|
| It is a rare corporation that retains a soul for longer than
| its founders presence, because lawyers, resumes and
| advertising cannot sense what founders could: a creative
| future.
| hhh wrote:
| I would think an increasing amount don't remember it either.
| I was three at the time. The earliest OS X version I remember
| hearing about was Tiger, and I used Leopard.
| lalwanivikas wrote:
| Is it possible to get it(old look) back? I tried searching for
| it but did not find anything promising.
| SllX wrote:
| Any method I can think of to replace UI assets would be prone
| to breaking with every patch Apple pushes out. I'm not going
| to say it's impossible, but it's probably not worth your
| time. If you want to explore what the UI felt like, you're
| better off exploring VMs or old hardware and install media.
| Klonoar wrote:
| To be honest, with the way Apple does support for releases
| 1 or 2 back from current, you could potentially do this
| easier nowadays: just don't support the current version
| (e.g Monterey), only target Catalina or Big Sur. When
| Monterey is no longer the new one (only receiving security
| patches), that's when you roll it forward.
| can16358p wrote:
| To be honest I really kept away from that old Mac interface for
| years. When they switched to a cleaner and flatter design, I
| literally went "now I want to jump on Apple ecosystem". Same
| for iOS 7 update.
|
| They weren't the only or primary reasons but they had
| significant role. I personally love the new flat interfaces
| MUCH more TBH.
| anthk wrote:
| Flat interfaces today on desktops are unusable compared to
| OSX Tiger, KDE3 and Windows 9x/2k/XP.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Absolutely. It feels like playing battlefield. Just like
| you do not see the soldiers in that game, you don't know
| where the buttons or clickable things are. Does this page
| when scroll? Who knows. Maybe it does.
| dijit wrote:
| I understand some of what you mean with this.
|
| I couldn't really stand the tiger-era MacOS either; but early
| iOS and *MacOS Snow Leopard* we're the _pinnacle_ of UI /UX
| for me.
|
| I still remember the high pixel density of the devices being
| shown off so well with the crisp rendition of paper and
| leather. The way it felt like it was popping off the screen.
|
| Back then I had really good eyesight (I was 20-22~) and those
| UI elements sold me on the quality of the hardware.
|
| That, and it was much smoother in it's animations than
| android/windows/compiz.
| can16358p wrote:
| All of them were the right choice for their time though.
| Especially early iPhone and its skeuomorphic design taught
| (practically) the whole world how to use a touch interface
| with buttons, lists etc. and it looked great for the time.
| Similar for old Macs too. Then flat design, IMO, cleaned up
| the general UI after teaching it.
| mirkules wrote:
| I still have a working 2007 16" MacBook Pro (fully loaded 4GB
| of RAM, yeah!). It's not just the software that was better but
| the hardware too. That keyboard has so much travel compared to
| these newer ones, it's crazy. It actually feels like a real
| keyboard.
| tomxor wrote:
| I've got a 2009 MBP, After continuous use enough of the
| keyboard domes finally cracked to become (almost) unusable
| after 10 years (made it Linux after 5 after Apple
| abandonment), now a lot of the keys are mush but still
| actually work.
|
| i duno... "they don't make em like they used to"? :P
| jacobolus wrote:
| The newest generation of Apple keyboards has a bit more
| travel than the previous generation, but the laptops from 15
| years ago are nicer. None of them come close to the glory of
| this keyboard though:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Portable
| pram wrote:
| Wow that thing looks bigger than the IIc I had. Portable
| indeed!
| salamandersauce wrote:
| It is. Also really heavy because it used a lead acid
| battery. It was also wired in such a way that if the
| battery died it wouldn't turn on anymore unlike modern
| laptops that can run off the AC adapter directly. My
| parents threw theirs out because of that.
| jagger27 wrote:
| 15" or 17"? I have a PowerBook G4 from the same era, and I
| think the keyboard is the same as that. Indeed it has better
| travel, but I find the keys are slightly wobbly and a bit
| unrefined. Having torn one apart a while ago, I'd suspect
| it's due to looser tolerances than more modern designs. I
| think ThinkPads from the same era have significantly better
| keyboards. They're less mushy and have a better texture.
| jacobolus wrote:
| The wobble in keyswitches is often intentional: it prevents
| keys from binding when pressed off-axis, and makes them a
| bit more forgiving when they get dust inside.
|
| I didn't like the older thinkpad keyboards; noticeably too
| stiff for my taste. But this IBM "portable" keyboard is a
| dream: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_5100
| csdvrx wrote:
| I just don't understand how many people prefer these
| keyboards.
|
| Key travel is only important to assist in your typing +
| provide feedback, but unless you type like a brute (I've
| a friend whom I would NEVER lend my laptop too, as I
| would be worried for my keyboard) or have sensory nerve
| issues like from diabetes, you don't need much travel.
|
| I was dubious of the newest Lenovo keyboards, but after
| using my X1 Nano for a few hours, I was convinced: while
| the keys themselves have less travel, it has a strong
| opposing force that gives a lot of feedback.
|
| It's still a bit too stiff for my taste (it seems to have
| been made for big burly guys) and I'd prefer something
| more like the current Macbook keyboards, a self-avowed
| heresy for any Thinkpad fan :)
| jagger27 wrote:
| It's funny to think about Lenovo making the X1 Nano for
| big burly guys.
|
| It's too bad that laptop switches will likely never see
| the huge and varied aftermarket that we have with
| mechanical keyboards. There's a switch for everyone, and
| it'll work in almost any keyboard if you're handy with a
| soldering iron or have one with hotswappable switch
| sockets.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > It's too bad that laptop switches will likely never see
| the huge and varied aftermarket that we have with
| mechanical keyboards. There's a switch for everyone
|
| Is there one for me, who likes little key travel,
| softness, and silence?
|
| So far the best solution I've found : thinkpad USB
| keyboards everywhere :)
| jagger27 wrote:
| Possibly a lightweight Kailh Choc linear switch? They're
| very soft and quiet, but they have no tactility. The
| tactile ones leave a bit to be desired. It's hard to
| match rubber domes there.
|
| https://mkultra.click/choc-switches
| csdvrx wrote:
| > It's hard to match rubber domes there.
|
| Indeed. Even if it's antithetical to the mechanical
| keyboard idea, I wish MX style keycaps (wide
| availability, for ex this is how I could get a Cyrillic
| keyboard) could be made compatible with rubber domes
| (with no mechanical switch)
| jagger27 wrote:
| This was somewhat common with Alps, actually. They made a
| rubber dome slider that was compatible with their
| mechanical mount.
|
| https://deskthority.net/wiki/Alps_dome_with_slider
| jagger27 wrote:
| > a bit more forgiving when they get dust inside.
|
| It's a tough engineering problem, that's for sure. I
| agree that older ThinkPads are a little bit stiff.
|
| Apple went too far with butterfly, but I think they
| landed a good place with their current line up. They have
| very little wobble. Cherry MX switches (and clones) are
| excellent in terms of off-axis binding. Some clones are
| significantly less wobbly than others, for various
| reasons but none of them sacrifice off-axis performance.
| It took decades to get to this point though.
|
| On a related, Alps mechanical switches are notorious for
| dust and dirt ingress issues as they get older and
| they're extremely hard to clean. For some reason Cherry
| MX switches have fared much better over the years.
| pivo wrote:
| I still have one of those too. I do love the keyboard on
| that, it feels very luxurious to me, but I have to admit I
| can't type as fast as I can on my 2019 MBP work or 2021 M1
| personal MacBook Pros.
|
| I'm definitely in the minority in that I actually prefer the
| 2019 keyboard over the others. It's the "fixed" version with
| the rubber gasket that prevents dirt getting in the works and
| I've never had an issue with a stuck key. Maybe it's because
| I'm a very light typist, but the 2019 butterfly keyboard
| never leaves my fingers feeling tired after a day of typing,
| where the 2007 keyboard did.
| [deleted]
| ImprovedSilence wrote:
| Wow, Agreed. The window shadows here really help them pop way
| more than I remember, and they seem to do a much better job
| delineating overlapping windows than the current "styles".
| yoz-y wrote:
| macOS still has window shadows and they are still the same
| size (by eyeballing them). The only difference is that in
| dark mode the shadows are of course less visible because the
| contents of windows are darker.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| At some point, window shadows became much more diffused. I
| think the release that implemented this change was mountain
| lion.
|
| I keep a Snow Leopard VM around to occasionally run old
| software in and the difference in shadow size is always
| striking. I personally like the more focused look of
| pre-10.7 shadows.
| yoz-y wrote:
| Ah yes. When looking at it it does indeed look darker
| towards the window in the screenshots.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Definitely. It feels lively and exciting. Jonny Ive's decision
| to go with flat killed all joy in the UI space and millions of
| designers copied it mindlessly which I find especially
| egregious.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| My nostalgia is that iPhone rumor render at the bottom. Kind of
| love and want it.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| Same. I remember a lot more of that type of content around
| that era (2005-2012) - does anyone know where there's similar
| content now?
| Toutouxc wrote:
| What do you mean by "similar content"? For unreleased
| device rumors and leaks there's https://www.macrumors.com.
| TillE wrote:
| There's definitely some ugly bits from that era, but I
| miss...color.
|
| My favorite example are the icons in the iTunes sidebar, which
| used to be distinctly colored (and therefore quickly and easily
| distinguishable!) and then became a dull grey. It looks
| incredibly bland _and_ it 's harder to use.
|
| Now it's split into multiple apps with monochromatic sidebars,
| which is slightly less boring but no more usable.
| macNchz wrote:
| I had some firsthand experience of how many people were
| bothered by the grey iTunes icon change after I released a
| little hack to restore them. The demand blew through a month
| of my web hosting bandwidth in a couple of hours, and people
| kept sending me emails about it for years! Comment from a
| previous discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24638381
| gurkendoktor wrote:
| Thanks! I think I've used that, and a SIMBL bundle for
| Finder when it became necessary.
| kergonath wrote:
| Hey I think I used that! That's about 10 years late, but
| thank you!
| philistine wrote:
| Imagine if they kept the monochrome design but gave every
| icon a different shade of red. It would get us so much closer
| to the colourful past !
| duxup wrote:
| I ran into a site I was fixing that used an older css
| framework.
|
| Buttons had depth and looked like candy.... I really liked
| them.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| I think, in general, UIs back then felt more "human": soft,
| intuitive, yes, sometimes a bit clunky, and yes, sometimes with
| contradictions (like any human being). Now they feel more
| "robotic": harsh, darker (or is it that designers nowadays tend
| to use softened colors?), precise as any machine (but this
| doesn't always mean that they are easier for humans to use).
| Robotic, though, doesn't seem too far off: society is becoming
| more and more robotic I believe.
| bluedino wrote:
| IMO the last few versions of the Classic MacOS were the peak.
| There was a lot of hate for Aqua and the fisher-price look.
| Remember the pinstripes?
|
| Tiger was a big improvement. And, the earlier versions of OS X
| still look way better than what we have now.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| Tiger remains to this day my favourite look for macOS. It's
| not that I don't like the modern look, but there's something
| incredibly friendly and inviting about the 10.4 era Aqua
| interface. I wish you could still skin macOS because I'd
| totally run a Tiger desktop on modern macOS if I could. Best
| I can get is a brushed metal theme for Firefox to mimic old-
| school Safari!
| varunprasad wrote:
| The Tiger -> Snow Leopard period was amazing.
|
| Tiger: Great new UI. Spotlight. Dashboard. Leopard: Quick
| Look. Time Machine. I hated it from a functional
| perspective, but wow it looked amazing. Snow Leopard: They
| just cleaned up everything.
| wyclif wrote:
| Snow Leopard was also probably the most stable Mac OS X
| ever. I had it for years and I don't ever remember it
| crashing under duress.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Tiger looks over a Snow Leopard core. What more could
| anyone possibly want?
| hyperbovine wrote:
| Do not fear--it's only a matter of time before the "design
| conscious" crowd, which includes a large contingent of
| Apple employees, alights on the year 2005 as the pinnacle
| of "retro" and starts creating throwback versions of
| everything. By my estimation we're at about 1994 right now
| so ...
| csdvrx wrote:
| ... in 10 years, as the cycle of nostalgia takes about 30
| years.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| I literally have a playlist called 'modern 80s' which is
| 2020s music releases that kind of sound like they're from
| the '80s. I definitely subscribe to the 30 year nostalgia
| theory!
| adfm wrote:
| It used to be 20. 70s-->50s (American Graffiti, Grease,
| Happy Days), 80s-->60s (Summer of Love, Touch of Gray,
| Love Shack), 90s-->70s (Tarantino, lowrise bell bottoms),
| 00->80s... When you're 18-25, your model is the previous
| generation. Around 30, the pattern resolves and your
| grandparents somehow become sophisticated in hindsight.
| Uehreka wrote:
| There were a lot of bands harkening back to an 80's sound
| in the 2000's, and people were saying that the "retro
| cycle" was therefore 20 years (if it was recurring in the
| 2020's that'd be 40 years). But I think someone could
| make the case that the 80's have just become the
| permanent retro decade, and that everything since 2000
| has been subsumed into a sort of "infinite present".
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| I think the internet and free universal frictionless
| undifferentiated unbiased access to recordings has made
| all sounds equally available at all times, starting
| somewhere in the 90's, and that has made anyone who was
| born after that point perceive them a bit differently
| than before.
|
| I have a neice who was born in 96. When she was 10 or so
| I found out she was listening to both Green Day and Patsy
| Kline with essentially equal interest.
|
| That's when I got this idea.
|
| She was born entirely after not only the existense of
| recordings that go back at least a few generations, not
| only after the existense of the internet, but after the
| mass adoption of the internet, digital copies of
| recordings, and countless distribution means, both
| centralized and peer to peer. The essential nature was
| not that different from today, the day she was born, let
| alone 10 years later.
|
| For me, Patsy Kline was only on the oldies station at my
| grandmas house and the barber shop and which actually
| called itself the oldies station, and my parents wouldn't
| be caught dead listening to Green Day.
|
| For my neice they are both just content.
| Shared404 wrote:
| Born in 2001 here, and can confirm.
|
| I can go from Yes, to Twenty One Pilots, to Kansas, to
| TheFatRat, to Johnny Cash, to random youtuber, to Linkin
| Park, to Guns 'n Roses, to Elvis, and so on.
|
| They're all just there, there's good stuff from every
| time period - why would you limit yourself?
| majormajor wrote:
| I think there's a technological aspect too where after
| 2000 or so, nobody has really figured out as many new
| novel sounds to make with synthesizers or turntables or
| instruments or whatever. The technology of music
| instrument/tool development plateaued, so the novelty
| started to as well.
| Uehreka wrote:
| I'd definitely disagree on that front. Though I do think
| there's been a bit of a logarithmic curve, the difference
| in what was possible in 2000 vs 2022 is pretty huge.
| Like, listen to Animal Collective's Merriweather Post
| Pavilion (2009) or any of James Blake, Jamie XX or
| Burial's stuff from the past decade. Not all of that was
| impossible before 2000, but you'd have a hard time
| finding people making music with those timbres (outside
| maybe some really cutting edge IDM).
|
| Oh and don't forget auto-tune ;) Although there are a few
| examples of it being used for pitch correction before
| 2000 (+ that Cher song), it wasn't until the 2000's that
| it got ratcheted up to T-Pain levels.
| majormajor wrote:
| How does the magnitude of that difference compare to vs
| 1980, and then to 1960, though? Both in terms of the
| possibilities and in terms of how much the possibility
| space had been explored?
| contidrift wrote:
| >But I think someone could make the case that the 80's
| have just become the permanent retro decade, and that
| everything since 2000 has been subsumed into a sort of
| "infinite present".
|
| As if we lived in the Matrix.
| angio wrote:
| My favorite thing about Tiger was that at the end of its
| life cycle it was incredibly stable.
| lostgame wrote:
| Which is pretty incredible, since Tiger was the first
| public version of OSX to have distros for both PPC and
| Intel!
|
| Tiger was solid - Leopard was where it was at. Snow
| Leopard may be my favourite, but as I can't run it on any
| of my PPC systems I have no excuse to run it anymore.
| gurkendoktor wrote:
| I actually liked Expose a lot more in Tiger and Leopard
| than in Snow Leopard, where all windows were resized to a
| grid, and you lost relative window sizes as a visual cue.
| Thankfully, there was a hack to get Leopard Expose in
| Snow Leopard, by overwriting a binary with one from a
| beta! https://superuser.com/a/212717
|
| There were hacks for absolutely everything. Simpler
| times...
| Klonoar wrote:
| IIRC there was a hack to make it work on PPC machines,
| no?
|
| Or there was a hack to backport certain things from Snow
| Leopard onto Leopard PPC...
| kergonath wrote:
| It was in the middle of the 64bit transition, as well.
| lostgame wrote:
| I actually still use a quad core G5 with 16GB(!) of RAM,
| and 2x1TB SSDs for some audio production work in Logic 9.
|
| 64-bit started for me back when the G5 came out, and
| today that G5 _screams_ , easily feeling as responsive as
| my girlfriend's M1 MacBook Air most of the time.
|
| It's almost unbelievable how the G5 performs like it's
| got bloody Sonic the Hedgehog trapped in there on a
| hamster wheel generator. My Intel machines never came
| close, and a lot of it seemed to have to do with major
| bloat as the OS moved along. Probably also bloat in
| Logic. My G5 can handle the hell of a lot more effects
| and VSTs with about 50% the impact they have on my Intel
| machines. It's surreal.
|
| I also find it absolutely pathetic and astounding that up
| until this year (16 inch MBP excluded) the maximum RAM a
| MacBook could have was the equivalent of a computer I got
| in 2005. 15 years later I still couldn't get even 32GB
| RAM in a MacBook. And it was soldered so it couldn't be
| upgraded. Shameful.
| kergonath wrote:
| The 8 DIMM slots don't fit in a laptop anyway ;)
| Seriously though, the 16GB limit was mostly due to the
| Intel parts not supporting more LP-DDR.
|
| But yeah these things were beasts. The dual-CPU and then
| the dual dual-core were seriously impressive. I really
| wanted one at the time but could not justify it. I
| finally got one for EUR100 2 years ago, now it sits next
| to a G4 Cube. Both are some exceptional pieces of
| engineering.
| SllX wrote:
| I miss a lot of things about the 10.4-10.6 era. Brushed
| metal Safari is not one of those things.
|
| As I recall, per the HIG, the official line on brushed
| metal was that it was for apps that interacted with
| physical hardware in some direct way: portable music
| players, synch. managers, optical drives, disks, something.
| Now if you think that's vague, you're not wrong; most apps
| could at least print something, and it wasn't applied
| consistently even within the iLife suite which up until the
| inclusion of iWeb consisted entirely of apps that were
| intended to bring the Mac and peripheral devices together
| (CDs, digital cameras, MP3 Players/iPods, DV cameras,
| SuperDrives, MIDI). This vagueness and the low popularity
| of brushed metal Safari in particular was one of the
| reasons the brushed metal theming was retired after Tiger.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| I know I'm in a minority with brushed metal but I really
| liked it, yes its official usage guide was vague and it
| probably was abused a bit but from a purely aesthetic
| point of view I liked it, like a lot of things in Aqua of
| that era it made things feel very tangible. I'm one of
| the apparently few people on HN who actually liked the
| touch bar (but not the lack of a physical escape key) on
| the MacBook Pro as well so take my opinion with a pinch
| of salt!
| xattt wrote:
| Brushed metal worked because you were already touching a
| surface that was a similar texture as the UI.
| SllX wrote:
| Only on a MacBook Pro or PowerBook. Not accounting for
| 3rd party accessories: iBooks, MacBooks, Apple's Mice &
| Pro Mice, Mighty Mice, Apple's Pro Keyboards, Apple
| Keyboards and Apple Remotes were all plastic at the time,
| and mostly white or translucent plastic with a couple of
| exceptions.
|
| The aluminum stuff all came about just immediately prior
| to (about one or two month's prior) or after Leopard's
| release, but Tiger's era (and Brushed Metal didn't start
| on Tiger) was dominated by plastic input devices.
| SllX wrote:
| That's fair, but I found it grating in any app I looked
| at for a decent length of time, like web browsers. I
| think brushed metal with stricter usage guidelines
| (followed by Apple) that wasn't per App but per Window-
| type could have stuck around. Having some way to
| distinguish Apps and window types in Expose isn't that
| worst thing in the world and was about the only redeeming
| aspect of Apple's Lion theming choices.
|
| Anyway, I used Firefox and Camino around that time.
| kergonath wrote:
| I loved Aqua, particularly after they toned down the pin
| stripes and transparency, so, yes, around Tiger (and up until
| around Snow Leopard). It was indeed a great step forward in
| terms of UI, which cannot be said of many more recent
| releases.
| philistine wrote:
| Everybody is very positive about Tiger's UI, but what I
| remember were the disjointed elements. Brushed metal was
| prevalent in many apps, and completely broke the UI's look.
|
| Even though we have many gaping holes in the details of the
| current UI due to the many paradigms (SwiftUI, AppKit,
| Catalyst), skin-deep macOS is much more agreeable.
| kergonath wrote:
| Yeah brushed metal from the experiments in Panther was
| still too present. It got better with Leopard.
|
| Cocoa apps are mostly fine in modern macOS. Their main
| issues are the lack of contrast*, but things like the
| dark theme are great. From what I have seen SwiftUI is
| fine too, although it still has some way to go to catch
| up with AppKit, and has some rough edges. Catalyst is
| plain garbage, though.
|
| * a pet peeve: I have to click 3 times when I want to
| make sure that the shuffle mode is either on or off in
| Music. Another one: document proxy icons are getting
| hidden and harder to use, even though they are a
| fantastic feature of the OS. There's a bunch of others
| features that are becoming more and more obscure, which
| is a damn shame.
| queuebert wrote:
| Since this opinion seems near universal, is there any
| explanation for what the heck Apple is doing?
| ryanf wrote:
| It's not universal, people just don't bother writing posts
| with the opposite perspective because it's boring. Tiger
| was my first version of OS X and I think what we have now
| looks much better.
| asdff wrote:
| Project manager driven decision-making. Everyone wants to
| make a name for themselves, so every update gets a big UI
| overhaul even when it doesn't need one. Features get taken
| away when they don't need to be. Workflows get redone when
| they don't have to be redone. Imagine if this were to
| happen for something as important as Bash, people would
| revolt and fork, but in the big tech world you are beholden
| to these corporate products.
|
| It's not just apple, its everything in big tech. Venmo just
| released an update where they moved key workflows around
| for no reason at all, and now I don't have muscle memory
| for the app anymore, but I'm sure some project manager
| justified it with telemetry and got a huge bonus for
| rolling out an update and showing downloads grew by 1%
| (which they probably would have anyway).
| md_ wrote:
| "Project" or "product?"
| sbuk wrote:
| It's rose-tinted glasses. Every release meets the same same
| level of criticism as to how it's the end of macOS, how the
| interface design is a regression towards infantilism. It
| has been ever thus, even in the System/OS 7, 8, 9 days. The
| difference now is that macOS is more mainstream.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Yep. Everyone is cool with all the change that was
| necessary to get software to the point where they were
| most emotionally attached to it, and all change after
| that is "useless meddling that no one likes and is only
| done to give PMs and designers a job."
| nitrogen wrote:
| This massively oversimplifies the state of technology and
| is unfairly dismissive of the significant productivity
| hit that some changes can inflict on the most loyal and
| experienced users.
| tshaddox wrote:
| It's certainly possible for changes in UI to
| significantly harm productivity, but you would need to
| systematically gather evidence to know if this is
| happening. Whether it's happening is almost completely
| independent of anyone's individual feeling of frustration
| at needing to learn about and adapt to new UI changes.
|
| But more importantly, they existence of change is
| _inherently_ important to the large-scale advancement of
| computing over time. Even if it is the case that a
| certain UI overhaul of a major operating system harmed
| productivity, the solution is _not_ "permanently halt all
| software changes after this specific version that I have
| learned and enjoy using." We ought to reject arguments
| that forced stasis is the solution any time changes
| introduce risk.
| gurkendoktor wrote:
| Mh, I don't know. Some of the changes that people
| complain the most about (from Leopard's 3D dock to Safari
| 15 tabs) were undone by Apple. And for some changes that
| haven't been undone, like monochrome icons everywhere, I
| still mis-click things so often that I doubt it's just
| nostalgia.
|
| If you'd let people mix and match elements from different
| eras of macOS, I'm sure you'd see some patterns
| regardless of when people got into Macs; similar to how
| people have lots of abstract opinions about architecture,
| but somehow the tourist buses always stop at the same
| cozy-looking old towns. Beauty and usability are not
| entirely subjective.
| sbuk wrote:
| I've been an Apple user since the early 80's. Apple being
| simultaneously the gods of UI and scourge of UI have been
| a constant, along with the 'doomed' narrative. A lot of
| this is the peanut gallery repeating what they've heard,
| as well as exaggeration of the issues individuals face.
| For instance, in the 40 or so years that I've used
| computers, I believe they have never been more user-
| friendly than they are now _for the typical user_. Not
| just Macs, but Windows and Linux's desktops too. Reading
| opinions here would make you think the opposite is true,
| but here is full of people that love to tinker, and fewer
| seem to want to go back to the "good old days". Hence the
| 'rose tinted glasses' comment. I was there, it wasn't
| that great! I jest, well a little bit anyway. I remember
| Tiger being released and a-not-insignificant-amount of
| people complaining about brushed metal. As I said, it has
| been ever this. Long may it continue - it makes us that
| do care think.
| champagnois wrote:
| They are in the Windows 8 phase of design. They want to
| merge mouse and keyboard systems with touch systems, and
| are thusly forcing mouse and keyboard users to use
| interface conventions that are derived from touch
| platforms.
|
| Mobile platforms benefit more from high contrast, very
| simple and flat designs.
|
| Beyond just the touch screen convenience features -- A
| significant portion of users is seeig their UI under
| conditions of extreme sunlight, water droplets, or cracked
| screen at any given time. These things all inform design
| choices for mobile.
|
| Now then, why is Apple making the same mistake as Microsoft
| Windows 8 by forcing these design elements onto Desktop and
| Laptop market segments? Apple doesn't really think of the
| PC market much. According to their financial reports, they
| make more money selling chargers for their mobile devices
| than they do on the entire PC market.
|
| The answer, I assume, is apathy.
| arrrg wrote:
| Apple isn't merging mouse and keyboard systems, though.
| Not in macOS. So that hypothesis is complete bunk.
|
| This design move is at this point getting to be a decade
| old. So this explanation from you makes zero sense.
| slategruen wrote:
| This. macOS has been in an incremental phase for several
| years now. Windows 8 was a major overhaul from Microsoft
| which ended up as a big mistake since they didn't
| consider the impact of such an overhaul in terms of user
| experience. macOS on the other hand is quite mature and
| Apple knows that any major change would hurt users in the
| end.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Was Big Sur one of those "incremental" updates?
| champagnois wrote:
| Just an "incremental" update where they added touch
| screen apps (from the iPhone and iPad) to the desktop and
| laptop experience. Oh, they also changed the system tray
| to mimic the touch functionality of iPads 1:1 as well,
| despite being a (far more precise) mouse pointer
| controlled system. Incremental they say. I was way off
| base and taking crazy pills when I saw any relationship
| between these design elements and touch interfaces.
| jen20 wrote:
| Yes.
| champagnois wrote:
| The latest design elements feel straight from iPad OS
| imo. They also have had a focus on allowing iOS installs
| onto MacOS. This is from BigSur onward.
|
| I was mostly describing my feelings and guesses of it.
| batman-farts wrote:
| I was one of the Aqua haters, but I got used to it quick
| after installing OS X Public Beta and switching it to the
| graphite color scheme. Doesn't mean I don't miss OS 9
| Platinum, though. I'd be interested to hear from anybody who
| spent time using the Dark Platinum/NeXT hybrid desktop of
| Rhapsody and OS X Server 1.0/1.2, although I have to wonder
| if there was ever anyone who used the server OS as a daily
| driver.
|
| Fun fact: OS X Public Beta had an Easter egg setting that I
| can't quite remember, defaults write com.Apple.something or
| other, that would set all Cocoa apps to a straight-up
| NeXTSTEP appearance. It completely broke usability, though,
| as windows would minimize into little squares in the corner
| of the screen a la NS rather than into the dock.
| warning26 wrote:
| _> Fun fact: OS X Public Beta had an Easter egg setting
| that I can't quite remember, defaults write
| com.Apple.something or other, that would set all Cocoa apps
| to a straight-up NeXTSTEP appearance. It completely broke
| usability, though, as windows would minimize into little
| squares in the corner of the screen a la NS rather than
| into the dock._
|
| Wow I've never read about this -- know of any screenshots?
| Would be really interesting to see what some of the default
| OS X apps looked with the NeXTSTEP appearance.
| Lammy wrote:
| You could move/rename the `Extras.rsrc` file in `/System/
| Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks
| /HIToolbox.framework/Versions/A/Resources/` and disable
| Aqua in the very early versions, returning lots of things
| to a Mac OS X DP2-style Platinum appearance:
|
| https://macosx-dev.omnigroup.narkive.com/WZX5AkMk/extras-
| rsr...
|
| https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macosxdp2
|
| I also like to use Jagwire's Extras.rsrc on Tiger to get
| my sweet sweet pinstripes back:
| https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/jaguar-ui-on-tiger-
| proj...
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| It's not exactly what you're asking for, but this Twitter
| thread from Stephen Troughton-Smith has screenshots of
| several stock OS X apps as they changed from
| NeXT/OpenSTEP - Rhapsody/OS X Server - Developer Previews
| - Public Beta - final release.
|
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1125050952506052609.ht
| ml
| majormajor wrote:
| At the time, some of us went out of the way to get rid of the
| blue parts of Aqua in particular.
|
| Was the graphite option for gray button bubbles available in
| 10.0? I can't remember anymore.
|
| Interestingly, though, Aqua holds up better than the Brushed
| Metal OS X phase.
| sebow wrote:
| (In case there needs to be a reminder) Take a look at
| hellosystem if you want this kind of interface on a modern
| OS(FreeBSD, that is).Yes, it's nowhere near a complete solution
| for most work or even some average usage, but it looks
| promising and we don't deal with apple.
| johnebgd wrote:
| Scott Forstall was fired for the Apple Maps mess up. He
| championed good designs like this. When he left it was a race
| to the bottom at Apple for their UI/UX.
| marstall wrote:
| funny I was thinking this would demonstrate that Xcode and
| Interface Builder were easier to grok for a beginner than they
| are today, but it seems it was just as particular then as it is
| today.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Lovely!
|
| It's just missing the part where half way through, osx and xcode
| updates and your existing app no longer builds on your machine
| nor runs on anyone else's.
|
| My ascerbic observations about the platform aside, I love this,
| both in it's current context, and would have loved it at the
| time. Thank you!
| jedberg wrote:
| Why would you use Yahoo in 2005? I'm pretty sure Google was
| already the more popular search engine by then, especially for
| people looking for developer documentation.
|
| Edit: Best data I can find shows Google was about 35%, Yahoo 30%,
| and MSN 15%. So I guess it was a toss up if you were using Yahoo
| or Google, but I seem to recall everyone I knew who was a
| developer preferred Google because it did a better job finding
| developer docs.
| dhofer wrote:
| There is a collection of redrawn high-resolution Mac OS X Tiger
| wallpapers at https://hector.me/aqueux
|
| After all those years it's still the best.
| johnebgd wrote:
| During this era Apple sent third party official devs a shirt when
| the new OS released. I still have mine but they are quite worn
| out from all the wear. Wish they still did that but I appreciate
| how much less expensive Apple developer accounts are these days.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| This was really fun to read. Tiger was before my time - does
| anyone know of good resources on where things went from here?
| What were some of the first 3rd party native Mac apps?
| lkxijlewlf wrote:
| My favorite version of OS X was El Cap. Nothing since has been
| enjoyable.
|
| I get it, my preference, but I'm allowed.
| godDLL wrote:
| 10.8 was the last of agreeable direction for OSX for me.
|
| I'm running 10.12, for software compatibility reasons. Likely
| here our paths will split. Versions beyond this are of no
| interest to me.
| sgt wrote:
| My favorite is Mojave.. coincidentally the one I am running.
| pcdoodle wrote:
| Same.
| Normille wrote:
| Me too.
| grishka wrote:
| My favorite is Mavericks, the last one with skeuomorphism.
| miles wrote:
| For anyone on an M1 and feeling nostalgic, PPC versions of OS X
| run quite well in UTM/QEMU: https://tinyapps.org/docs/tiger-
| on-m1.html
| sophiebits wrote:
| > Next, go back to the MainMenu.xib, right click on your
| MainWindowController and select Instantiate MainWindowController
|
| .xib - Freudian slip? :)
| Shinchy wrote:
| I still love the way OSX Tiger looks, even after all these years.
| andrekandre wrote:
| i really feel the ui in tiger was just great... not perfect of
| course, but just feels peak (pre-darkmode) osx to me...
|
| btw, taping the rss link doesnt open my rss app on ios, i think
| it may be the mime-type isnt set?
| coolandsmartrr wrote:
| Tiger was a solid release from Apple that made me switch to the
| then-unstable Windows ecosystem. I guess back when you paid for
| software, Apple made sure to squash bugs so you were happy with
| it. Nowadays...
| matheweis wrote:
| About 20 years or so ago, I actually got Apple to replace an
| out of warranty motherboard for a paid os upgrade.
|
| Can't find a reference to it now [1] but there was some sort of
| somewhat known issue with the powerbook g3 that I had at the
| time that presented under os x, but not os 9.
|
| I argued successfully that it should be fixed under the
| "software warranty" because it said it was compatible with that
| powerbook, but the processor issue made it incompatible, and it
| worked.
|
| Imagine that happening today...
|
| [1] This CNET article alludes to it but doesn't go into much
| detail: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/lombard-powerbook-
| the-pr...
| Lammy wrote:
| It's kind of remarkable there weren't more issues than that
| considering Lombard was their very first "New World"
| portable, "PowerBook1,1"! Even the OG toilet-seat iBook comes
| afterward as "PowerBook2,1":
| https://macintoshgarden.org/apple-powermac-line-of-
| computers...
| philistine wrote:
| That New World switch is such an Earth-shaking change and
| it's basically forgotten. It was Steve Jobs' first big
| software transition before OS X was even decided on as the
| future of the company.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Tiger was good. Around this time I realized apple really wanted
| to decide how my music and photos were organized and weren't
| going to let go. Their control put me off it all. Fortunately I
| discovered Linux around this time.
| grishka wrote:
| Nowadays they think there's a need to release a major update to
| a feature-complete product every year because marketing said so
| and because project managers need something to justify their
| existence.
| slig wrote:
| One can tell this is absolutely true because _emoji_ updates
| are tied to major OS updates.
| grishka wrote:
| If only we could update _a font_ separately from the rest
| of the OS.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Switch _to_ or switch _from_?
| bonaldi wrote:
| This makes me more nostalgic for the old Interface Builder than
| it does Aqua. So much more straightforward to create
| actions/outlets and create the files than the current mess.
| smm11 wrote:
| I used Rhapsody for a couple years on a Thinkpad. It was very,
| very limited for what I was doing at the time, and the Lighthouse
| applications I could get running weren't anywhere near what
| anything else was, by the time I got them.
|
| My work laptop at the time was a G3 running System 8.6, which
| remains my favorite Apple OS to this day. I still have a G4 with
| 8.6 stuffed full of everything for the heck of it. And the
| Thinkpad.
| maxpert wrote:
| For the record to this day I believe this aqua pill styled
| interface was way more clean and attractive than the flat design.
| I've never been fan of flat interfaces, it's the reason I hated
| Windows 8 onwards interfaces. Skeuomorphism was just perfect!
| mfollert wrote:
| I really love this, thank you. This was so much me back then ...
| the switch from Windows to a Mac basically was my "awakening" as
| a dev.
| dmitriid wrote:
| An interface where all elements are distinguishable from each
| other..
| carlivar wrote:
| Because Jobs was still in control. As I understand it, this was
| a constant tension between Ive and Jobs. Of course Ive design
| eventually dominated after Jobs' death.
| grishka wrote:
| It appears to me that they're rolling back Ive's decisions,
| slowly but surely. There are skeuomorphic icons in Monterey,
| and I think there's fewer borderless crap.
|
| The one thing that does really grind my gears though --
| they've replaced all purpose-made icons in toolbars and such
| with some "universal" ones that completely disregard the
| existence of the pixel grid. There's literally not a single
| line in these icons that isn't blurry af.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > appears to me that they're rolling back Ive's decisions,
| slowly but surely
|
| And yet there's the completely washed out BigSur and
| Monterrey for which I recommend turning on contrast mode: h
| ttps://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1456894618000400385?s=20
| seumars wrote:
| OSX Tiger running on a Power Mac G5 was my dream setup I never
| could afford. Time flies.
| flatiron wrote:
| Someone had one of those g5s on eBay for a few hundo. Ones with
| the wheels. I regret not picking it up and at least putting bsd
| on it.
| chrizel wrote:
| I bought my first desktop Mac back in 2004 after owning an
| iBook 3G since 2002. And as a 19 year old software developer
| from Germany who finished his apprenticeship, I wanted the best
| Mac I could afford. I bought a Power Mac G5 - one of the first
| dual core models with water cooling. Was a lot of money back
| then and I waited months for it to arrive, but it was a great
| machine.
|
| Played a lot of World of Warcraft on this thing. :-) And did
| some Cocoa/Objective-C development. But it was never the big
| investment that I thought it would be. After the Intel switch
| in 2006, the Power Mac G5 didn't have much more use for me
| personally because the new Intel machines were so much
| better...
|
| Today I'm more into buying the cheaper machines for myself.
| Should have put the money from the Power Mac G5 into Apple
| stocks...
| Normille wrote:
| My first desktop Mac was an 8500. I bought it when I was a
| student and took out a loan to buy it at PS3500 second hand.
| Unbelievable how cheap computing power has become in such a
| relatively short time.
| srinathkrishna wrote:
| That was such a fun nostalgic ride! :)
| throwmeback wrote:
| I... don't get the nostalgia.
|
| Just for context, I'm 26, from a post-commie country, have been
| around computers since birth thanks to my dad. He wasn't
| technical, he just liked the new tech.
|
| What stinks to me: - I very much prefer 16:9/16:10 ratios (4:3
| begone)
|
| - Skeuomorphism was always very "uncanny valley" for me; I much
| prefer the Win95/OS 7/etc. designs than skeuomorphic ones, the
| current flat designs are better but way too saturated and I tend
| to lose my focus quickly
|
| - I vividly remember how lost and frustrated I was when those old
| IDEs would launch with multitudes of windows by default - most of
| them were never used by anyone and everyone would just click
| through to the main window; being a small child I didn't know
| what to do or where to start and nobody around me could help -
| this memory kept me disinterested with programming until I
| literally went to a programming bootcamp after my finals.
|
| - I really mean it! IMHO user friendliness is over the roof
| compared to those supposedly golden times.
| vintagedave wrote:
| > I vividly remember how lost and frustrated I was when those
| old IDEs would launch with multitudes of windows by default...
|
| Tiger and Xcode 2 is quite old and I think is not really the
| version of macOS many people yearn for. It was the first
| version many started using (10.0-10.3's graphics were terrible
| - pinstripes! - and 10.4 was the 'Redmond, Start Your
| Photocopiers' release which was genuinely exciting. Although
| I'd used OS X at uni, I bought my first Mac with 10.4 Tiger.
| Since for many it was the first used, it's what's remembered -
| but using Tiger this month, I realised that several things I
| fondly remembered were actually in newer versions.)
|
| The 'best' version is very likely 10.6 Snow Leopard (2009), or
| possibly Mavericks (2013), the last pre-flat-design OS X. Snow
| Leopard had a clean, fairly modern UI (so your concerns about
| multi-window were heard) yet was still joyful.
|
| > I very much prefer 16:9/16:10 ratios (4:3 begone)
|
| The iMac G4, which runs 10.4 Tiger and 10.5, has a 16:10 aspect
| ratio screen if you buy the 17" screen option. (Source: just
| bought one, to investigate if it's truly nostalgia or things
| really were better back then.)
|
| > I much prefer the Win95/OS 7/etc. designs than skeuomorphic
| ones
|
| Much of OS X was bright and colourful, with pretty graphics,
| which as you note is very different to Win95/OS 7. However the
| skeuomorphism wasn't as strong as its reputation is these days.
| Much of the interaction (say, Cover Flow) is what we'd today
| call skeuomorphic but really was just a fairly natural way to
| interact. The real skeuomorphic elements, like the Calendar app
| using stitched leather, were fairly rare.
|
| > the current flat designs are better but way too saturated and
| I tend to lose my focus quickly
|
| 100% agreed. I personally find it very hard to distinguish
| elements at a glance in modern macOS.
|
| > IMHO user friendliness is over the roof compared to those
| supposedly golden times.
|
| I think early 2000s OS X was not as golden as remembered, but
| mid-2000s to 2012 was extraordinary. OS X really ramped up and
| improved in those years. Then when they switched to flat
| design, they lost a lot of usability tweaks along with it.
| Running current and old OSX/macOS side by side on one desk, as
| I'm doing, you can clearly see it's the same OS, but today's
| has much more onscreen, taking more space, but has many small
| UX indicators missing, and yet despite the amount onscreen the
| design feels austere and soulless. I find UIs with UX hints
| built in to their design, and designed for visual beauty, both
| usable and pleasing for my mind the same way any beautiful
| object is, and I dearly miss them.
| classichasclass wrote:
| I wonder how your iMac G4's arm is. Seems like the 17"s and
| up all seem to suffer from stretched springs (the lower
| weight on the 15"s has preserved them).
| zepto wrote:
| I think the answer lies with the 'aesthetic usability effect',
| which is a well studied phenomenon. Basically people find
| visually appealing UI more usable even if it is objectively
| worse.
|
| https://www.nngroup.com/articles/aesthetic-usability-effect/
|
| Of course what we find aesthetically pleasing is a subjective
| function of our life experience.
| ptr wrote:
| Nostalgia is irrational and often felt for things that were
| objectively worse. I feel nostalgic about a lot of crap.
| Including Tiger.
| dgellow wrote:
| > - I very much prefer 16:9/16:10 ratios (4:3 begone)
|
| Have you tried 3:2? Best of both worlds IMHO, I will never go
| back to 16:9 or 16:10!
|
| My personal ranking: 3:2 > 16:10 > 4:3 > 16:9.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| Hard disagree on aspect ratios. I grew up on 4:3 which was
| great for working with text editors and long blocks of code.
| The switch to 16:9 felt like it was just driven by the movie
| industry for people who had nothing better to do but use their
| computer for multimedia consumption.
| randallsquared wrote:
| > _Apple releasing their first phone, which will likely run some
| kind of Cocoa in it. Good thing you already know how to write
| applications for it, right?_
|
| Awww. It must have been so shocking to MacOS devs when the iPhone
| was announced and it was web applications or nothing.
| Lammy wrote:
| Probably less so if they'd written a Dashboard widget (also a
| new feature in Tiger) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashcode
| draw_down wrote:
| sharikous wrote:
| Tiger was the apex of developer-friendly FOSS-friendly Apple.
|
| You can find the last official guide to modifying and compiling
| the xnu kernel from that time.
|
| Documentation was fabulous. I miss those times.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I do too. It was around this time I left my kiddie days as OS X
| dev behind and became an adolescent Linux dev. :) It's actually
| true, been using Linux since then, it was just a much better
| hacker environment.
| easton wrote:
| It's kind of sad when you find a great Apple doc that there's a
| 90% chance the top of the page says "Documentation Archive".
| toyg wrote:
| It's not just Apple. Microsoft also stopped producing first-
| party documentation on low-level technology, just because they
| wanted to stop people from using certain things even though
| they were still very much a fundamental part of Windows.
| sbuk wrote:
| The decline of 'FOSS-friendly' Apple coincides with the re-
| licensing of many projects under the GPLv3, which is decidedly
| enterprise-hostile by design. I concur that the developer
| documentation need improvement.
| fouc wrote:
| Or it has more to do with the "Embrace, extend, and
| extinguish" strategy that all big corporations engage in.
| smichel17 wrote:
| Can you elaborate on how GPLv3 is enterprise-hostile? My
| impression was that the main change was fixing the tivo
| loophole.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I believe that most corporate legal departments (who are
| the ones controlling what licenses can/can't be used, not
| the engineers) received GPLv3 as an end to simple ways to
| guarantee that GPL had no possibility of bringing legal
| trouble.
|
| Even if it's technically possible to comply with GPLv3
| without open sourcing proprietary code, there's enough
| caveats/hoop jumps involved that it was seen as too risky
| to even try. They don't want, "no legal issues as long as",
| they want a flat, unconditional "no legal issues ever".
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Well, GPLv3's installation instructions requirement more or
| less is targeted squarely at consumer electronics companies
| and that includes Apple. If Apple were to include GPLv3
| software in iOS, the only way to comply with the license
| would be to significantly alter their security model to
| include an owner override. While there are ways that Apple
| could still use GPLv3 software, not change their security
| model, and remain in compliance[0]; I imagine they decided
| it would be easier to just ban new GPL software in their OS
| entirely rather than deal with the compliance headaches.
|
| Apple in particular never shipped any GPLv3 software in
| their OS and stopped updating even v2 software. They used
| to be very heavy GCC users, but wrote their own
| permissively-licensed compiler that outdoes it in almost
| every way. In their defense, they actually wanted LLVM to
| be an upstream FSF project; but RMS famously lost the
| e-mail because he daily-drives barely functional ancient
| laptops. In a sense, that too is enterprise-hostility;
| albeit not owing to choice of license. I imagine that if
| the FSF had agreed to refactor GCC the way Apple wanted,
| Apple would have gone through the time and effort of GPLv3
| compliance.
|
| I'd also argue that GPLv3 didn't actually fix the TiVo
| loophole. It can't - not unless we're going to pull an SSPL
| and start writing copylefts that trip on software that
| merely runs alongside Linux. The way TiVo got around the
| GPLv2 installation instructions requirement was to make
| their own proprietary app enforce the kernel lockout rather
| than the bootloader, and prohibiting that would be very
| draconian.
|
| That being said, you also should take into account the
| historical context of GPLv3's announcement and development.
| The FSF had some pretty crazy ideas, like rolling the
| Affero clause into GPLv3, that probably scared people into
| dropping their upgrade clauses even if it never actually
| made it into an actual FSF license document. The end
| document we actually got is relatively tame, but the
| message the FSF sent was that they were willing to ship
| whatever license language they felt met their personal
| definition of software freedom. If you didn't like any new
| restrictions they added to your own code, tough.
|
| [0] Stuff that runs in a sandbox container and doesn't use
| private entitlements _probably_ isn 't violating GPLv3,
| because Apple hands out free dev accounts that let you
| compile and run whatever, albeit with some annoying
| requirements to renew the app's signature every week.
| sbuk wrote:
| GPLv3 addresses definitions (such as what constitutes
| source-code), software license compatibility, software
| patents as well as tivotization. The clauses around
| software patents are what I was referring to. By design,
| they are hostile towards software patents. Hence for
| instance Apple not updating BASH for so long (macOS still
| ships with BASH 3.2.57, the last version that was GPLv2)
| and the switch to (the MIT licensed) Z shell. Not
| commenting on the legitimacy of software patents, Apple's
| take on using GPLv3 licensed software - merely stating
| cause and effect.
| azalemeth wrote:
| Also, the GUI for building GUIs was great. Nothing really made
| you appreciate why they wanted objects so much as dragging
| buttons around and instantiating the class. It _made sense
| internally_ to me as a university student at the time.
| Objective C was a "relatively simple" set of extensions (which
| I never really understood) over C (which I claimed to
| understand at the time) and the language made you aware of both
| "the magic" of what you were doing and, at the same time, how
| it related to the bare metal. I learnt a lot from it.
|
| I'd love to know what this looks like to a straight-out-of-
| university developer of an Electron app, though.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Making GUIs was easy as long as you stayed on the happy path,
| but the moment you needed to do something different you were
| back to writing reams of code, there was a cottage industry
| of custom NSSplitView classes. Even just making a button a
| different color involved reinventing the wheel a substantial
| amount.
|
| The current Electron/React approach has no happy path -
| everything uniformly requires some amount of boilerplate
| code. But when you need to deviate you are less likely to
| have to write a novella.
| nottorp wrote:
| Hmm Delphi 1 (RIP) was released in 1995. When did
| Cocoa/Interface Builder show up?
| WoodenChair wrote:
| > Hmm Delphi 1 (RIP) was released in 1995. When did
| Cocoa/Interface Builder show up?
|
| 1988 [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Builder
| marcodiego wrote:
| And it came from an older (1986) project from
| expertelligence. There is a video about it:
| https://vimeo.com/62618532
| hokumguru wrote:
| This is a beautiful video.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| NeXTStep and Project Builder (which XCode was based on) was
| realease in 1989
|
| edit: WoodenChair beat me to it with the right date
| nottorp wrote:
| Ahh NextStep. For some reason I was only thinking of Mac
| OS. Possibly because in 1988 i was a kid with an 8 bit
| spectrum clone who only saw NeXT machines in magazines ;)
|
| Still, RIP both Interface Builder and Delphi.
| [deleted]
| yoz-y wrote:
| Having implemented multiple programs in GUIs for GUIs (with
| GtK, UIKit and dabbling with AppKit)... I must say that I
| have my past self every time I want to go back and look how
| something works. At least with SwiftUI / reactive things the
| code can be searched and navigated and doesn't take ages to
| load.
| a-dub wrote:
| > You're amazed by the brand new Spotlight and Safari RSS, you
| like your new OS so much you want to develop apps for it.
|
| when i was younger i had a used next slab. it had the same
| effect, everything was so cool you just wanted to build things
| for it. next thing i knew i was coming in on weekends to build a
| from scratch port of my then employer's product. my boss at the
| time was blown away.
|
| it's no wonder to me that berners-lee wrote the first version of
| worldwideweb on the next, nor carmack with quake...
|
| edit: i guess it was doom. it was a long time ago!
| mietek wrote:
| It was both Doom and Quake!
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I have occasionally tried to put together a basic Mac app. I
| picked up the basics of Swift easily enough, but I get stuck
| because XCode seems completely incomprehensible to me, and my
| basic attempts at finding a "cheat sheet" or "idiots guide" meet
| with failure.
|
| It's at this point I get frustrated enough to give up and maybe
| try again in another year.
|
| Is it just me? Does XCode really lack basic documentation?
| MagerValp wrote:
| If you tried to build a Mac app based on Storyboards, which
| iirc has been the default for the past few years, then yes. All
| the docs are for iOS and the Mac side is completely under
| documented.
|
| The classic way of building building apps is quite well
| documented though. It has been modernized quite a bit since
| Tiger and Xcode 2.0, but the general structure and workflow is
| the same as in this article, and there's plenty of docs.
|
| The new SwiftUI stuff is still under heavy development, and
| starting with the wwdc sessions is probably the best approach.
| mrbombastic wrote:
| it isn't just you, I've been doing iOS development for the last
| few years which generally gets preference for docs these days
| but I have still found over the years even if most things have
| documentation 1) it is pretty difficult to find 2) it is
| lacking. A lot of times you are better off going to 3rd party
| tutorials to get what you are looking for, I would recommend
| the Big Nerd Ranch books and Ray Wenderlich tutorials. I don't
| know if I have come across a general Xcode intro tutorial,
| maybe because Xcode is massive, most stuff is task oriented and
| you pick up the Xcode quirks along the way.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Did you have a go at Appcode from Jetbrains?
| the_only_law wrote:
| It's been a while since I tried it, but iirc you had to
| context switch between XCode and AppCode if you wanted to use
| storyboards or whatever they're called.
| Austin_Conlon wrote:
| Under the Help menu and in the Xcode Help menu item it's
| thoroughly documented.
| kailuowang wrote:
| Yeah I was there. Some people may think it's just the norm in the
| old times. It's not. It's just Apple obsession with being "user
| friendly", and for some reason, they think Gui is more friendly
| for programmers than code.
| anthk wrote:
| Where would you put TCL/TK? It merges the best of both worlds.
| toyg wrote:
| It did work though, the developer drain from MS to Apple around
| that time was massive. They were giving easy tools to low-skill
| developers, and command-line access to high-skill developers, a
| win-win. Whereas MS around that time was busy overcomplicating
| Visual Studio in their quest to merge web and desktop
| development for lock-in purposes.
| jonpalmisc wrote:
| Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29962004
| Lammy wrote:
| > 2005! The future is here! You have just spent $129 for the
| newest release of Mac OS X: Tiger.
|
| For me it was more like "you have just torrented the Golden
| Master DVD image and restored it on to your bootable Firewire
| iPod because you only have a CD-RW drive and nobody has released
| rips of the six-CD version yet" ;)
|
| https://betawiki.net/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Tiger_build_8A428
|
| e: Siracusa's review for Ars is still a great read too:
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2005/04/macosx-10-4/
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| I had a disc i bought at the end of line to fix a mac of a
| friend, some decade ago! and when refurbishing old macs to
| Linux become very handy, as before i could install linux
| sometimes i needed eEFInd.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| The bootable disk function of iPods was really something else.
| It saved me multiple times through the years, at one point even
| functioning as a primary boot drive when the HD in my sunflower
| iMac G4 gave up the ghost.
|
| I wish modern smartphones had a similar capability. I know
| Android phones let you copy files to them via MTP, but that's
| not even a fraction as good as the portable HD function of
| iPods was.
| GranPC wrote:
| If your device is rooted you can use USB Mountr [0] to
| achieve the functionality you describe.
|
| [0]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/streetwalrus.usbmountr/
| kergonath wrote:
| It was so cool to boot from it in the uni's labs and get all
| my home environment.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| It never shipped obviously, but back in the day there were
| a lot of rumors of Apple developing a feature that let you
| take your home folder and apps with you on your iPod, with
| any Mac you plug it into making your user account available
| without even rebooting. So it seems that they saw that use
| case and almost acted on it.
| kergonath wrote:
| IIRC it was even mentioned in the keynote or around that
| time. It was one of the bullet points in the magazines
| (remember those?)
| Lammy wrote:
| It appeared in Panther dev builds and even briefly on its
| public "Mobility" features page but was pulled right
| before release:
|
| https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/panther-feature-
| home-on...
|
| Unfortunately the oldest snapshot in Wayback is October
| 12th 2003 with the blurb already removed. Apple filed a
| patent application for it in 2002 which was assigned in
| 2006. It expires this year!
|
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US7246226B1/
|
| https://appleinsider.com/articles/06/10/11/apples_missing
| _ho...
| Aloha wrote:
| I think it could be a killer feature for iPhone + Mac
|
| Here is a secure external disk, which you can plug into your
| mac, it will be secure even when plugged into your mac, even
| the data over the thunderbolt bus could be encrypted in
| transit, its all technically possible to do.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Well it was really just a fancy external drive. It's more
| because of macOS happily booting from any kind of external
| device that makes this happen.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| That's true, I remember being a bit confused when I found
| that Windows was extremely picky about what it booted from,
| with weird hacks being required to boot a Win2K or XP
| installer from anything other than an optical disc. Both OS
| 9 and OS X were pretty lax about that.
| kccqzy wrote:
| A friend of mine even booted from an SD card.
| JadeNB wrote:
| That must have been slooooow.
| lostgame wrote:
| I don't think I ever paid for a MacOS (OSX, at the time)
| upgrade.
|
| I still remember buying a RapidShare account for a month to get
| Snow Leopard off those multi-split files because I couldn't
| find a torrent.
|
| The 00's were such a different time for tech.
| varunprasad wrote:
| I paid for alternate OS X versions (and then jumped on the
| snow leopard wagon immediately due to the $29? price).
|
| That meant shelling out $129 after about 3 years (2 year
| lifecycles, and I think I bought my first mac almost a year
| into the then OS lifecycle).
|
| This provided me with excellent stability and a very
| reasonable price. I'd save up a few hundred $s, and then
| upgrade the software and hardware at around the same time, so
| I also added additional RAM and moved the HDD to the CD-RW
| and inserted an SSD instead of the HDD (I am 100% sure I made
| these changes for my macbook, but I'm not sure if I made
| them, or if they were even possible, for the iBook I owned
| before).
|
| That was almost a decade+ of highly stable, highly effective,
| and almost cutting edge of computing that I haven't even come
| close to replicating in the almost decade since, despite
| earning real money.
|
| I did switch to Linux for my personal computing a few months
| ago, and I have hopes that this may allow me to do so, once I
| really set something up once I get to my Mar-Apr spring
| cleaning. Linux is giving me that Mac feeling for the first
| time in a long time, although the major challenge here
| appears to be restraining oneself. It seems so easy to get
| lost trying to distro hop constantly, or try a new terminal
| for marginal benefits, etc. The new shiny in Linux shines
| very bright, and restraint seems to be the core challenge
| required to have a stable, outcome focused computing
| experience with Linux.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Is that iPhone a legit early Apple mockup before, or just a joke?
| callahad wrote:
| Just a joke.
|
| There were plenty of rumors about an Apple phone around that
| time, but it was generally referred to as the "iTunes Phone."
| And the mockups were significantly more hideous:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20070630183849/http://www.applei...
|
| Five months after Mac OS X Tiger's release, the iTunes phone
| was unveiled: the Motorola ROKR
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_ROKR).
|
| You can find some fun things in the old MacRumors archives
| (https://www.macrumors.com/archive/). For example, a post
| (https://www.macrumors.com/2005/07/29/steve-jobs-on-itunes-
| ph...) from July 2005, two months before the ROKR, and two
| years before the iPhone:
|
| > _When questioned about the lifespan of the iPod and why the
| functionality won 't eventually move into the cell phone, Jobs
| answers, "I'm going to leave the answer to our actions in the
| future."_
|
| Or this (https://www.macrumors.com/2005/09/20/jobs-on-motorola-
| itunes...), from September 2005:
|
| > _- Feels that Bluetooth isn 't a good option. Sound isn't
| good. Recharging headphones is a pain._
|
| Eleven years later: AirPods.
| someotherperson wrote:
| Neither -- it appears to be a third-party mockup of what an
| Apple phone could have looked like.
| andrethegiant wrote:
| Tiger also was the debut of Dashboard widgets, which opened up
| creating app-like experiences for those who knew HTML/JS/CSS
| instead of Cocoa (myself included).
| sharikous wrote:
| Also it introduced the canvas element and opened the way for
| HTML 5.
|
| To this day I miss being able to enter Dashboard with a single
| keypress like in the old days. I used that mini calculator,
| note taking app and weather widget constantly.
|
| By I seem to be alone. For dome reason most people hated
| Dashboard.
| andrethegiant wrote:
| I didn't hate it :-) I actually made the Gas widget, which
| fetched local gas prices. It was a popular widget at the
| time, and ended up on a slide (amongst other third-party
| widgets) during the 2006 WWDC keynote.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| I'm with you here! I still miss Dashboard to this day, and
| regret that such a great idea never caught on. Having widgets
| merged with Notification Center (!) is such a worse
| experience, especially on smaller screens.
|
| Never mind the fact that apps like Calculator only allow a
| single instance/window for no reason. Only way around that is
| to literally duplicate the app!
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Wow, that old Xcode UI with "Active Target" and "Active Build
| Configuration" made a lot more sense than the current layout! I
| always thought that weird "Scheme" stuff was a left-over from the
| olden days, but it actually seems to be an intended feature that
| was introduced at a later time.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| The scheme stuff was added because Xcode became able to do a
| lot more stuff beyond "Run app" and "Debug app".
|
| There were a lot of hoops you had to jump through to get unit
| tests working and there weren't iOS apps that could be run in a
| simulator or device.
| victor106 wrote:
| What resources do people here recommend to learn Mac OS
| development?
| mrbombastic wrote:
| I have only read their books on iOS dev but have had good
| experiences with Big Nerd Ranch books:
| https://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Programming-OS-Ranch-Guides/dp/...
| Ray Wenderlich tutorials are also iOS biased but have been
| great: https://www.raywenderlich.com
| jamil7 wrote:
| It depends what you want to do, if you're playing around
| building apps for a hobby and friends and family and you can
| target Monterey, you could go with SwiftUI and Apple's official
| tutorials (it runs on older versions but a lot is missing). If
| you've got experience in React or any other of the declarative
| frameworks you'll pick it up quickly, it's actually much nicer
| than React.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Very nostalgic. I wonder if an old PPC is feasible at all for
| basic browsing these days. Probably would run into issues
| updating the browser?
| sneak wrote:
| You can emulate it on modern hardware, faster than it would run
| on the real deal, if you truly want to go that route.
| Pamar wrote:
| Pretty sure it would: I replaced my old PPC iMac in (IIRC) 2017
| and it was already basically impossible to get an updated
| browser version (let alone most if not all the other apps).
| fredoralive wrote:
| Until recently there was TenFourFox, a Firefox fork for old
| Macs, if you wanted a modern browser although it's now mostly
| dead.
| djxfade wrote:
| It has been forked as InterWebPPC
| classichasclass wrote:
| I'm still doing security updates, but you have to self-build,
| and any new development would be "when I get a round tuit."
| Some people are doing downstream forks and there are build-
| it-for-you scripts/Automator packages you can use.
| rayiner wrote:
| Still the best version of OS X.
| varispeed wrote:
| I was never able to work in an environment with so many floating
| windows. I lose focus instantly and can't do much work.
| throwmeback wrote:
| Same, this feels absolutely dreadful! "Where do I start? Why is
| there so much stuff screaming at me? What's my first move here?
| Oh shoot it, I don't want to do this anymore."
| diskzero wrote:
| Tiger was the first release of OSX that I was truly proud of. I
| came to Apple, not as part of the NeXT acquisition, but from the
| post-pivot Be, which had decided to focus their attention on
| "internet appliances". My love at the time was operating systems
| and specifically GUI libraries and components.
|
| Apple internally at that time was frightening. Coming neither
| from Apple or NeXT, I has an interesting position, being able to
| talk to various people more candidly. The Blue [1] team (System
| 7/8/9) on the second floor of the IL2 building seemed to be in
| constant distress. The ATG [2] team on the 3rd floor of IL3 was
| being swept out in mass layoffs and departures. There were still
| factions of Pink [3] and Copland [4] adherents trying to get
| their technology into the "Beaker" builds of what would become
| OSX Cheetah. The Beaker builds at the time were roughly re-
| skinned versions of NeXTStep and pretty uninspiring.
|
| After my experience at Be, I really wanted to be involved in
| creating something great that would ship and be of real value to
| users. At Apple, I discovered that I just wasn't happy trying to
| exist in the chaos. Steve wasn't yet CEO, Avie and Bertrand were
| establishing a new OS organization on the 4th floor of the IL2
| building and Steve Glass was still fighting to keep "OS 9" alive.
| In fact, OS 9 was critically important as it was needed to run on
| the new iMac and support all of the Apple hardware that was
| bringing in (diminishing) revenue. On that note, Steve was
| actively batting the Mac clone makers (or leeches according to
| Steve.)
|
| In a moment of bleakness I received a call from a friend from Be.
| He said I should come join him, Andy Herzfeld, Susan Kare, Bud
| Tribble, Bart Decrem, Stan Christensen, Darin Adler, John
| Sullivan and more at Eazel. [5] Eazel wanted to create a user-
| friendly Linux distribution with a services model to generate
| revenue. The main product of Eazel was the Nautilus file manager
| and contribution to GNOME. After failing to raise addition
| capital after the initial 10 million dollars, Eazel went through
| a couple of layoffs. On the evening of shutting the doors, Andy
| gave Steve a call and told him about the Eazel team and Steve set
| up a large meet and greet with various Apple teams on the 4th
| floor of IL2. Those who were interested went to the meeting; the
| majority of those who weren't, ended up joining with previous
| comrades who had left Be to form Danger, who were now at a
| startup called Android.
|
| The group who went to the meet and greet contained some
| significant contributors to various Apple software and hardware
| efforts; Darin Adler, Don Melton, Ken Kocienda, Bud Tribble,
| Maciej Stachowiak, Pavel Cisler, John Harper and more. Pavel
| helped in convincing Dominic Giampaolo [6] to come to Apple. This
| group of people also convinced other key contributors to come to
| Apple who were leery due to Apple's past history.
|
| All that wanted to take a job were hired on the spot and we all
| showed up on campus got our pictures taken and started doing
| whatever project we thought was cool.It had only been 18 months
| since I had left Apple, which meant I qualified for an employment
| bridge; my stock options, employee number and previous employment
| time all rolled into my current employment phase.
|
| This iteration of Apple was more stable; there was no more OS 9
| group, the clones were gone, ATG was cleared out, Betrand had a
| functioning software organization, the product lines were much
| cleaner, Bas and the UX team were cranking out good designs and
| Steve was CEO and ruled with an iron fist. It was this
| organization that produced Tiger; the first release that I felt
| really represented the vision and aspirations of what a desktop
| operating system should be.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Advanced_Technology_Grou...
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)
|
| [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel
|
| [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Giampaolo
| rewgs wrote:
| Amazing to be able to interact with those who were actually
| there. Thank you for the story!
| unixhero wrote:
| OSX 10.4 and 10.5 were marvelous operating systems for so many
| reasons. Particularly 10.4 in my view due to the compatability
| layer for legacy MacOS binaries, AND big binary feature that made
| the same OS usable on PPC AND Intel X86. Also Quartz Composer,
| which I find really interesting and awesome [0].
|
| 0, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer
| bluedino wrote:
| I always wondered how early Mac OS X developers learned to
| navigate XCode and Cocoa. Were they all just ex-NeXT programmers?
|
| I bought an old copy of the Hillegass book _Cocoa Programming for
| Mac OS X_ , but I'm guessing most people learned from Apple
| developer docs that I never saw (or guess didn't know how to find
| back then)
|
| As an aside, I don't miss the old programming books where each
| chapter just showed you how to use some GUI elements and they
| never got around to showing patterns on how you would actually
| create a usable application.
| diskzero wrote:
| Shamefully, as an Apple employee working on
| Finder/Spotlight/Time Machine and more, I never, ever used
| XCode. Almost no one on our team did. We all used a combination
| of the terminal, our text editor of choice and command line
| tools to wrangle together binaries for local development. The
| actual production build was done by the internal build system
| which also used various scripts. Why didn't we use XCode? Take
| the same reasons stated today and apply them to 2001, 2002,
| 2003, etc. etc. etc.
| rapind wrote:
| Depends how early you mean. The Big Nerd Ranch osx book has
| been around for a while.
| carlosrg wrote:
| Apple's developer documentation was much, much better and
| complete back then. There was several introduction documents,
| guides, etc. For example:
| https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...
| [deleted]
| varunprasad wrote:
| This was key. I built a couple of minor, but useful for me,
| apps by simply following the docs at the time.
|
| The major difference between Apple docs, and Javadocs at the
| time (Java was the actual language I used to program in), was
| that Javadocs was basically API references, whereas Apple
| docs had API references but they also had guides that went
| into the why, and the best practices, and even occasionally
| alternatives for edge cases, etc.
|
| And the fact that it was available offline as an optional
| download with XCode was a massive bonus at a time when
| ubiquitous Wifi and internet was not a thing.
|
| It was a real surprise to me, after having stepped away from
| any sort of Apple development for a few years that Apple's
| docs were considered bad.
| fundad wrote:
| The most useful non-source code resources at the time were
| about GCC, BSD and Apple's PDF guides on how the OS works, and
| the Human Interface Guides, paid Developer Connection accounts
| got you tools mailed to you and DVDs of WWDC seminars.
|
| But it's a profession, selling shrinkwapped desktop
| applications or the modern equivalent takes a lot.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> Were they all just ex-NeXT programmers?_
|
| Back then probably a significant portion. Today, I guess most
| of those former Next greybeards have retired or moved to other
| gigs.
| vaxman wrote:
| Original MacOS X ran unmodified apps for original Mac (which
| they called Classic) using emulation, slightly modified apps
| for the original Mac (recomplied to Carbon APIs) or slightly-
| modified NeXTStep apps (using Cocoa APIs AND InterfaceBuilder
| which became part of Xcode), or even slightly-modified Unix
| apps (using POSIX APIs) along with AppleScript for
| automation. There were few NeXTStep/Cocoa apps, except for
| simple graphical wrappers around POSIX apps. Then Apple
| started killing off APIs (including Carbon), changing
| functionality and picking winners/losers to drive the
| developers to retrain, rewrite and maintain their code base
| for Cocoa, which most did not do, leaving Mac OS native apps
| to languish for many years (sort of similar situation to
| AppleWatchOS), especially after the codebase was forked to
| become iOS. However, HTML5 apps were on the rise and WebKit
| sort of kept the Mac hardware sales going. Then, a year ago,
| Apple introduced the ability to run iPad apps on new Macs and
| rolled out SwiftUI (which, when it works, can target either
| iPad or macOS natively), which is sort of the final nail in
| the coffin for Cocoa.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| yes, and.. "Apple started killing off APIs (including
| Carbon)"
|
| there was some transition time when Apple published Carbon
| interfaces to Mac OS 9 devs (like me), stating that they
| were "transitional". Quite skeptical, I used them to
| rebuild some tools and apps in CodeWarrior. Within a short
| time, more updates had less Carbon, and the news came out
| that Codewarrior was locked out of OSX -- no deal. It was
| obvious that the Mac OS 9 interfaces were for chumps, and
| who wants to be a chump. It was true, and things changed.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| I built a decently widely used mmo chat client, Cocoa was very
| well documented in books. Zero NeXT knowledge from my side.
| IMHO QT still lacks the amount of information that was
| available at the time for Cocoa.
| zippergz wrote:
| I did learn from the Hillegass book -- the first edition
| released in I believe 2002. I also had a couple of old NeXT
| programming manuals, and had done a tiny bit of NeXT work in
| the past. And I agree with the others who said Apple's dev docs
| were better back then. But really Aaron's book is what got me
| started.
| sillyquiet wrote:
| Ha, in the 2006-2010 timeframe I worked for an aerospace
| company working on experimental radar sensors and the like and
| I developed quite a few Cocoa desktop data analysis and
| visualization tools since we were a Mac shop.
|
| It was a good fit since the physicists and mathematicians wrote
| their experimental stuff in Matlab and the engineers and us
| computer scientists wrote the actual production code in C
| compiled for the embedded hardware in the avionics. Cocoa
| provided a good bridging platform for tool sets between the two
| camps. (Later, python and its robust set of science and math
| libraries became the tool of choice in this role as Python
| expertise became more general on our team)
|
| Long story short, I learned by suffering through the interface,
| especially the fairly esoteric Interface Builder.
|
| And _then_ in 2008 I went to a bootcamp hosted by the former-
| NeXT guy that had founded Big Nerd Ranch, Aaron Hillegas. He
| made it just _click_ , so yeah, maybe but did take a NeXT
| programmer to wrap your ahead around it, ha.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| As someone who was a teenager who couldn't afford books up
| through 2009 or so, most of my learning of Obj-C and Cocoa came
| through scraping the internet for blogposts on whatever
| subtopic I needed to know about. Occasionally you'd run into a
| full fledged tutorial, which were gold mines. At one point, I
| made AIM friends with a couple of people who were more
| knowledgeable than myself which was a great help, and later on
| Stack Overflow appeared which let me both ask questions and
| peruse the answers to others' questions.
|
| It was kinda rough, and I didn't get to the point to where I
| could build useful things until the late 2000s and early
| 2010s... just in time to dovetail into iOS development (which
| I've now been doing as my job for the better part of a decade).
|
| The cornucopia of free resources that are available to new
| learners today is a ridiculously stark contrast to how it was
| back then.
| pavlov wrote:
| I learned Cocoa in 2002 on Mac OS X 10.1 and Project Builder
| (the NeXT IDE that was Xcode's predecessor).
|
| I remember reading a brand new O'Reilly book called "Building
| Cocoa Applications". It was written by two ex-NeXT devs and was
| quite helpful in understanding the system.
|
| Apple's own documentation and sample code was good back then.
| The API was much smaller, so I read the reference for every
| Cocoa class.
|
| Apple provided a fully functional demo app called Sketch which
| showed important architectural patterns like undo/redo. When
| developing my first Cocoa app, I'd basically go see how
| Sketch.app implemented something and copied the approach.
|
| (Incidentally, I'm convinced that the well-known Sketch drawing
| app is basically a case of somebody looking at Apple's
| Sketch.app sample code and thinking "couldn't we just sell
| this.")
|
| Some years earlier I had tried to learn Win32. It's hard to
| overstate just how fun and easy and powerful Cocoa felt in
| comparison.
| Liquid_Fire wrote:
| Maybe I am missing some context here as I have never developed
| for an Apple platform, but what is the point this blog post is
| trying to make? That the tooling used to be very complicated?
| marcodiego wrote:
| This!
|
| I usually praise Apple's UI for often being intuitive and
| elegant. But it looks like, in this specific case, there is a
| problem only outsiders can see clearly: ctrl+clicking an icon
| to an UI gadget is neither discoverable nor intuitive!
|
| When I improved the Anjuta-Glade integration, I made some
| effort to do something simpler: - Open the .ui
| then the corresponding (by marker comments that are
| automatically created when the project is created) .c and .h
| files... boom! They are automatically associated. -
| Add an ID to a widget you want to access programmatically,
| double-click it on the inspector... boom! Code for accessing it
| as a member of the "private" struct is automatically created.
| - Add an onClicked signal to a button (which already has an
| ID), double click it... boom! Code for the callback is
| automatically created.
|
| It is a shame Anjuta+Glade never became as popular as they
| could.
| indemnity wrote:
| Didn't Delphi/Visual Studio do this as well when using corn
| designer / property inspector?
| vintagedave wrote:
| Yes - Delphi and C++Builder's Object Inspector still does
| this. Double-click a control, and the default event handler
| (OnClick) will be created. There's a link auto-set between
| the button instance's event handler (method pointer) and
| the method, which is auto-created in the form the button
| belongs to.
| gchokov wrote:
| I came to the comments, looking for the same answer. Was it
| that.. there was no documentation or tutorials whatsoever?
| dysoco wrote:
| I was absolutely expecting a comparison with how hard it's to
| get started and develop software on modern MacOS and XCode
| today (is it? I haven't used it).
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| It would be a much better post if a comparison with the
| current state of the art was made
| kgwgk wrote:
| It's funny that you got two opposite answers.
|
| "GUI-driven, mostly-discoverable" vs "neither discoverable nor
| intuitive"
| toyg wrote:
| Actually the opposite, likely. The tooling was preinstalled and
| ready to go, and you could largely click your way through
| building interactive experiences.
|
| Compare this GUI-driven, mostly-discoverable flow with the
| incantations you need to know to set up a React interface, for
| example. It's night and day.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Xcode/dev tools were not preinstalled, but just cost a
| registration on their site to download and install.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| When OS X was still distributed on optical discs, it came
| with a dev tools disc for the first several releases. That
| how I personally stumbled upon Project Builder, Cocoa, etc.
| I may have never found it if I had to seek it out and
| download it.
| addandsubtract wrote:
| What does macOS / iOS / iPadOS development look like today?
| Do you not have XCode with a GUI-driven workflow anymore? I
| only poked around iOS development during the iPhone 1/3G
| days, but I thought tooling has been constantly improving
| since then.
| mrbombastic wrote:
| honestly if you are doing native development and using the
| iOS/macOS tooling directly it is not that different than
| this. You basically have options, xibs and nibs like in
| this blog now have a new friend Storyboards that
| encompasses multiple screens and transitions but
| development is still GUI based and uses outlets like in the
| blog. A lot of programmers just refuse to use this stuff
| and just do everything programmatically. new kid on the
| block is SwiftUI which is a much saner not XML based
| declarative way of defining UI components like React but is
| still rough around edges and will likely be for a couple
| years.
| toyg wrote:
| The main difference is that now most development is
| actually not based on the platform but carried out with web
| tech. Which, compared to desktop tools, is light-years
| behind in usability.
| AndroidKitKat wrote:
| Disclaimer, I'm only a wannabe Apple platform developer,
| but the GUI-driven workflow is still the predominate way to
| develop for Apple platforms. The most radical change is the
| introduction of SwiftUI, which has you writing interfaces
| entirely with code, rather than using drag-n-drop
| components with Storyboards.
| jamil7 wrote:
| Most iOS teams I worked on did UI in code since
| Storyboards are a nightmare with more than one developer
| and version control.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| There's quite a few iOS devs who ditched storyboards and
| XIBs years ago in favor of full code. I did several years
| ago, largely because Interface Builder became so much
| worse after it was merged into Xcode. That, and XIBs and
| storyboards suck to have to deal with merge conflicts on.
|
| I still use XIBs when doing personal Mac Cocoa
| development though, because the experience there is still
| decent (though not as good as it was). Won't touch
| storyboards with a ten foot pole though, they slow down
| IB too much and generally aren't a good fit for desktop
| UI paradigms.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Alternate take: if you want developing for OS X [sic] to be
| this easy, don't even think of trying to use anything other
| than the tools we give you (after you ask for them).
| philistine wrote:
| It's the same logic that drives how they handle OS licensing.
| ad-astra wrote:
| Hah, I'm so glad that my team writes 100% of our UI
| programmatically instead of using IB.
| ralphc wrote:
| In the vintage apple groups and subreddits Tiger is preferred
| over Leopard because it runs on more hardware and it's the last
| version that allows Classic mode that runs classic Mac OS
| applications.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Can you link to a few such subreddits. Thank you.
| vintagedave wrote:
| The one I read is https://old.reddit.com/r/VintageApple .
|
| If there are more I'd love links too!
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Not sure why alisonkisk's comment is dead, as that's the only
| thing interesting in this post.
|
| It's funny to see, because the first Android versions were
| similar / no touch
| skhr0680 wrote:
| If someone asked me what I thought an iPhone would look like in
| 2006, that's what I would have come up with
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