[HN Gopher] Mac OS 9
___________________________________________________________________
Mac OS 9
Author : Shank
Score : 908 points
Date : 2022-12-05 17:00 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (macos9.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (macos9.app)
| zczc wrote:
| Apple logo on the bottom does not render on non-apple machines,
| because it is apple-specific PUA code-point U+F8FF. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas#Vendor_use
| jejones3141 wrote:
| I've never owned a Mac, but I remember Mac OS 9 because some of
| its users would post their questions on comp.os.os9.
| ben_w wrote:
| Hah, Marathon Infinity, running in real time on a Javascript
| emulation of MacOS, in Safari, on my phone.
|
| What a difference 26 years makes.
| blonky wrote:
| Oh boy. Those extensions loading. So many times I held my breath
| when adding a new extension. If it doesn't then you have to
| restart in Safe mode, or something. I won't miss the extensions.
| OS 9 was cool. I used it a lot on my lime-green imac.
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| Really cool. Is this running in Web Assembly?
| vishnuharidas wrote:
| Open Photoshop, press Ctrl+Alt+"About Photoshop" for an easter
| egg.
| s1k3s wrote:
| Damn what a terrible UX this is, no wonder Windows kicked their
| ass so hard with ME and XP. This reminded me to keep it simple
| and stupid proof whenever I want users to actually enjoy what I
| build, thanks!
| s1k3s wrote:
| I apologize to everyone who got triggered by the above comment.
| Please remember that Nike makes great shoes, but they also make
| a lot of crap.
| bovermyer wrote:
| Two questions:
|
| 1. Are you being serious, or are you being sarcastic?
|
| 2. If you're being serious, what about it is terrible?
| Mogzol wrote:
| I don't know if they were being serious, but as someone who
| never used a mac back then, I really struggled with this UI.
| Why do folders all open in a new window? Why can't I maximize
| a window by double-clicking the title bar? Why can I only
| resize windows with the little handle in the bottom corner?
| What is the point of the settings dock in the bottom left of
| the screen? Do I really need to change resolution and colors
| that often? Why do I have to browse the whole hard drive to
| find any of my applications? Why can't I right-click
| files/folders? What is the point of the bigger/smaller window
| button, why not maximize? Why does minimizing just collapse
| windows to their title bar? How do you even turn off the
| computer?
|
| These are all features that work how I would expect on
| Windows 98. I'm sure if I had used a mac back then this would
| all make sense to me, but even as someone who uses modern
| macs, I was very lost in the old UI.
| Mikhail_Edoshin wrote:
| The buttons that made windows bigger/smaller are not quite
| that. The button toggles between the natural (smallest)
| size of a window that is sufficient to display all the
| contents and the last size other than minimal. It was very
| convenient for document windows. E.g. you have a
| spreadsheet with a few rows and columns and lots of white
| space: click that button and the window shrinks to display
| only the contents, leaving the empty cells hidden. It's
| also good for Finder windows that have only a few icons.
|
| If you hold down the Option/Alt key, it will try to resize
| to the largest possible size, similar to maximize.
| Lammy wrote:
| > Why do folders all open in a new window?
|
| Windows 95 was like this too unless the Internet Explorer
| 4.0 Desktop Update was installed:
| http://toastytech.com/guis/win95desktop3.png
| flenserboy wrote:
| A few quick answers --
|
| >Why do folders all open in a new window?
|
| Spacial Finder (see
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/). It
| remembers window position, icon positions within the
| window, and the like.
|
| >Why can't I maximize a window by double-clicking the title
| bar? Why can I only resize windows with the little handle
| in the bottom corner?
|
| Nobody really thought about maximizing by double-clicking,
| as there was the maximize button available, that maximized
| not to the screen but to the _content_ being presented (at
| least that was the intent). Double-clicking on the title
| bar made the contents of the window disappear while keeping
| the title bar hovering there. This was _great_ on small
| screens so that you didn 't have to click between windows
| that had information in them but could hide the top one,
| read the one below, and go back to the top one without
| moving the mouse.
|
| As for the little handle, that was for a) the sake of
| consistency, and b) because that was the one way the OS did
| things; resizing windows worked just that way. Not sure if
| that was purely intent or if it was due to system
| resources, especially in earlier Systems.
|
| >What is the point of the settings dock in the bottom left
| of the screen? Do I really need to change resolution and
| colors that often?
|
| I remember using settings much, much more than on current
| machines -- there were a lot of little tweaks one might
| want to make for performance or ease (changing colors or
| resolution might be necessary due to a game, for instance,
| whether for speed or compatibility if it were older).
|
| >Why do I have to browse the whole hard drive to find any
| of my applications? Why can't I right-click files/folders?
|
| That was simply the way of things, though there were plenty
| of extensions out there that put application links (or
| links to pretty much anything) into the Apple menu, which
| became a catch-all that Apple has pared down (in response?)
| to almost nothing.
|
| >What is the point of the bigger/smaller window button, why
| not maximize? Why does minimizing just collapse windows to
| their title bar?
|
| See above.
|
| >How do you even turn off the computer?
|
| Choose shut down, and turn it off with the switch when it
| told you it was safe to do so.
| Mogzol wrote:
| Thanks for the replies, I guess a lot of it does boil
| down to "that's just the way things were".
|
| Although, like I mentioned, all those features do work on
| Windows 98, which released over a year before Mac OS 9,
| so I think the parent's comment of "no wonder Windows
| kicked their ass so hard" does have a point. Windows 98
| feels far more "modern" than this, at least in my
| opinion.
|
| Also, in response to "Choose shut down, and turn it off
| with the switch when it told you it was safe to do so."
| That's what I was asking, where do I choose "shut down"?
| I expected it to be in the Apple menu but it wasn't
| there. After searching some more I eventually found it in
| the "Special" menu, still seems like a weird place for
| it.
| flenserboy wrote:
| Remember that there are a lot of holdovers from the very
| early days of widespread GUI use -- many, many of the
| things introduced on the earliest Macs are still present
| in Mac OS 9. This is not a new phenomenon.
|
| Also, spelling error on my part: _spatial_ Finder.
| Someone wrote:
| Shut down is in the Finder, in the "Special" menu.
|
| That's an evolutionary left-over from the first Mac. It
| ran only a single program at the time [1]. It booted up
| running the Finder. From there, you could launch a single
| program. If you quit that program, it launched the Finder
| again.
|
| [1]: except for desk accessories, a special kind of
| device driver (!) that could present an UI (https://www.f
| olklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...)
| Mikhail_Edoshin wrote:
| Shutting down is used infrequently, so there is some
| logic in putting it farther away.
|
| Now let's look at a few things that never made it into
| Windows :)
|
| The desktop was special. If you move a folder or a file
| there, it would remember the original location of it.
| Later you could select things on the desktop and choose
| "Put Away" from the menu to move them back into their
| original locations. The idea was that you could do that
| to organize the work the way you do it traditionally:
| bring the current work on the desk, work on it, then file
| away.
|
| If this sounds like it would break file references, no,
| it wouldn't. On Mac applications normally remembered
| files by their internal ID, so you could rename a file or
| even move it into a different folder and still find it
| via the 'recent' files in your app.
|
| Files and folders were "things"; this is why there was
| always one window for a folder. If you open a file or a
| folder, the icon of it changed into an outline to show
| that it is currenly open and there is a full-scale window
| for it somewhere. If you clicked the icon, it would trace
| the way to that window.
|
| The window of a folder remembered its settings, including
| the manual arrangement of icons inside. Together with
| color labels they made it very easy to organize small
| sets of files. (I do realize this won't scale to today's
| millions of files, but I indeed miss it for smaller
| projects.)
| s1k3s wrote:
| I am serious, and it's all about how things are named and how
| the OS interacts with you.
|
| Some examples (imagine you've never used a computer before):
|
| - "file explorer" on Windows, "finder" on Mac. This is just
| an example of naming that I think it's just confusing to
| users, among many other names
|
| - a red "X" to close a program on windows, a random square
| with no color differentiation on the Mac
|
| - a clear view of what programs are running in the taskbar on
| Windows vs. the current active program in the top right
|
| - taskbar showing date + time and the calendar "on click" on
| Windows vs. time, date on click & no calendar on the Mac
|
| ... and the list can go on. I honestly believe they screwed
| up by acting too smart, when people wanted something simple
| that makes sense to them.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| - a clear view of what programs are running in the taskbar
| on Windows vs. the current active program in the top right
|
| The top right current program name has the running programs
| in a dropdown on click. You can 'tear off' the dropdown
| menu to create an always-visible task bar, either in the
| dropdown format or as nice little icons.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| Just a reminder that Windows 98 was Microsoft's popular OS
| at the time and it had its own issues:
|
| https://youtu.be/yeUyxjLhAxU
| hardnose wrote:
| One of my first real entries into "the industry" was as a beta
| tester for WC2:ToD on Mac OS. Warms my heart to see its included
| here. Shout out to all my Burning Blade bros from the ladder
| days!
| glitchc wrote:
| Is it slow for a reason or to mimic real-life performance in its
| heyday?
| GingerMidas wrote:
| Warcraft II actually plays, I wasn't expecting that.
| calmconviction wrote:
| Does anyone know the address of a website that used to bring up a
| full blown VM in the browser as a background to whatever the main
| site was loading?
| sandgiant wrote:
| I love projects like these! I don't have anything to add to what
| others have already said about nostalgia and simpler times,
| except I watched the Civilization intro and almost started a
| play-through. The original Civilization tile set is so pleasant
| to look at.
| scroot wrote:
| Would really appreciate if someone could get SK8 running in one
| of these environments!
| autotune wrote:
| Oh wow this actually has The Oregon Trail available to play, this
| is impressive!
| spking wrote:
| Prince of Persia as well. There goes my whole day.
| aareet wrote:
| I tried the Prince of Persia but it just loops on the intro.
| Wasn't able to get to the game.
| autotune wrote:
| This may sound obvious but try clicking File -> New Game.
| That is how I escaped the intro loop.
| aareet wrote:
| Aha! thank you :)
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Oh no... it has a working Civilization...
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Oh the memories! I've spent countless hours on MacOS 8 and then 9
| IIRC, running QuarkXPress to do professional desktop publishing.
| Mostly on a beige Powermac G3 tower. I still have that computer
| somewhere in a garage, don't know if it still boots and still has
| my software of yore installed.
|
| Our physical tools of the trade were Iomega Zip drives and Iomega
| Zip disks (100 MB then 250 MB IIRC), Apple II Extended keyboard
| (the M3501, with ALPS switches: incredible keyboards for the
| time), HP LaserJet printers (600 and then 1200 dpi) and Sony
| Trinitron CRTs.
| nodesocket wrote:
| Oh my god, its got Hotline[1]. Hotline Client 1.2.3.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications
| jrnichols wrote:
| you might be surprised at how many Hotline servers are still up
| and running today. :)
| ubermonkey wrote:
| That's the version of Mac I started with, back around the turn of
| the century, on a 500Mhz G3 Powerbook.
|
| I was in a job that was mostly analysis and presentation and
| writing, and Win95/98 on a laptop was just a NIGHTMARE of freezes
| and crashes and excruciatingly long boot times. I had a
| colleague, though, that was using a Mac (because his background
| was design), and while OS 9 definitely did crash, too, it was far
| less frequent -- and boot times were faster. Plus, sleep actually
| WORKED.
|
| Maybe 18 months later, that firm tanked, OS X came out, and I was
| keeping the lights on with freelance LAMP work using that same
| Mac as a dev environment. I'm on OS X to this day.
| WraithM wrote:
| Ohh! Don't tease me with Escape Velocity! It apparently needs
| 2050K more memory?
| bitlax wrote:
| Wow, A10 Attack must have been by the same people who did FA-18
| Hornet.
| fideloper wrote:
| I played that game for HOURS as a kid. I literally just yelled
| "OMG A-10 ATTACK!" when I saw it there about 3 minutes ago.
|
| I don't remember the key bindings very well (or if it works
| with a mouse), but I did make it into the air before crashing.
|
| What a wonderful hit of nostalgia. I'll have to try to play
| again when I have a free second.
| trafnar wrote:
| I really wanted to play Barrack but it doesn't work :(
| sfpotter wrote:
| Just FYI, anyone who wants to play any of the Marathon games, be
| advised that they have been available open source for a long
| while now:
|
| https://alephone.lhowon.org/
| j1elo wrote:
| Oh well, I _almost_ got to play Another World :-) (I recently
| finished it on PC so it was the first thing to catch my eye).
|
| Didn't work, either on Firefox or Chrome ( _memory access out of
| bounds at void powerpc_cpu::execute_loadstore_ ) but I get it,
| playing AW is not the ultimate purpose of this emulator!
| dkonofalski wrote:
| And here I thought the purpose of this emulator was to play
| Battle Chess. Unfortunately, that doesn't work either.
| ehaliewicz2 wrote:
| Escape velocity seems to work, I recommend it if you haven't
| played it.
| johnthuss wrote:
| This is awesome! I still love the look of the Finder from this
| era, and I love that this has the Window Shade extension turned
| on too.
| chongli wrote:
| The WindowShade control panel disappeared after MacOS 8. The
| feature became part of the Appearance control panel at that
| point. You can customize it on this MacOS 9 machine by going to
| Apple -> Control Panels -> Appearance and clicking on the
| Options tab. There you have access to the option "Double-click
| title bar to collapse windows", an option that lets you use the
| feature the way it originally worked (before the minimize
| widget was added to the far right end of the title bar).
| lostgame wrote:
| WindowShade was _amaaaazing_. There was something that - for a
| while, was an OSX equivalent...I want to say 'ShapeShifter'(?)
| - but it only worked for versions from like 10.2-10.4.
| zero_iq wrote:
| You might be thinking of SheepShaver, a Mac emulator for BeOS
| and Linux. Its name is a play on the name ShapeShifter, an
| earlier emulator by the same develope, which was an Apple II
| emulator for the Amiga.
| lostgame wrote:
| Nope, the utility was actually called ShapeShifter: (I used
| to make themes for it)
|
| https://www.macintoshrepository.org/11531-shapeshifter-
| osx-t...
| duskwuff wrote:
| There was a utility called "WindowShade X" which (messily)
| hacked the functionality back into early versions of Mac OS
| X. This developer's utilities had a nasty habit of breaking
| with _every_ OS update, though, sometimes even making the
| machine fail to boot, so it probably comes as no surprise
| that it 's no longer available.
|
| The same developers also had a UI skinning utility called
| ShapeShifter, which is probably what you're getting
| WindowShade X confused with.
| bri3d wrote:
| This is really impressive and goes way above and beyond the
| normal "emscripten an emulator into a browser" shenanigans.
|
| There's seamless file copy in/out, and a really clever setup
| where accessing the same subdomain as someone else puts you in an
| AppleTalk zone together.
|
| Extremely cool stuff.
| rzzzt wrote:
| If you open the developer console, it is revealed that the
| experience is provided by SheepShaver, a traditional desktop
| emulator (packaged presumably with Emscripten) running in the
| browser. :)
|
| The integration portions are pretty nice, no doubt.
|
| Edit: https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac#building-the-
| emulator... reveals that it is indeed built using Emscripten.
| bri3d wrote:
| Oh sure, I didn't expect it to be a from-scratch emulator,
| but it's way beyond the usual low-effort "type make and send
| it" type stuff.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Graphing Calculator doesn't work because it can't find an FPU,
| and it's the first thing I tried. :/ (also, because it was pretty
| revolutionary at the time!)
| rcarmo wrote:
| This sort of UI elegance is why I keep around an XFCE container
| with the Platinum theme:
| https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330
|
| I love using it when I need a break from GNOME.
| mbauman wrote:
| Man, I miss all those Ambrosia Software games (Apieron, Barrack,
| Escape Velocity, etc). I love how many are pre-loaded there, but
| the few I tested all seem broken.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrosia_Software
| BillFranklin wrote:
| The A-10 attack game works! Controls are at http://www.sierrahe
| lp.com/Documents/Manuals/A-10_Tank_Killer....
|
| Also, you can still get EV Nova on a Mac as far as I'm aware.
| The price hasn't decreased in about 20 years though.
| danaris wrote:
| > Also, you can still get EV Nova on a Mac as far as I'm
| aware.
|
| There's also an open-source clone, Endless Sky [0], and a
| recently-Kickstarted project to re-create EV Override for
| modern systems, Cosmic Frontier: Override [1].
|
| 0: https://github.com/endless-sky/endless-sky
|
| 1: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic
| -f...
| ehaliewicz2 wrote:
| Escape velocity works here!
| mdasen wrote:
| I've always loved Apple Platinum (the Mac OS 8 and 9 interface).
| I'm not a UI/art person, but the gray color they used always
| seemed so clean compared to the dull gray of Windows 95/98.
| Likewise, it wasn't the blinding white of light-mode in
| macOS/Windows today. The purple used was soft and pleasant,
| unlike the harsh yellow of folders in Windows or the harsh royal
| blue of Windows progress bars.
|
| Plus, everything had lots of contrast without feeling harsh. One
| of the things that bugs me about modern UIs is the lack of
| contrast. I don't need a high-contrast mode, but it would be nice
| to get back to the contrast of 90s operating systems.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| >I've always loved Apple Platinum (the Mac OS 8 and 9
| interface). I'm not a UI/art person, but the gray color they
| used always seemed so clean compared to the dull gray of
| Windows 95/98.
|
| I feel similarly. The Win9X gray is just a touch too dark, it
| reminds me of a dark overcast day or something.
|
| Platinum's shade of gray is great, and the shade that they
| switched to in Windows 2000 is also very good. For this reason
| on the Windows side of the fence I've always considered Win2K's
| UI the peak of Win9X-type UIs.
| akx wrote:
| The win9x default gray was from an age where you didn't
| necessarily have the option to use an arbitrary shade of gray
| - meanwhile Macs had full control of the hardware (as they
| still do) and could pick any old color.
|
| That said, you _could_ customize all the colors in Win9x if
| you liked, which you couldn't do with Macs.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > That said, you _could_ customize all the colors in Win9x
| if you liked, which you couldn't do with Macs.
|
| Well, until Kaleidoscope[0] was created way back in 1991,
| followed by Apple's own Appearance Manager[1] in Mac OS 8.5
| in 1998, both of which allowed all-encompassing theming
| that could stop just short of changing colors or radically
| change your UI's appearance. Windows wouldn't get an
| equivalent until the addition of visual style themes in XP
| in 2001 (which still had to be hacked to allow arbitrary
| third party themes) and was by predated the third-party
| WindowBlinds[2] by three years.
|
| To date I've not seen OS theming that was as capable as
| Kaleidoscope was. Kaleidoscope schemes could change
| practically any aspect of the Mac OS UI (e.g. moving
| titlebars to the bottom or left/right edges of windows)
| which led to the creation of some extremely creative and
| zany schemes. Even the theming systems of modern Linux
| desktop environments which are built with customization as
| a central tenant aren't as capable as Kaleidoscope was.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidoscope_(software)
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appearance_Manager [2]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowBlinds
| Not_John wrote:
| Reminds of this https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/
|
| Had a lot of fun with this some time ago.
| deluarseo wrote:
| webwielder2 wrote:
| Very excited to see Infini-D. Hands down the most Macintosh-esque
| 3D rendering software ever created.
| hadrien01 wrote:
| Question from someone who never used MacOS 9: why does the
| Sherlock UI look so... OS X like?
| johnzim wrote:
| Because it was built with the newer design language that Apple
| was developing - they used it in Quicktime too. I'd hazard a
| guess that the key difference was that at the time that MacOS 9
| came out, you could get something in as long as it appealed to
| Steve.
|
| It's not that Apple didn't experiment in earlier days, but this
| was a time when the push to the next OS and design was really
| strong after so many failed efforts to get a next-gen OS out
| the door.
| Lammy wrote:
| See also: http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm
| cortesoft wrote:
| I still play quite a few games from MacOS using SheepShaver.
| Still find it pretty fun.
| ty_2k wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this. It's stuff like this that really makes
| the web feel mysterious and magical.
| jdlyga wrote:
| Brings me back to being a kid playing with Mac OS making folders
| and colorizing them with labels. This was the first time in my
| life I ever heard the word "essential" and had no idea what it
| meant. I used to pronounce it like "assess natal".
| thfuran wrote:
| You had a very novel approach to phonetics.
| heywire wrote:
| I have some words like this too. I still read archive as arch-
| ive in my head all these years later. Native speaker too, just
| wasn't a word I heard a lot when I was younger I guess.
| siruva07 wrote:
| I can hear "Sosumi" while clicking around :)
|
| "Sosumi is an alert sound introduced by Jim Reekes in Apple
| Inc.'s Macintosh System 7 operating system in 1991. The name is
| derived from the phrase "so, sue me!" because of a long running
| court battle with Apple Corps, the similarly named music company,
| regarding the use of music in Apple Inc.'s computer products."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sosumi
| spongeb00b wrote:
| For me it was weird not hearing that very specific sort of
| grinding noise of old hard drives while watching the boot
| screen :)
| papandada wrote:
| Not a Mac user. Figured this was a new announcement. Clicked and
| then remembered -- I was at a "System 7" launch as a youngster,
| 30+ years to get a couple version would be very, very slow.
| genewitch wrote:
| when mac os X was announced they said "we're done with the
| versions! forever!" and it took them about 16 years to start
| incrementing the versions again. I get announcements from a
| discord server about mac OS checkpoint releases and they're
| over version 15 now, i think.
|
| edit to add: also when windows 10 came out microsoft was like
| "we're done with the versions! forever!" and then a couple
| years later "windows 11!"
| papandada wrote:
| I wonder if any company is successfully keeping any of its
| "forever" promises. ("unlimited gmail storage") -- I guess
| Costco's hot dog price is still holding strong.
| eigenhombre wrote:
| Very cool to see a working HyperCard app in there (Infinite HD >
| Multimedia > HyperCard). Some of the animations are painfully
| slow, but dang this takes me back... and the old Photoshop!!!
| Just, wow!
|
| Spent a lot of time in this world a few decades ago....
| scelerat wrote:
| I was stoked to see Apeiron in the Games folder. One of the best
| Centipede clones ever.
|
| Too bad it doesn't work -- hope that's a temporary thing.
| genewitch wrote:
| it's missing inputsprokets, which i spent about 2 minutes
| looking for in other folders before the system crashed...
| poundtown wrote:
| KPT Bryce!
| genewitch wrote:
| but who is Kai
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| Kai Krause, a German designer and software developer -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_Krause
| kirykl wrote:
| Love the inclusion of ClarisWorks, spent so much time in there
| mitchitized wrote:
| First thing I did was look for Shufflepuck Cafe and Sun Tzu's
| Ancient Art of War.
|
| Anybody else do the same?
| blastro wrote:
| Turns out I'm nostalgic for an operating system...
| winrid wrote:
| Amazing that this boots faster in Chrome on my phone than it did
| on my laptop in the day.
| sph wrote:
| Look at that subtle off-grey colouring, the tasteful thickness of
| it...
|
| What the hell happened to modern GUIs, man. We peaked in the
| 1990s.
| miohtama wrote:
| Web browser and mobile happened.
| cogman10 wrote:
| And why is everything just so slow!
|
| That's what always annoys me. I have a computer that's easily
| 100x or 1000x more powerful than my 1995 desktop yet so many
| actions have noticeable lag.
|
| Like, try it, resize outlook right now (just stretch the side
| left and right). You'll see so much jank and jitter. How is
| something like that not instantaneous?
| acdha wrote:
| > Like, try it, resize outlook right now (just stretch the
| side left and right). You'll see so much jank and jitter. How
| is something like that not instantaneous?
|
| Outlook is old, old code and still does things network I/O in
| the same thread as window repainting. I wouldn't treat it as
| a reference of anything other than how much Microsoft has
| struggled with the baggage from a bunch of mistakes they made
| in the 90s.
|
| If you use Safari, Apple Mail, or almost any other macOS app,
| it is instantaneous -- and unlike the older Mac apps like the
| Finder which did the rubber-band overlay until you released
| the mouse button, that means things like Safari seamlessly
| reflowing the entire Mac OS 9 emulator the whole time.
| firecall wrote:
| I 100% agree with your broader point!
|
| However in support of Apple's M1/M2 macs, I dont have this
| problem so much!
|
| Apart from Electron based apps...
|
| Which is why I find the wide spread love of VS Code so
| befuddling!
|
| It's fine.. but so laggy when redrawing windows, switching
| tabs and so on!
|
| Maybe it doesn't seem slow when in isolation, but compared to
| a GUI editor like Sublime Text, it's very noticeable!
|
| But yes - your broader point stands and drives me nuts!
|
| Somewhat gone are the days of upgrading your computer and
| everything being noticable faster because the software is the
| same! (to be fair, the M1 upgrade from Intel was impressive)
|
| These days to have a decent experience (as a self confessed
| geek with high standards) you need an M1 Mac or on Linux and
| Windows a modern CPU, decent GPU and as much RAM as you can
| fit!
| VapidLinus wrote:
| I have the same feelings about VS Code. JetBrains is
| working on a competitor (Fleet) that is running on the JVM
| and renders using Skia. But everywhere I keep seeing it get
| flack for _not_ being web-based...
| bombcar wrote:
| Some of that you can tune down as it's trying to redraw at
| every single step in between.
|
| Sometimes there are accessibility options that speed it back
| up (don't redraw until mouse let go) - I know you can turn
| off animations but not sure you can disable that one.
| IncRnd wrote:
| It's created with javascript in the browser, which is not
| efficient.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| JavaScript is very efficient. It compiles to native on the
| fly in v8 engines. The DOM itself, however, has a lot of
| foot guns for performance.
| IncRnd wrote:
| That's a distinction without a difference. Running JS is
| slower than native. The user of JS cares about the real
| world speed of emulating a quadra machine, which is shown
| as very slow at this webpage.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| This conversation went on a tangent. It started off with
| people complaining about modern GUIs then moved onto
| Outlook and then someone rushes to blame JavaScript /
| Electron. JS runs 50-80% as fast as native, which is
| _more than fast enough_ thanks to Moore 's law, for
| virtually any GUI application. The _web_ has a reputation
| for being slow, thanks to a traditional lack of GPU
| acceleration as well as 25 years of legacy code attached
| to its Document Object Model, that are pretty gnarly for
| browser vendors to deal with. That has nothing to do with
| JS itself.
|
| JS can run full GPU accelerated graphics with WebGL (and
| soon WebGPU), with shaders, complex geometries, textures,
| etc at 60 FPS:
| https://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_animation_keyframes.
|
| The MacOS 9 demo as shown, is impressive, but it is far
| from optimized, given that it is a side project. But it's
| impressive all the same that it's emulating a full Mac
| environment _in the browser_. Read the developer 's own
| comments on it:
| https://blog.persistent.info/2022/03/blog-post.html
| IncRnd wrote:
| > This conversation went on a tangent.
|
| The discussion was to answer, "And why is everything just
| so slow!"
|
| > The web has a reputation for being slow, thanks to a
| traditional lack of GPU acceleration as well as 25 years
| of legacy code attached to its Document Object Model,
| that are pretty gnarly for browser vendors to deal with.
| That has nothing to do with JS itself.
|
| That's not exactly true, though, as many discussions here
| on HN have demonstrated. The web is not slow due to, "a
| traditional lack of GPU acceleration." The DOM is the
| execution environment of JS in the browser. This isn't a
| discussion about JS in any other environment.
|
| While you may have a vested interest in JS, that doesn't
| change its properties. Please, let's get back to the
| actual discussion.
| retrac wrote:
| When you resized a window on classic Mac OS, your program had
| to actually like, draw the new window. Your program is
| spinning in a loop listening for events, you get a window-
| resize event. So you allocate space for the new bitmap,
| calculate what you need to display within the enlarged view,
| and then draw it. Did the user drag another window over your
| window, and then drag it away again? You get an event for
| that. Gotta draw what was there all over again.
|
| This is all very close to the metal. On early 68K Macs, this
| is driven by QuickDraw, some very tightly coded assembly
| routines in ROM. Invoking them is only 2 bytes of code, as
| they're simply CPU opcodes (trap instructions). Render this
| string at this point size with this font at this X, Y
| location. Redraw the menu bar. Draw a rectangle. And so on.
| If you sequence these Toolbox invocations correctly, as a
| great master programmer of coroutines who never mistreats a
| handle as a pointer, you can render a complex scene with
| hundreds of polygons and a full screen of text in 200
| milliseconds at 8 MHz.
|
| But it takes thousands of lines of hand-holding the machine
| to do it.
|
| Today, all of this is typically handled by instantiating a
| window object which draws into a private framebuffer which
| the system composites. That right there is tens of megabytes
| of RAM overhead. Then you use a thread to handle the UI and a
| thread to draw and etc. There's almost no boilerplate to just
| show a window. Perhaps one line of code. And it doesn't get
| overwritten by intrusive neighbour windows. Creating
| frameworks that can do all that bookkeeping in a flexible and
| general way (don't forget you want to be able to render
| vector fonts for any Unicode language) has a tremendous
| overhead.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| > That right there is tens of megabytes of RAM overhead.
|
| FWIW the slowest spec of DDR3-800 transfers 100MB is about
| 15ms.
| firecall wrote:
| Classic MacOS only draws an outline of windows on any
| interaction!
|
| There was an extension to enable window previews whilst
| dragging.
| [deleted]
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Well, you see, they've traded end-user performance for
| productivity. This is why it only takes a team five times as
| large to deliver the same functionality as a comparable
| program from the 1990s, and that team can make a buggier
| initial release in merely twice the time.
| sharikous wrote:
| There might be something in what you are saying but it's
| not really like that.
|
| The current macOS is humungous, kernel aside. There is a
| variety of systems running under the hood (Spotlight,
| fsevents, Apple Events, duet, launchd, MIGs, XPCs, caches,
| endless network services, launch services, anti-malware
| background programs, AppleID agents, diagnostics,
| cloud/AppleID integration, auditing, RAM compression,
| energy management, backups, filesystem snapshotting,
| COW,.... not to mention that huge OS inside the OS that is
| the browser) that is more than a surgeon can know about the
| human body.
|
| Of course most of that is spying on you and telemetry...
| But you just have much more features these days and
| stability and security increased a lot. If that is not
| added value for you just work on one of those "minimal"
| OSes that appear from time to time. I guarantee you that
| you will miss a modern "bloaty" OS in no time.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| One might expect all those extra services and
| capabilities would make application development faster,
| though. Less for application developers to worry about,
| since the OS and built-in services do way more than a
| typical 1990s OS--and any that aren't helpful, ought at
| least not be getting in the way. So, sure, the situation
| for our industry's even more embarrassing than my
| original post implied.
| dzikimarian wrote:
| Javascript/Electron - single code base for multiple desktop
| platforms.
| potatolicious wrote:
| +1. I can't speak to Windows but I suspect it's similar: if
| you're running a well-implemented native app (ex.
| Pixelmator) the responsiveness is entirely there and in
| fact significantly better than it was in the 90s. Even
| fairly graphically heavy apps have no issues resizing and
| otherwise being real-time interactive.
|
| I would hazard that the vast majority of "jank" you see in
| desktop apps today is due to cross-platform code. A large
| portion of this is webviews (ex. Slack), but some of it is
| also poorly-implemented shims between the platform's native
| APIs and shoehorning that into some cross-platform library
| (ex. Photoshop).
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| I recently used a legacy win32 app at work, on a windows
| 10 laptop. It looked old, even though the buttons etc got
| styled the win10 way. Since the app had some issues, I
| wanted to rule out a compatibility problem with modern
| Windows, and ran the app in a windows XP VM on the same
| laptop. Unfortunately the same issues arose, but I was
| really surprised by how snappy the app felt. Everything
| was just immediate, sub-windows popped up instantly.
| Sure, the machine was an order of magnitude faster than
| the typical XP machine back in the day, so it's not an
| apples to apples comparison, but still it was one of
| these revelations that we just seem to be taking one step
| forwards and at least one step back every time we improve
| something.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Even if you take a step above win32 and use a framework
| like GTK or QT, you'll find that sort of responsiveness.
| FirstLvR wrote:
| Yup that's the answer, and cyber security, we had to add
| thousand of code lines in order to circumvent login
| properties and such, in order to make software more secure
| (and less private)
| chrisco255 wrote:
| VS Code works great in my experience.
| dzikimarian wrote:
| We'll I've spent years on notepad++ and I will have to
| disagree (ofc VSC can be almost like full IDE but I don't
| have a lot of plug-ins)
| pjmlp wrote:
| Thankfully to having multi-process architecture with
| enough of those services written in a mix of C#, Rust and
| C++.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Vast majority of the codebase is Typescript:
| https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/tree/main/src. Only
| thing I could find written in Rust was the CLI.
|
| Sure, under the hood Electron is powered by Chromium V8
| (which also powers Node.js), which is written in C++. But
| that is just the basic packages and services available to
| all Electron desktop and Node.js apps.
| pjmlp wrote:
| See ripgrep, and Microsoft plugins that have to be
| additionally installed, depending on the workloads.
| bovermyer wrote:
| Just this morning I finally bought a license for Sublime
| Text.
|
| It's just so much faster than any other GUI-based editor.
| dieulot wrote:
| Modern macOS is a significant counterexample to that claim.
| Most of it is janky. Zooming and dezooming the Finder is
| not something a 2.5 years old MacBook Air (EUR1200) can
| keep up with smoothly, for instance. Opening a Save dialog
| takes over 3 seconds, and expanding/collapsing the file
| explorer in it is comically janky.
| ace2358 wrote:
| None of this sounds right based on my experience.
|
| Wondering which model you have? Is it fanless? I've never
| used until o got my 2022 m2 air. It's the best computer
| I've ever used.
|
| Before that, 10 years of Mac Pro, and they've all been
| old (2010 models) and fast.
| dieulot wrote:
| MacBook Air early 2020 base model.
|
| The 2010 Mac Pro doesn't run macOS 11+, that might be its
| X factor.
| ace2358 wrote:
| Is that a fanless intel machine?
|
| The Mac Pro can run newer os with the help of open core.
| I can do many things with it like run Mac osX 10.6 using
| my modern amd rx570.
|
| I can also run macos 12+ which I do. It runs great!
| ezfe wrote:
| That's simply not true. A 2019 MacBook Air has no trouble
| with any of these things. If you're having trouble with
| these, something is seriously wrong with your computer.
| dieulot wrote:
| Proof: https://dieulot.fr/~temp/Screen%20Recording%202022
| -12-05%20a...
|
| It's more pronounced while recording but that's the idea.
| ezfe wrote:
| Ah, I misunderstood what you were referring to. Now that
| I understand, I'm less surprised. For some reason I was
| thinking File I/O.
|
| The Early 2020 MacBook Air is a joke from a CPU/Graphics
| perspective - even compared to other Intel Macs.
|
| I still think something's wrong with your computer, as I
| have worked with multiple of that model and they weren't
| nearly this bad (even accounting for screen recording) -
| perhaps your cooling is worse?
| mritchie712 wrote:
| Not by any means a solution to all Electron problems, but
| Tauri[0] is promising.
|
| 0 - https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri
| no_time wrote:
| Is this any better in performance? Looks like rust bolted
| to a system webview (chromium in the case of Windows)
| instead of electron (chromium bolted to v8)
| robertlagrant wrote:
| We're looking seriously at Tauri for a new application.
| It seems good, although we're very early days.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| yep, we're using too. Very happy so far.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| That's great to hear.
| genewitch wrote:
| https://danluu.com/input-lag/ has some actual metrics with
| scientific rigor and accuracy.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| See, the whole problem is that you're running Outlook,
| probably on Windows. A light-weight Linux desktop is _not_
| slow. If anything it 's a bit faster and snappier now than
| those older systems were on their historical hardware, since
| it can save a lot more disk I/O via caching in RAM.
| throwaheyy wrote:
| It's not slow. It's just that modern OS's redraw at every
| intermediate size between the initial size and the final
| size. The name of the setting in Windows is "Show window
| content while dragging", you can disable it and all your
| windows will be 100x snappier than Mac OS 9.
| ehaliewicz2 wrote:
| Rendering at every intermediate size means that it is
| slower (by default).
| walrus01 wrote:
| > What the hell happened to modern GUIs, man. We peaked in the
| 1990s.
|
| People of this opinion will probably enjoy using the latest
| version of XFCE4 on a Linux or BSD environment.
|
| It's "less terrible" than most other modern GUIs that waste
| space and are full of bubble shaped smooth looking jellybean UI
| elements.
| bacchusracine wrote:
| >People of this opinion will probably enjoy using the latest
| version of XFCE4 on a Linux or BSD environment.
|
| Mate desktop might also be something they'd enjoy. I
| personally recommend the Ubuntu-Mate version since it
| inherits a lot of the papercut fixes from when it was used in
| Ubuntu as Gnome 2.x. I was very excited to hear that the lead
| developer of Ubuntu-Mate was working with Debian to port
| those changes over.
| dri_ft wrote:
| Let's see Paul Allen's operating system.
| jzelinskie wrote:
| If this is intended to be an American Psycho reference[0],
| it's a pretty great comment.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iixytdJqZg
| iaabtpbtpnn wrote:
| That'd be MS-DOS.
| [deleted]
| mk_stjames wrote:
| I've lived to see the day where someone made an American
| Psycho business card reference _and_ a follow up comment
| would - in context mind you - be able to reference Paul Allen
| as both the movie character and the Microsoft founder.
| foobiekr wrote:
| NeXTSTEP was peak traditional UI. Everything since has been
| gradual degradation. And I include with that Apple's butchering
| of what made MCCA on NeXTSTEP so amazing.
| aj7 wrote:
| An Excel 4.0 was peak Excel. It brilliantly chose axis limits
| for you in scatter graphs, rather than wasting two minutes of
| your time every time you created one. Create new data series
| in the formula bar. Write your own functions and macros
| without consulting documentation. (I had to create my own
| ATAN2 (quadrant sensitive two-variable input arctangent.
| Ironically, when it began appearing as a standard function,
| it was called ATAN2!)
| mattl wrote:
| MCCA?
| sbuk wrote:
| Mission Critical Custom Apps.
| hahamrfunnyguy wrote:
| I lived through these times, and I thought OS X was a huge
| improvement over MacOS, I'd never want to go back! Software in
| general has gotten more bloated and slow since the '90s, but I
| don't blame it on the OS.
|
| I didn't have too many major complaints about working on MacOS,
| but I've always preferred windows. I used Windows 3.1 before
| MacOS. It's probably since I used Windows first, but I've
| always preferred the Windows approach of window management.
| Whenever using a Mac, I would always end up with a jumble of
| windows and I'd frequently click the wrong one when and it
| would pop to the front and hide what I was looking for. Then
| the wrong application's tab strip would be visible. Arrrgggh!
| It was a common point of frustration for me when using
| Photoshop and Illustrator since there are a number of similar
| Windows.
|
| In Windows 11, I like that there is reasonable support for dark
| UI and multiple desktops. I haven't used OS X that much in the
| past 10 years, so I can't comment on the improvements that have
| been made since then.
| heather45879 wrote:
| I think it's the compounding effect of digital clutter over
| time. It's easy to create digital things and the tendency to
| keep adding features never stops.
|
| Minimalism is a good thing for an OS as it really makes it
| easier to use.
|
| Another thing to note: there's a lot or duplication in modern
| software. For instance, each OS file browser has a search bar
| to help find files. But tragically, the browser also has one,
| and so do many websites in the browser. So we have a recursive,
| ever-expanding set of search bars--yuck.
|
| And also tragically, so do many apps have built-in file
| browsers. Ideally there should be one mechanism to find things,
| one mechanism to organize things, etc. It should be simple but
| flexible, and apps shouldn't have to roll their own, they
| should be able to gracefully use the one provided.
|
| We're at a weird point in software where the browser is
| basically the OS for many people. ChromeOS was an interesting
| thought but it's more like a limited-feature OS designed to
| sell Google services.
|
| We need to take a step back and kind of assess the situation
| more--and then make a nice little OS :)
| [deleted]
| mk_stjames wrote:
| I completely understand people like Andreas from SerenityOS and
| the idea that there was a time that was a peak of GUI
| simplicity yet usefulness for power users.. In their case it's
| the Win2K aesthetic but I think OS9 is pretty close to that
| level of streamlining.
|
| As amazing as OSX seemed when it was launched, I partially
| blame OSX and the whole "make everything round and groovy and
| graphical goodness" trend that started us down the path of
| making GUI's 'form over function'.
|
| This is bleeding over from OS into power-user-oriented software
| like CAD and engineering tools and most everyone hates it. The
| whole "lets take away buttons and make the ribbon icons bigger
| and more graphically pleasing" to make products look more
| modern is a cancer for power users and productive people who
| just want access to everything as best and fast as possible.
| It's a delicate balance that I do indeed believe peaked well
| over a decade ago.
| asveikau wrote:
| > As amazing as OSX seemed when it was launched
|
| This reminds me: There was pretty interesting community of
| Linux users customizing X11 desktops in the late 90s and the
| very early 2000s... When the first screenshots and demos of
| OS X and Aqua came out, almost immediately, people tried to
| imitate that.
| rzzzt wrote:
| I remember WindowBlinds and an MP3 utility (but just
| vaguely) that used a theme similar to Aqua on Windows.
| stuaxo wrote:
| There were/are Winamp themes that looked like Aqua.
| Joeri wrote:
| The frustrating part is that OS X was NeXTStep under the
| covers, and that had the late 90's look down better than
| any OS. http://toastytech.com/guis/ns332.html
|
| I ran windowmaker on my linux systems around 2000 to get
| that same look, but I had serious NeXT envy.
| asveikau wrote:
| I liked NeXT and GNUstep in those days too.
|
| I'm not sure they had it literally "better" than
| everybody else, but they certainly had something unique,
| well executed, etc.
|
| You can still recognize NeXT patterns in modern Mac GUIs.
| They're usually not surface level anymore.
| bitwize wrote:
| Oh, man, NeXTstep was an amazing UI, easily the best in
| the Unix world.
|
| Still a disaster compared to System 7, 8, or 9.
| 1ko wrote:
| I feel like BeOS was even cleaner. And it made my old PC
| feel really snappier than win98.
|
| https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/10/beos-1....
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Still upset that I don't live in the timeline where
| GNUStep/Windowmaker became the defacto DE for Linux.
| ilyt wrote:
| Yeah I remember when putting your desktops on a cube and
| spinning it around was a thing. Compositors also had a
| bunch of weird and interesting effects.
|
| It started as apple's knockoff but quickly spun out of
| control with amount of stuff you could setup with
| compiz/beryl.
|
| Then people figure out most of it _while very cool_ is not
| all that practical.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I have always felt that Win2K Pro was the pinnacle of the
| Windows UI.
| deergomoo wrote:
| I would prefer we leave the window borders in the 1990s but I
| do wish we'd stop hiding controls in overflow menus when we
| have more pixels available than ever before.
|
| I appreciate that dropping a user in a window with 150
| unlabelled icons is intimidating for them, but needing to hover
| over the magic space or find the correct icon abstraction of
| "junk drawer" to find core features is hardly intuitive either.
| etc-hosts wrote:
| how do I use this to play Dark Castle and Crystal Quest?
| tren wrote:
| I went for dark castle first thing as well. Says you need to
| change the display to 2 colours for it to work, I couldn't
| figure out how to do it.
| genewitch wrote:
| on the bottom left there's a thing that looks like the color
| bars from old TV stations, click that and pick your color
| depth. the one with the checkerboard pattern to the right is
| the resolution settings.
| aj7 wrote:
| It's amazing how much more central search is in modern OS's. This
| feels more like the original'84 Mac, but gussied up. I like OS6
| better. It was 10 years ahead of anything else, except perhaps
| Amiga, in the hands of a developer. This Mac OS9 actually looks
| like it came from a low point in Mac's penetration and power.
| adolph wrote:
| Agreed, 6 was the high point, 7 wasn't bad and 8/9 were
| skeuomorphic slow lipstick on the core OS pig. Gimme 6 with
| original iPod any day of the week.
| jwr wrote:
| A desktop where windows remember their positions... so refreshing
| in today's world, where every window and app has total amnesia
| and launches in random places.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Sick!
| GoofballJones wrote:
| Now you just need QuarkXpress loaded on it and use a weird 3rd
| party font manager to load the customers weird fonts....and then
| have it simulate crashing every 5 minutes or so.
|
| Would really bring back that OS 9 feeling.
| agys wrote:
| Makes me remind (and appreciate) of how beautiful and clean the
| UI was. Designed in the tiniest detail!
| lprd wrote:
| Wow, what a blast from the past. I was only 9 at the time this
| was released and every bit enamored with the world of computers.
| My dad owned a data recovery business that also developed
| software. I was home-schooled and would visit his office
| frequently after class as I loved looking at all the hard drives
| and also loved the "computer room smell". There was also the
| office tradition of playing a game of Bungie's Marathon (which
| ran natively on Mac OS 9) before closing up shop. It wasn't too
| long after I would be saving up for my first tangerine iBook.
|
| Good times.
| genewitch wrote:
| the smell being dust, or ozone? Working in a computer repair
| place when i was ~19 ruined my sinuses forever. I have a lot of
| old hardware kind of sorted in cabinets, and whenever someone
| needs some old hardware i have to either dust mask or take an
| antihistamine.
|
| So asking me for something to fix a broken old thing usually
| involves me making a cross face, handing you whatever it is,
| and then taking a nap after washing my hands twice.
| lprd wrote:
| > the smell being dust, or ozone?
|
| I'm not exactly sure the origin of the smell. Perhaps its the
| silicon/plastic they use on the electronics? Maybe even the
| heat combined with all the rest of the components produces
| that unique smell that I love so much.
| dheera wrote:
| Reminds me of a fake MacOS website that we naughty students
| used to load up on IE on Windows machines at school and then
| full screen it, which would make it look like it was converted
| to a Mac.
|
| Except it was just a webpage designed to look like a Mac with
| some very basic GUI features.
|
| It was an extremely popular prank, I just can't remember the
| name of the website now.
|
| And today we have actual real MacOS in a browser.
| slowmotarget wrote:
| It's a great reminder of how well MacOS 9 UI and UX were
| designed, and how space efficient the whole OS was on screen.
|
| Even the window handle bars were subtly shadowed, the window
| shadows evolved when they were collapsed. Like Windows 95 at the
| time, Mac OS 9 was a beautiful work of interaction design.
| truetraveller wrote:
| Mac UX is far worse compared to Windows, in my opinion. I feel
| very claustrophobic using it. How do you live without a simple
| maximize button? "Maximimze to contents" is ambiguous, and in
| practice, does not work at all for most apps. I find myself
| having to "manually" maximize windows. And now, I don't want a
| third party app.
|
| To add to this, even after I "maximimze" windows, I have an
| ugly menu bar at the top, in addition to the windows own
| titlebar. Allow apps to have a menu in their own window, but
| don't force an ugly global menu. For the clock/systray,
| integrate it like windows in the bottom app bar.
|
| I could keep listing frustrations. Many of these are objective.
|
| Note: I'm not talking about app installation, or malware, or
| "polish". Mac is superior, will agree.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| If they're anything like this, almost none of your
| frustrations are going to be objective - they are going to be
| things that grate on you because of the design and
| interaction models you are used to.
|
| There's nothing wrong with that! You're allowed to prefer
| particular approaches. It's like when I use Windows or
| Ubuntu, and get frustrated at how particular interactions
| work. It's not because the Mac is objectively better, but
| because I'm used to it.
|
| (Except for the keyboard shortcuts. Distinct
| control/option/command keys is objectively better and I will
| die on this hill.)
| truetraveller wrote:
| >Distinct control/option/command Way too much cognitive
| load. Just have a single "ctrl". Coupled with shift, that's
| more than enough for most hotkeys.
| wmf wrote:
| The way I remember it, command was used for commands,
| option was mostly for typing accented characters, and
| ctrl was only used within terminal windows (which means
| most Mac users would have never touched it).
| rifty wrote:
| ctrl+click was used to show the context menu with a
| single button mouse. At least some probably used it!
|
| https://www.wired.com/2000/10/eek-a-two-button-mac-mouse/
|
| "In recent years, the company has added "contextual
| menus" to the Macintosh operating system. But to activate
| them, users must hold down the control key while pressing
| down the mouse button, which more or less defeats the
| purpose."
|
| _Oct 31, 2000_
| bodge5000 wrote:
| I only started using MacOS a few months ago. For the first ~2
| weeks, I hated it. I actually remember thinking that it felt
| like a poorly implemented clone of MacOS ironically. But the
| truth is, whilst you can jump between Windows and most Linux
| distros (even Fedora) without much trouble, MacOS is an
| entirely different beast.
|
| For example, I learnt that, completely different than
| Windows, on MacOS you're not really supposed to minimise
| windows, at least not as you would on Windows. Instead, you
| open the command centre or whatever its called and switch
| between them. Workspaces also arent an optional extra,
| they're pretty crucial to using the OS if you have multiple
| windows open. Its for these reasons I can see why people
| praise the trackpad so much, its actually preferable to use
| over a mouse because its so deeply embedded in the flow of
| the OS.
|
| I'm not saying MacOS is objectively better in its workflow,
| for that I'm still not sure what I'll end up using as my main
| computer, just that its different and should be treated as
| such.
| philwelch wrote:
| > How do you live without a simple maximize button?
|
| Classic Mac OS apps did not put the entire application UI in
| a single full screen window. Instead, it was typical for an
| application to contain multiple windows that could all be
| visible at once.
|
| > To add to this, the "top" menu bar is lame.
|
| This is related. In Windows, the entire UI of the app is
| contained in a single window, which you would typically
| maximize to fill the screen. In classic Mac OS, apps have
| multiple windows open at the same time, but the menu bar
| pertains to the application and not to the window.
| truetraveller wrote:
| I understand all of that. And that is precisely my point.
| Isolate everything concerning an app to its own window, and
| allow that to be maximized. If an app has multiple windows,
| contain them within the main app window. Don't pollute the
| "global" window space with app-specific windows.
| kccqzy wrote:
| > If an app has multiple windows, contain them within the
| main app window.
|
| This advice is actually rarely followed by apps
| regardless of whether they are on Windows or Mac.
| Consider Microsoft Word; if you open two Word documents,
| does Microsoft Word open two windows or does it open one
| main app window and then contain both documents in a
| single window? Are you aware of this Microsoft concept
| called MDI?
|
| It sounds like you were used to iOS where each app has
| but one window and you'd prefer that to be the case on
| desktop operating systems like Mac or Windows. There's
| nothing with preferring that, but it's against decades of
| desktop computing tradition.
| flenserboy wrote:
| That makes it really hard to use two (or more)
| applications side-by-side effectively. I am grateful for
| individual windows I can move exactly to where I need
| them without worrying about the application as a whole. I
| think it boils down to how people think -- application-
| centered thinking makes it easy to have multiple windows
| from different applications playing nicely with each
| other, workspace-centered thinking hates what appears to
| be the messiness of applications having windows here and
| there.
| philwelch wrote:
| The tradeoff to that being the lack of UI consistency
| between applications.
| deergomoo wrote:
| > How do you live without a simple maximize button?
|
| Why would I want a webpage which stops showing additional
| content after ~1200 pixels wide to take up the entire of my
| 2560px wide monitor?
| stuaxo wrote:
| To avoid everything else distracting you.
| Kamq wrote:
| > Why would I want a webpage which stops showing additional
| content after ~1200 pixels wide to take up the entire of my
| 2560px wide monitor?
|
| Personally, 80% of my web usage these days is hacker news
| and wikipedia. Neither of which do this.
|
| The rest is probably majority dev docs (crystal atm), and
| I'm not aware of any dev docs that do this either.
|
| The point here being that not all websites exhibit this
| behavior.
| truetraveller wrote:
| Because it removes the clutter of your desktop + other
| windows. I think many would agree. Sure, there are times
| you need to see windows side-by-side, and there is
| affordance for that. But mostly, a person is doing one task
| at a time.
| Kehvarl wrote:
| As my displays have gotten larger, I've found I want my
| windows to take up less and less of them. I may
| occasionally full-screen something, but it always feels
| incredibly difficult to deal with. As primarily a Windows
| user, I've more than once wished I had a "fit to content"
| button like Mac's.
|
| Just another instance of different users having different
| patterns.
| rifty wrote:
| I feel like the expected pattern to deal with clutter in
| MacOS is by hiding rather than just covering. This is
| often forgotten about but you can alt+click on an app to
| hide all other apps but the one you clicked. This is even
| in possible in Mac OS 9. In modern macOS you can invert
| the behaviour by turning on single-app mode through the
| terminal. It's then alt+click to show multiple apps and
| just click to hide all but the app.
| npteljes wrote:
| I'm this person. I have a hard time focusing on one,
| never mind more than one - in a similar vein,
| notifications are also disabled / minimized.
| oaiey wrote:
| I came here to say the opposite: The folder icons ... a mess.
| Dynamic spacing depending how long the folder name is, free
| style sorting, "arranging", ... that is a lot of things but not
| a folder system ;) .. maybe a "desktop" folder ... but not a
| structural archiving system.
|
| I was a macOS 9 user before I switched to Windows ... and I
| have to say: I had a fonder memory of it than what I see in
| this emulation. All operating systems came a long way since.
| But hey, it is 20 years, is not it.
| toasteros wrote:
| Are there any decent implementations of this UI for Linux?
| asveikau wrote:
| It's not maintained, but a few years ago I was feeling
| nostalgic and playing with "mlvwm", the mac-like virtual
| window manager, a project from the late 90s.
|
| At least a small amount of C knowledge is sometimes helpful
| for getting those old projects working. Sometimes a new
| compiler or new libc will expose old bugs.
|
| My experience with old window managers is they need tweaks to
| work reasonably on modern high dpi displays.
|
| Iirc mlvwm builds with imake, which is positively ancient.
| It's the build tool that X.org got rid of after taking over
| from XFree86.
| zydeco wrote:
| I made a platinum theme (and a few other mac-like ones) for
| xfwm some years ago: https://www.opendesktop.org/p/1016308
| rcarmo wrote:
| Here you go: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330
|
| You can theme XFCE to look really, really close. Won't behave
| identically, of course.
| retrac wrote:
| You could theme some window manager, but it's not the same.
| It'd be a tough project! The Mac UI was holistic. Early on,
| it didn't even make much of a distinction between application
| and operating system. Just getting the menu bar right (shared
| between OS and application) when every program has its own
| idea on how to present a menu would be a major challenge.
| Applications really do need to be designed for the classic
| Mac environment. Back in the day software was almost never
| ported directly, but had to be substantially redesigned for
| the Mac.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Linux has a standard protocol (dbusmenu) for exporting menu
| structures supported by most common app UI libraries, and
| environments like KDE's Plasma use this to offer a global
| menu bar option, too.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Unfortunately there's a number of Linux apps that don't
| publish any menus, including most GTK3/4 and Electron
| apps. I don't think Firefox does either. I remember
| trying the global menu option in KDE and being sorely
| disappointed in how few apps populated it.
|
| To get consistent usage out of a dbus-based global menu
| (KDE's or that one XFCE panel plugin) one would need to
| fork quite a number of packages, and for proprietary
| Electron apps you'd probably just be stuck.
| sho_hn wrote:
| GTK apps can support the global menu. There's a GTK
| plugin that adds support, and many distros install it by
| default. I think it was originally written by Canonical
| (their custom Unity desktop also used a global menu bar).
|
| Not sure about the state of things with Electron. I'm
| sure you're generally right and there are some gaps, and
| of course, on Mac OS you do only very rarely encounter an
| app with an empty menu bar (I have though).
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I think I may have stumbled upon that plugin but getting
| it to load under latest Fedora wasn't trivial.
| projektfu wrote:
| Yeah, apps were responsible for drawing the menu bar and
| handling its mouse events (delegated to toolbox libraries).
| They also used to ask the OS to put in the menu items for
| the apple menu, and were responsible for delegating those
| mouse clicks to the OS as well. Background tasks required
| the foreground app to release the processor (or interrupts
| like vertical blank). Everything depended on proper
| cooperation.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| The whole system.. from the sizing of the borders and titlebars
| to the font and the menu density to the icon sizing, spacing,
| and design in general...
|
| All feels more coherent than anything today. It feels like it
| was sketched out by a small group of people and executed
| incredibly well. Meanwhile things today look more disjointed
| like the product of a lot of design-by-committee.
|
| Susan Kare's 'Chicago' in this rendering hits hard in the
| nostalgia factor to me a well.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| I'll be that guy... the system font for menus, etc in OS 8
| and 9 is "Geneva" [EDIT: It's _" Charcoal"_, of course.
| Thanks for the heads up!]. It was "Chicago" up to and
| including System 7.x.
|
| I do agree on all other points :)
| ihatepython wrote:
| Pretty sure it was Charcoal and not Geneva.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| You're right, I mixed up the two font names in my head. I
| edited my post above.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| Huh, TIL. I had always thought it was always just up-
| res'ing variations on Chicago, up thru and including the
| first iPod.
|
| They look pretty similar but now that I look it them side
| by side I see it a bit.
|
| As much as it is the style, it's also that kinda.. not-
| True-type still-a-bit-pixelated edges look that is the
| nostalgia factor, I guess.
| tobr wrote:
| Original iPod did use Chicago though! Then when they got
| color screens they switched to Lucida Grande.
| philwelch wrote:
| iPod used Chicago for the same reason Chicago was used on
| the original Mac--it was designed to make UI elements
| clearly readable on low resolution monochrome screens.
| resters wrote:
| I agree it was a high point for UI/UX logic. The filesystem
| was part of the OS experience and it generally made sense
| with little magic going on.
|
| I have wondered in the years since whether the newer
| abstractions and UI patterns we find in MacOS and Windows are
| actually necessary. These days both OSes are trying to be
| tablet friendly, trying to discourage user-installed/curated
| software, and trying to promote bundled cloud services, so
| it's not even clear to me whether the MacOS 9 abstractions
| are really the correct ones anymore, as evidenced by the many
| problems with cloud backed file explorer interfaces,
| synchronization, etc.
| ralphc wrote:
| I have several Macs that run OS 9, I pull them out just to
| use the UI at times, I enjoy it so much. It all flows and
| works together so well.
| klodolph wrote:
| Sure, but--
|
| The fat borders for the windows and the control strip at the
| bottom left of the screen took up a lot of space on real
| monitors of the era. Try running at a more modest 800x600 or
| 640x480 and it will seem less efficient. Modern Mac OS X is
| actually quite efficient, with zero-pixel window borders on
| three sides, and narrower scroll bars.
|
| Worse, a bunch of applications had code that would set up
| window locations with the assumption that the window borders
| were 1 pixel wide, like they were prior to Mac OS 8. This often
| meant that controls which were supposed to be visible would be
| partially covered by another window's border.
|
| I remember the Mac OS 8 era as a bit of "excess" that got
| cleaned up somewhat with the arrival of Mac OS X.
|
| On the other hand, Mac OS 8 came with a fresh batch of
| standardized widgets (Appearance Manager) which made all the
| apps look better. These widgets came with guidelines for how
| they should be sized and placed, something which is missing
| from a lot of modern UI toolkits.
| outworlder wrote:
| Yes, but also keep in mind that the pointing devices in use
| were very primitive compared to what we have today and that
| many users were not as proficient. All contemporary operating
| systems had thick borders and some had very prominent
| resizing handles.
| klodolph wrote:
| The thick borders took up valuable screen space and weren't
| necessary. They weren't present prior to Mac OS 8, and they
| weren't present after Mac OS 9. You might consider the era
| of thick borders as a 5-year blip on the timeline from 1997
| to 2002.
|
| If anything, modern pointing devices are often less
| precise. We now commonly use trackpads, touch, and pens. In
| the 1990s, it was usually the mouse, so you find a lot of
| 1990s UI elements that are very small. The only reason our
| modern scrollbars on macOS are so small is because it's
| assumed that you can scroll without them, either with a
| scroll wheel or with a touch gesture.
|
| I'm not sure if the list of contemporary operating systems
| is particularly illuminative. You might look at Windows
| '95, CDE (Solaris), or BeOS and find chunky borders. Or you
| might look at TWM or Window Maker (OpenStep) and see thin
| borders. The only conclusion I draw is that everyone agreed
| that you _should_ have borders.
| II2II wrote:
| > If anything, modern pointing devices are often less
| precise.
|
| You're discounting the joys of using a dirty mouse, where
| the mouse would momentarily stick due to gunked up
| rollers.
| klodolph wrote:
| I've been using old versions of Mac OS, like Mac OS 8,
| with both new hardware (modern trackpads) and original
| hardware (ball mice). The ball mice are much more precise
| than modern trackpads, when you're clicking on something.
| If they stick, it's frustrating and you have to wiggle
| the mouse around to get it to land on your click target,
| but once the cursor is over your click target, you can
| click on it. When you try to click on something with a
| trackpad, what happens is you end up moving the pointer
| during the click.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| sure but this trend of tiny/hidden until you magically know
| to mouse over a 10px wide area on the right to reveal the
| scrollbar is simply user hostile
| amadeusz wrote:
| Compared to amount of space wasted in modern applications on
| margins, padding, etc, I would take Mac OS 9 window borders
| with rest of the interface.
|
| Not to say it was perfect, but overall old computer
| interfaces were more information dense than todays one.
| david422 wrote:
| Not a fan of the new trend of zero window borders. I wish
| there was at least a way to make them customizable.
| natemwilson wrote:
| You can turn on Increase Contrast from the OSX System
| Preferences Accessibility section. I do that for this exact
| reason.
| david422 wrote:
| Trying it now, thanks!
| klodolph wrote:
| By "new trend" are you talking about how the borders got
| eliminated in Mac OS X in 2001? That trend is old enough to
| buy beer.
|
| Although for a while (starting with 10.3?), some windows
| had a chunky brushed-metal look.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| IIRC it was around 2010 that Apple started getting rid of
| scroll bars by default
| lelandfe wrote:
| That would be 10.7 Lion, in 2011. But I believe OP was
| talking about the older window borders, which afforded
| the ability to drag the window from any part of the
| perimeter.
| azinman2 wrote:
| You say that but I've recently been programming an app in
| system 7, which isn't totally dissimilar to 9 in UX, and I keep
| thinking "wow how did I ever use this." Windows constantly
| occluding each other, no easy way to switch between them
| outside of the mouse, finder windows filled with grids that I
| have to scroll through, no easy way to just see the desktop,
| etc. Current macOS is miles ahead in usability.
| eyesee wrote:
| It's interesting: my recollection of that period was I rarely
| stored anything on the desktop. The file system was so much
| smaller and easier to handle that I stored things in folders
| and didn't have trouble finding them again. Not until OS X
| did I pick up the desktop-as-staging-area habit because
| navigation was so painful.
| azinman2 wrote:
| But then how do you easily navigate / launch apps? Dig thru
| your folder trees each time in Finder? Most apps I'm
| finding have folder structures with a bunch of aux files.
| It's not so seemless as a dock or even a start menu.
|
| Back even then I used my desktop heavily too.
| Schlaefer wrote:
| The Apple menu top left is the start menu, you organize
| it however you want.
| azinman2 wrote:
| But that not how you launch apps?
| bitwize wrote:
| > But then how do you easily navigate / launch apps? Dig
| thru your folder trees each time in Finder?
|
| Back in the day, Finder used to remember whether folders
| were open on the desktop or "put away". It was a _direct_
| , _one-to-one_ mapping between your spatial awareness of
| objects in the real world and the representation of
| objects in the computer. Meaning that things were left
| exactly where you put them on-screen, just like in the
| real world and, hence, it was easy to find your
| applications because they will be right where you left
| them.
|
| But you don't _need_ to launch applications, you just
| double-click on documents. Mac OS remembered which
| program was associated with each document -- not each
| document _type_ or _extension_ , each _document_. Each
| file had distinct type and creator codes associated with
| it, so that a JPEG created in Photoshop will be opened in
| Photoshop, and a JPEG downloaded off the web might be
| opened in a browser, when double-clicked.
|
| Mac OS, pre-X, was quite simply the best UI ever
| designed. It took advantage of pioneering research into
| human-computer interaction and the underlying psychology
| of how humans relate to objects in a way that nobody
| today -- not even Apple -- is doing. It is what all UIs
| should aspire to be like, even today.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I think the whole spatial desktop metaphor is overhyped.
| Rather than go point by point on this, I encourage you to
| use OS 9 for a week or two to actually do work in. Relive
| using it versus just from memory. Then I'm curious to see
| if you still feel that way. My guess is you'll realize
| it's actually not all that.
| fzzzy wrote:
| DragThing
| azinman2 wrote:
| But now we're just adding 3rd party software to change
| the fundamental UX. The GP was talking about how much
| better it was back then, but if you need 3rd party tools
| to make it work, then it really wasn't.
| fzzzy wrote:
| OS 8 also allowed you to drag any folder to the bottom of
| the screen to create a pop up tab, and switch any folder
| view to the At Ease view, so you could do the same thing
| without any third party software. But DragThing is just
| awesome.
| eyesee wrote:
| More often than not I was opening documents, not apps.
| But with spatial windows in Finder I used to just arrange
| my Applications folder the way I wanted (sometimes using
| Aliases) and have it open on the left of my screen, then
| have my Documents on the right. I kept a row of Desktop
| icons visible with an In and Out box.
|
| There wasn't a default folder structure in the early
| days. Your hard drive had a "System" folder with merely a
| few hundred files in it (in a hierarchy) that you can
| ignore day-to-day. Otherwise the whole drive was your
| playground.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Finder aided this by being spacial. If you moved a window,
| then closed it, it stayed there the next time you opened
| it. If you moved a folder or file icon around it similarly
| stayed where you put it when you next opened up the window.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Exactly. And the muscle memory you built over time made
| you open and click through folders extremely fast.
|
| But I don't know if it would scale to the terabytes of
| today.
| amelius wrote:
| Apple isn't so great. For example why aren't Copy and Paste
| separate or specifically marked keys and do we have to use
| Cmd+C and Cmd+V? Same for Undo/Redo, etc. This is stuff any UX
| student can figure out.
| suction wrote:
| acdha wrote:
| Separate keys have challenges: in addition to the extra cost,
| you need to find physical space and train people to look for
| and use them. The original designers wanted to make it
| efficient for people who were already typing and as you might
| have noticed those keys are all close together and convenient
| for one-handed use:
|
| > Why the Z X C V keys? -- They were close on the keyboard.
| We did X because it was a cross out (CUT). We did V because
| it pointed down like this [he makes a 'V' shape with his
| hands], and you were inserting; it was like an upside-down
| caret (PASTE). And Z was the closest one, because we figured
| you'd UNDO a lot. And C for COPY -- that was easy.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW-atKrg0T4 via
| http://morrick.me/archives/8432
| dmix wrote:
| I love the purple color used in the "Platinum" interface theme
| in Mac OS 8/9, even the scrollbar is purple:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/WwFdpJH.png
|
| They even offered a crazy "Memphis" art themed option:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSLWbFUG_ig "High-tech" wasn't
| very pretty either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBUgDnPT8Ps
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Appearance_Manage...
| tambourine_man wrote:
| There was Drawing Board which I found exquisite, but as a
| work of art, not for everyday usage.
|
| https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/2-jpg.330369/
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KOEMz_saHCE
| duskwuff wrote:
| Drawing Board was probably the most usable of Apple's
| alternative Appearance themes (which never shipped, but
| were leaked pretty quickly). The little lines extending off
| the corners of windows had some glitchy behavior in some
| apps, IIRC, but it was at least visually acceptable, and I
| used it for a while.
|
| The other two themes were basically unusable, though, and
| it's very clear why they were never officially released.
| dmix wrote:
| That is quite nice from a purely visual perspective.
| JonathonW wrote:
| None of the alternate themes actually made it into a final
| release of Mac OS; just Platinum.
|
| There was a fairly healthy third-party theming community,
| though, and the Apple-developed themes (Memphis, High-Tech,
| and a sketch-styled theme called Drawing Board) would still
| work if you got your hands on them.
| munificent wrote:
| I love that color too. Fun trivia that I discovered doing
| pixel art way back then: That color is blue.
|
| It appears purplish, but it's actually a desaturated blue
| with hue right at 240deg. Something about the lack of
| saturation and brightness gives it a purplish cast.
| tobr wrote:
| It's funny how mixing pure blue (#0000ff) with pure white
| (#ffffff) makes it look a little purple, and how you also
| have the exact same problem when you invert the colors -
| mixing pure yellow (#ffff00) with pure black (#000000)
| makes it look sort of green (the complementary color to
| purple). In both cases you have to adjust the green channel
| a little "faster" and the red a little "slower" to get
| something that looks more neutral, ie shift the light blue
| towards cyan and the dark yellow towards red.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| Except for the lack of a proper fullscreen function...
| musicale wrote:
| > Except for the lack of a proper fullscreen function...
|
| What do you mean by this?
|
| How did screen savers and games work?
| philistine wrote:
| Believe it or not, full screen apps are a Windows thing.
| Apple has added full screen app support only recently, and
| any Windows convert who has switched to macOS and has
| problems adapting to its UI has one thing in common: they
| haven't let go of the idea that all apps need to use the
| whole screen at all times.
| dTal wrote:
| >full screen apps are a Windows thing
|
| And iOS. Funny, that!
| ilyt wrote:
| It's every other platform thing. Even Amiga did just fine
| with that _fucking arcane_ (apparently, to Apple) concept
| that your OS needs to fuck off and let me work /play
| pjmlp wrote:
| Nope, other 16 bit OSes and UNIXes have them.
| genewitch wrote:
| i see to recall america online was fullscreen on macOS 8
| and 9.
| realgeniushere wrote:
| This is a funny cope.
|
| > _Believe it or not, full screen apps are a Windows
| thing._
|
| Nope. It's just that maximizing--single action to expand a
| window the whole screen minus the OS docks/taskbars--is
| present in every widely used OS _except_ for Mac OS.
|
| > _they haven't let go of the idea that all apps need to
| use the whole screen at all times_
|
| Not sure where you're getting "at all times" from. Windows
| and Linux desktops all easily support having windows take
| up less than the whole screen. In fact, it's easier than in
| Mac OS because of window snapping to sides and corners.
| It's only that Mac OS makes it very clumsy to get the
| effect that maximizing has on every other OS.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Maximization of windows most certainly exists in MacOS.
| klodolph wrote:
| Prior to full-screen mode on macOS, you would option-
| click the window resize button to resize it to the full
| size of the screen. This still works. It just doesn't
| snap.
| kccqzy wrote:
| That's a Zoom button not a Maximize button. Apps like
| Safari zoom based on the content, not the screen.
| klodolph wrote:
| Sure, under some circumstances it won't fill the screen.
| musicale wrote:
| Seems to work fine on Finder windows in Mac OS 9:
|
| Single-click maximizes to the content size.
|
| Option-click maximizes to full screen minus menu bar and
| desktop volume icons.
|
| Apps like games and screen savers don't seem top have
| trouble covering up the entire desktop and menu bar.
|
| I prefer it to the current macOS Finder where zooming
| covers up the menu bar and desktop volume icons, and
| where there doesn't seem to be an easy way to zoom to
| content.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Apple has added full screen app support only recently_
|
| I read somewhere that the reason Apple finally added full-
| screen support to macOS (back then OS X), wasn't because of
| the Windows switchers. It was to get a bit more real estate
| out of the MacBook Air's small screen size.
| deergomoo wrote:
| I think it was also to try to get some i(Pad)OS users
| back to the Mac--one of the major advertised things about
| OS X Lion (which introduced full screen) was all the iOS
| stuff they were bringing "back to the Mac".
| retrac wrote:
| Classic Mac OS supported full screen applications since the
| beginning. I'm not sure if Apple allowed it or whatever in
| their very strict interface guidelines, but from a
| programming perspective you just have to turn off the menu
| bar and take the entire screen as the GrafPort.
| klodolph wrote:
| I think the recommended route is to make a window that
| fills the screen, rather than taking the entire screen as
| a GrafPort. If you want the code to be portable, you can
| make your fullscreen window, draw to an offscreen GWorld,
| and CopyBits to the window. There's a whole song and
| dance that you do in order to make sure that this is
| fast.
|
| Later on, there was DrawSprocket. It solved the problem
| of figuring out how to do "portable" and "fast" at the
| same time, and let you use features like page flipping,
| if the hardware supported it (saving you the call to
| CopyBits).
| jameshart wrote:
| HyperCard was a fullscreen app. A stack could hide the
| menu by just... saying 'hide menuBar' in its background
| script.
| klodolph wrote:
| You can think of HyperCard as a fullscreen app, and
| that's not wrong. Look at it another way, and it's
| displaying a 512x342 pixel window. On B&W compact Macs,
| that's the size of the display. If you ran Hypercard on a
| later 640x480 color Mac, you could see the border of the
| window and move it around.
|
| Later versions of HyperCard let you choose the size of
| the window. Various extensions would let you use a
| borderless window for the stack, and put a big black
| window behind it covering the rest of the screen.
| duskwuff wrote:
| HyperCard did some particularly weird things to draw to
| the screen quickly on older machines. If you try dragging
| a HyperCard stack window around, you'll notice that its
| horizontal position is quantized to 8-pixel increments,
| probably to accelerate drawing on low-bit-depth displays.
| :)
| klodolph wrote:
| Yes, that's something you'll need to do if you want to
| stay on the fast path :-)
|
| The Motorola 68000 does not have a barrel shifter. You
| want to shift by 4 bits? That's four cycles, buddy!
| Avoiding shifts keeps you on the fast path for
| CopyBits().
| PeterCorless wrote:
| OMG. Original Warcraft was so terrible. But at the time, we
| thought it was SO COOL. Very simple "guns or butter" simulator.
| [Also runs slow like molasses in the emulator.]
| ok123456 wrote:
| How do I send the command key (propeller)?
| genewitch wrote:
| at the bottom of the non-fullscreen browser window there's a
| rectangle, hover over that, or if on touch, move your finger
| about 5 words to the right, there's a "settings" button hidden
| (at least on my monitor) that lets you swap ctrl and command.
| Doing that lets you press ctrl-I for info, or whatever.
| samhickmann wrote:
| Brings so much good memories! [Edit] and their macos8 emulation
| is even better
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Seems like it's not running at the highest bit depth, or
| something funky with the emulator is causing the Finder to
| display low bit depth icons. On a real machine and on qemu-ppc on
| my machine OS 9 displays icons that are more shaded and detailed.
|
| Impressive that it runs in a web browser, but it seems that it
| has some quirks.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| You can change the color depth in the Control Strip in the
| bottom left corner. It's indeed set by default to "256 Colors",
| setting it to "Millions of Colors" (=24bit) removes the
| dithering from the icons.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Nice catch. Opening the Monitors control panel yields an
| error but didn't think to check the Control Strip.
| erksa wrote:
| Sherlock, I've forgotten about this beautiful software and how it
| opened the internet for me.
| gnicholas wrote:
| A tiny nit -- this refers to showing the experience of using a
| Mac in the mid-90s, but the screen looks like it's the 15"
| display that Apple released in 2000. Or perhaps I'm wrong, and
| they had something like this in the 90s?
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| Mac OS X came out in 2001, so even though Mac OS 9 was mostly a
| 1990's experience, it did survive into the 2000s.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Oh sure, I remember running OS 9 on my Cube in 2000 before
| the OS X beta was available. My point was that the monitor
| frame shown is not consistent with the note in the stickies
| that indicates a mid-90s timeframe.
| genewitch wrote:
| mac os x server came out in 1999.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related discussion from only _7 months ago_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31168646
|
| 1038 points, 323 comments
| mk_stjames wrote:
| So, is Photoshop 3.0 considered freeware/abandonware at this
| point?
|
| It runs impressively fast in this compared to what I remember in
| period.
| hardnose wrote:
| It's considered shhhware
| johnthuss wrote:
| Civilization 1 runs! I played this for SO many hours back then. I
| loved that game so much. This VM locked up after 100 turns or so,
| but man, this really brings me back.
| smallstepforman wrote:
| Whatever you do, dont attack Spearmen with a battleship.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Spearman is civ 2. Phalanx is the Civ defender of choice :)
| fdr wrote:
| Nice to see Escape Velocity in there. It's a shame that its
| distribution is endangered ever since Ambrosia closed up, without
| selling or releasing the source and rights.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| I managed to get over most of the nostalgia in my life. After a
| certain age, I feel it's a bit counterproductive and not a net
| positive.
|
| But old Macs hit me hard and it's something I can't seem to build
| an immunity to. The aesthetics, the simplicity, the cohesion of
| the metaphors... so good.
| rocketbop wrote:
| Me too. I think it's because Macs were around when I was a
| child, and they seemed to represent all the possibility of the
| future. At the turn of the 90s I connected to bulletin boards
| before I'd heard of the internet, and it seemed like whatever
| sci-fi future was ahead of me, these machines were pointing the
| way.
| grishka wrote:
| I don't share any of the nostalgia about old Macs most of HN
| seems to have. They weren't around me in my childhood, and even
| trying to get anything meaningful done on classic MacOS in the
| modern times on an emulator is an exercise in frustration
| because of how poor the support for Cyrillic characters is.
|
| But! I do have a similar feeling about old Windows versions.
| The UIs of both the system and the applications were denser
| (not yet ruined by the existence of touchscreens) and much more
| thought out. They actually felt like extensions of your mind,
| not something you have to fight all the damn time.
|
| Two things frustrate me immensely about modern computers: the
| dumbing down of everything, and the insistence on using
| touchscreen-inspired UI controls and patterns where they don't
| belong. The third thing, that kinda encompasses the second one,
| is the erosion of affordances. Is it a label? Is it a button?
| Is it a text input? You never know!
| tambourine_man wrote:
| It has more to do with what you were brought up with than any
| intrinsic merit, I'm sure.
|
| Being a Mac die hard I despised DOS and Windows 3.11. But I
| remember seeing Windows 95 and being as impressed as my young
| self would allow itself to be while still exhaling my Mac
| superiority fumes.
| Joeri wrote:
| _The UIs of both the system and the applications were denser_
|
| I'm not so sure about that. The pixel density was lower so
| apparent size was the same for the "denser" UI. A 14 inch vga
| monitor in the late 90's would run 800x600, where a modern 14
| inch laptop runs 1920x1080.
| grishka wrote:
| Doesn't a "14-inch" CRT monitor have a smaller viewable
| area? I remember LGR saying that at least. So, 800x600 at
| 13" yields 76.92 dpi.
|
| The once extremely common 1280x1024 19" monitors are 86.27
| dpi.
|
| My modern 14" laptop has a resolution of 3024x1964@2x.
| That's an effective resolution of 1512x982. And it's 128.78
| dpi, ignoring the retina thing. But then the thing to keep
| in mind is that you usually sit closer to a laptop screen
| than to a monitor. I have no trouble reading 11px font on
| that screen from my usual viewing distance.
|
| And yes there _is_ an issue with some Windows laptop
| manufacturers shipping their laptops without the correct
| DPI set in the system, thus everything becoming way too
| small with default settings, and thus designers designing
| those gigantic UIs to compensate for that.
| chongli wrote:
| That's because it's never just nostalgia. Sometimes things were
| better in the past. Take Google search for example. Everyone on
| HN knows it used to be better and that it's been getting worse
| every year. Of course, a lot of that was not (originally)
| Google's fault because spammers get more sophisticated every
| year, but I think Google deserves a share of the blame because
| they have a conflict of interest by running the ad network so
| many spammers use.
|
| I still believe Classic Mac OS (culminating with OS 9) was way
| easier and more pleasant to use. Everyone knows the story
| though: it didn't keep up on the back-end. Application crashes
| would frequently bring down the entire operating system. Multi-
| user security was non-existent (you were basically always
| running as "root").
|
| But when Mac OS X came along they abandoned the dedication to
| ease-of-use and focused on power user features to go along with
| a more modern (UNIX-based) kernel and userland. That led to the
| computers we have today: for more complicated, mixed metaphors,
| and borderline unusable by grandma.
| ace2358 wrote:
| Can't grandma still use the old computer while we all use our
| new computers with new software that's enriching our lives? I
| have countless instruments at my disposal in VST form, 3D
| software like blender, DAW to write music in, stable
| diffusion to help with the creative process.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| No, she can't. For the simple reason that it'll risk
| getting hacked the moment it's connected to the Internet.
| chongli wrote:
| Sure, grandma can still use the old computer. That's not
| the point. I see people constantly make this conflation
| here on HN. It's the idea that you can't have new
| technology while keeping the benefits of old. It's rubbish!
| What made the Classic MacOS great and easy to use were its
| solid, fundamental principles. We have abandoned those
| principles for convenience's sake.
| bacchusracine wrote:
| >Can't grandma still use the old computer while we all use
| our new computers with new software that's enriching our
| lives?
|
| Sure! And so can Uncle Joe and Aunt Mable! But why should
| they have to?
|
| We used to have this thing called 'sane defaults' and
| configuration options, which allowed people to set things
| to their preferred level. Why is it now suddenly that
| everything is hardcoded to behave one way? Nothing is
| allowed to be configurable?
|
| So much of this is about configurations and not about the
| age of the software being used.
| flenserboy wrote:
| Consider how little testing most software apparently has
| before release. If that's not going to happen, why would
| they put the effort in to making it configurable?
| Nav_Panel wrote:
| Same. And, for me, it's the little happy Mac icon at startup...
| seeing him takes me back to such specific moments in my
| childhood. Playing Oregon Trail in my friend's basement...
| damn.
| pram wrote:
| I miss window shading to this day, shame it never made it into
| OSX.
| sroussey wrote:
| I can't seem to install McDraft on it, unfortunately.
| emrah wrote:
| No matter how good anything is, it has to be resigned every
| year/major version/etc because it is far more "fashion" based
| whether we like it or not. And fashion is all about creating
| novelty by changing stuff not for utility but for the sake of
| generating a different neural firing pattern in our brains so the
| item doesn't simply fade into oblivion even if it is designed and
| works perfectly
| wildrhythms wrote:
| I am not unsurprised by the fact that Photoshop in this little
| browser emulated Mac OS 9 starts up faster than modern
| Photoshop on my decked out modern Macbook. What the hell
| happened?
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| I'm installing 9.2.2, Internet Explorer 5.1.7, and Netscape
| 7.0.2, so I'll backup to your AFP server over AppleTalk. Cool?
|
| Ah, the old days of watching extensions load and single-tasking.
|
| EDIT: Stable Google Chrome on a M1 MAX with a bazillion other
| tabs open is ~7-78x faster than real hardware. Chrome beats
| Safari beats Firefox.
| mihaip wrote:
| I'm the creator of the site, thanks for the submission.
|
| This is an in-progress port of the SheepShaver emulator to
| WebAssembly/Emscripten, https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-
| mac/issues/34 is tracking the remaining work.
|
| If you're interested in running older Mac software in the
| browser, the BasiliskII-based sites at https://system7.app/ and
| https://macos8.app/ may be better bets. They will boot faster and
| have fewer compatibility issues (especially System 7).
|
| The main thing that Mac OS 9/SheepShaver brings is PowerPC
| support. There is also a variant of System 7 for PowerPC with
| more esoteric mid-90s Apple projects like OpenDoc and QuickDraw
| GX installed available at
| https://system7.app/?domain=system7-ppc.app.
| jxdxbx wrote:
| I really love your project. It is a giant pain in the ass to
| get BasiliskII and/or SheepShaper working, at least the few
| times I've messed with them. Is it possible to run this offline
| or in some kind of encapsulated web app form?
| sharikous wrote:
| If you have experience with QEMU now there is good support
| for MacOS 8/9/X in ppc and there is an alpha version with
| initial support for System 7/8/A/UX on 68k. It's still a PITA
| but at least it's similar to the PITA of other QEMU VMs,
| which you may be familiar with.
| mihaip wrote:
| macintosh.js
| (https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/) is an
| Electron packaged version of an earlier iteration of the
| BasiliskII Emscripten port.
| JonathonW wrote:
| There's a professor at Columbia University that has good
| prebuilt SheepShaver packages with OS 9:
|
| Mac: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/macos9osx.html Windows:
| http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/macos9win.html
|
| There's not much in the way of third-party software included
| in these images, but it's a good starting point.
| ralphc wrote:
| I'll testify to this software, I use it on my i9 Catalina
| Mac and it works great.
| p_l wrote:
| Hi, it's a great project, although I found out that some 68k
| and PPC software seems to have required things that aren't
| emulated by either BasiliskII nor Sheepshaver, or at least so
| it looked when I was playing with it - tried running Macintosh
| Common Lisp and it always seemed to crash.
|
| Still, reminds me of plying with vMac long ago and this weird
| world of, to our perception then, barely usable machines ;)
| ralphc wrote:
| I'm a little disappointed that "Just Grandma and Me" isn't a
| first person shooter but other than that, great work!
| stuaxo wrote:
| Fantastic work.
|
| Could this have implement dynamic screen resolutions, like
| Qemu/Virtualbox/Vmware guest extensions do when virtualising
| other operating systems ?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Having worked with it extensively, how would you say the
| performance of SheepShaver compiled to WASM compares to a
| natively compiled VM binary?
| badrabbit wrote:
| Doesn't load on my mobile firefox and it tries to hijack
| browsing history (have to fight with it hitting the back button
| to get back to HN).
| steviedotboston wrote:
| wine em, dine em, OS 9 em!
| JeremyHerrman wrote:
| so cool, thanks for making this! Love that you have escape
| velocity!
| iamstef wrote:
| I immediately checked for EV and was stoked to see it!! I
| haven't played that game in decades...so many good memories.
| SOL?
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Awesome, this is so cool! I remember MacOS 9 with a mix of
| fondness, hatred, and nostaglia. OS X was definitely a big
| improvement when it came out (I remember OS 9 having so many
| crashes), but some of the charm was definitely lost.
|
| And these .app domain names you're all using in this space are
| great and totally apt. I love to see great usages of my work in
| the wild like this.
| dylan604 wrote:
| OS9 always seemed like little improvement over OS8. The
| biggest thing I remember was this was when they introduced
| the Applications folder. It's like they were trying to get
| you to get used to how the structure in OS X was going to be,
| but with no explanation.
| simondotau wrote:
| OS9 was really just 8.7 but, as you describe, a stepping
| stone towards 10, both numerically and with a few nods to
| the future, e.g. Keychain Access, CarbonLib, and
| file/printer sharing over TCP.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| Carbon worked all the way back with Mac OS 8.1
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API)
| mistrial9 wrote:
| Carbon was a moving target; each "update" cut more core
| MacOS tools and added OSX service interfaces. It was
| quickly obvious that there was no intention of letting
| MacOS run in the future, so why port to Carbon? many
| social signals in the developer group at the same time.
| simondotau wrote:
| Correct, but it wasn't shipped with the OS until MacOS 9.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Yeah, so looking back at the release dates of these, I
| definitely used at least back through OS 7, but I can't say
| I remember anything specifically about them because it's
| fading into the haze of youthful memories. In my mind it's
| all just pre-OS X and post-OS X, as that marks by far the
| biggest change in Mac OS functionality that I remember.
| Naracion wrote:
| > I love to see great usages of my work in the wild like
| this.
|
| Out of curiosity and ignorance--what is the work you're
| referring to here which is being used for the project /
| website? The comment makes me feel it's the (dot)app TLD, in
| which case--fascinating! But also what does it even mean to
| work on something like that?
| Cyphase wrote:
| I believe GP is the lead engineer of Google Registry. .app
| is owned and run by Google.
| thealienthing wrote:
| I love that this exists. Time to time I crave playing some of
| my childhood games that are OS9 based and setting up
| sheepshaver is a pain. This will help me to get my kicks
| playing some old games for the few minutes I intend to play
| them :) thanks!
| BerislavLopac wrote:
| Is there a way to browse the Web somehow?
| legutierr wrote:
| This is really great. I can't seem to get sound working on
| Firefox, though.
| 5amdotis wrote:
| Brings back memories!
| yubiox wrote:
| I wanted access to the college mac lab so bad back then, and
| eventually got in. Something about those little white screens
| and the feel of those keyboards was so compelling.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| Oh man, it's even got the "Grouch" extension for the Trash Can.
| Can't install it on Chrome/Mac, though, as it can't be read.
|
| Still, very very nice! And as others have pointed out, the UI/UX
| design is immaculately well thought out, discoverable and very
| clean.
| davepeck wrote:
| In addition to being impressive technically, this is just plain
| fun. I downloaded a game my friends and I wrote _way_ back in the
| day [1] and... it worked in my browser. Such a nice blast from
| the past.
|
| [1] https://www.macintoshrepository.org/2851-infotron
| [deleted]
| damontal wrote:
| I want to zap the pram and fire up Myst.
| chuckreynolds wrote:
| idk why but... cool. I had that Hellcats and Glider game...
| probably f-18 one too.
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