[HN Gopher] HelloSystem - OS with original Mac philosophy with a...
___________________________________________________________________
HelloSystem - OS with original Mac philosophy with a modern
architecture
Author : dev_tty01
Score : 187 points
Date : 2023-01-25 15:56 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| stuaxo wrote:
| What is this using as it's GUI, and file manager etc ?
| wmf wrote:
| It's using Qt and they're writing their own file manager. I
| didn't check whether they're starting 20 years behind by using
| X11.
| ozten wrote:
| Are you suggesting they should have chosen Wayland? I think
| they have a good argument against it:
|
| "Wayland: Under development since a long time, it offers no
| clear advantage over Xorg while it makes things more
| complicated (e.g, breaks screen recording) --> Use Xorg
| instead, or (maybe even better) no X server at all but pure
| framebuffer (like *ELEC does for media centers). Also see htt
| ps://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d...
| "
|
| https://github.com/helloSystem/hello/wiki/Welcome-and-
| unwelc...
| wmf wrote:
| If you think those are good arguments then... enjoy
| helloSystem I guess.
| ozten wrote:
| I am a total newbie in this area. I thought the gist was
| compelling, demonstrating a lot of screen recording apps
| that can't or won't support Wayland.
| wmf wrote:
| Those apps just haven't been updated to use the proper
| APIs.
| r00fus wrote:
| The readme seems out of date - the privacy issue for CSAM is
| essentially not an issue anymore - Apple has no plans to do on-
| device scanning.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Correction, Apple has given no public commitment to completely
| shelve their on-device scanning. There's no guarantee they
| won't try boiling the frog with their CSAM scanning plans.
| goodSteveramos wrote:
| I wish they would enable the CSAM scanner for children's
| accounts when parental guidance is turned on. That makes so
| much sense. If my child is being abused I want to be
| notified. But instead they shelved it because they couldn't
| get their spyware installed. Shows how much apple really
| cares about children and how much they care about spying on
| us.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| I appreciate the intent here and don't want to be overly
| critical, but this appears to be attempting a nicer UI for
| FreeBSD. Not a bad goal, but I'd like to see a page somewhere
| that lists not just the grievances with Apple that led to this
| project, but also how this project improves on a standard Linux
| config. Or better yet, a Linux config hardened as much as
| possible without losing compatibility with its software ecosystem
| or with Wine/Proton.
|
| Replacing Apple with a more privacy-preserving alternative is not
| really about UI minutia. UI/UX is mostly solved, for 2D displays
| at least. Gnome, KDE, Elementary OS's Pantheon, and others all
| offer usable and customizable variations on this tech that get
| you 90% of the way to Apple's standard. Incremental improvements
| in 2D UI/UX are reaching a point of diminishing returns, where
| it's more annoying for users to have to learn new interaction
| mechanics than to simply stick with the ones they know, even if
| the new mechanics are slightly better in some way.
|
| Rather, I think the area that really needs focused developer
| attention, and with bigger and more meaningful payoffs, is in
| bringing the most secure and hardened base systems up to full
| compatibility with the broadest possible application ecosystem/s.
| The best option for that right now appears to be Linux +
| Wine/Proton, ideally using a hardened Linux base like Qubes or
| SEL4 or similar and Nix/Guix-like reproducible builds, while
| integrating the extensive work already put into existing
| UI/UX/DE's. I think if hackers want to achieve this objective,
| then that's where they need to start and build a community
| around.
| donatj wrote:
| The hero here I see, that isn't shown on that page is Application
| Bundles. Being able to drop a single .app in the Applications
| folder and have it work is one of the biggest selling points of
| macOS imho.
|
| https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/developer/application-bun...
|
| The docs page have a lot of interesting technical details that
| the linked page either gloss over or do not touch. It's worth a
| look to see why this is seemingly more than a skin on FreeBSD.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| >Easily be understood by switchers coming from other operating
| systems with similar application distribution formats
|
| Interesting use of the plural form of _operating systems_ here.
| oneplane wrote:
| Sigh, here we go again. These keep popping up and a few months
| later the projects are dead again because it turns out this isn't
| all that feasible without both massive engineering capacity and
| an ecosystem to go with it.
|
| Most of them that manage to get to the point of a UI that doesn't
| look like Fischer-price fail on the ecosystem (i.e. they have no
| ecosystem at all, or they try to shoehorn an existing one on top
| like a standard ports/apt/yum repo from another distro).
|
| Besides that, the FUD in the README doesn't really help anyone
| since the masses care very little, and even if they did care,
| they almost never have what it takes to look at the sources, and
| even the small subset that does is practically not even checking
| a single package's sources.
|
| If they just stuck to a "we want something that feels like 2005
| apple" tagline it would have been a fine project to fiddle with
| for fun, but as soon as grand statements are made ("reinvent the
| Mac") we're back into generic "things few people care
| for"-territory.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| Agreed. And even in their cherry-picked screenshot there are
| several UI bugs/inconsistencies that would drive me insane as a
| daily user.
|
| I'll just take KDE plasma.
| torstenvl wrote:
| I think a much better approach would be porting Pantheon to
| FreeBSD, and patching Pantheon to allow a global menu as an
| compile-time option or user configuration.
|
| All the other stuff can come later. IMO it's a bit overly
| ambitious (I'd be happy to be wrong!) and I fear it dying
| prematurely.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| More discussion:
|
| a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28733897
|
| 2 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26092040
| snvzz wrote:
| >Modern Architecture
|
| I wouldn't call FreeBSD (or any UNIX(1971)-like system) modern.
|
| A modern architecture would be something like Genode[0], a multi-
| server system built around the concept of capabilities.
|
| 0. https://www.genode.org/
| Findecanor wrote:
| FreeBSD does have Capsicum [0] though -- with file descriptors
| as capabilities. FDs can be passed between programs over UNIX
| datagram sockets.
|
| Processes can enter "capability mode" where only open (or
| rather: active) file descriptors can be used. There used to be
| an alternative runtime for FreeBSD called CloudABI [1], with
| which native programs could be _started_ in capability mode,
| but it was discontinued in favour of WASI [2] (server-side
| Webassembly) -- which adopted CloudABI 's libc API.
|
| 0: <https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/>
|
| 1: <https://github.com/NuxiNL/cloudabi>
|
| 2: <https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI>
| criddell wrote:
| What's the permissions model like? I'm on board with
|
| "Because we want to run apps from _unidentified developers_ that
| need no blessing by the operating system vendor "
|
| but I also don't want that cool calculator application I just
| downloaded have access to the network, my webcam or microphone,
| my photos, email, or really any files outside of the ones in its
| directory.
|
| I do have nostalgia for the way computers used to be, but there
| have been a lot of OS improvements since then that I don't want
| to give up.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I agree that third party applications shouldn't be given carte
| blanche by default. Third parties are best assumed to not be
| well-behaved, because it's been proven many times over that
| devs can't be trusted to keep their hands out of the cookie jar
| and to follow best practices (which I say as a dev myself).
|
| The extent of moddability and control afforded by Mac OS 9
| extensions with their ability to patch the OS itself in memory
| as they pleased was incredible, but it was ridiculously
| insecure and unstable which makes that model untenable today.
| Applications having full access to everything is no different.
| malermeister wrote:
| It feels like if they really wanted to go for the original Mac
| philosophy, it might've made more sense to use something like
| GNUStep as the base instead of Qt.
|
| There's even some precedent, but it never really took off:
| http://etoileos.com/etoile/
| tgv wrote:
| The mac (nextstep?) philosophy contains at least building
| blocks for common UX tasks, Cocoa, which gradually grew over
| the various versions of OS X. I remember being quite astonished
| about what you could do with an array controller or two: parts
| of the UI practically wrote themselves. And it was all
| consistent across apps.
|
| "Qt on FreeBSD" simply isn't the same, even though it may have
| copied the rounding and color of the buttons. I get that
| GNUStep simply isn't there, and will never be, but this looks
| like three raccoons in a trench coat.
| malermeister wrote:
| Yeah I feel like this project should've tried to get GNUStep
| to a usable state instead of putting a skin on top of Qt.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| IIRC the problem with GNUStep is that it got stuck at a version
| of Objective-C and Cocoa/AppKit roughly equivalent with that of
| OS X 10.6 and would take a lot of work to even catch up to
| modern Obj-C and Cocoa, let alone get Swift integrated into.
| grishka wrote:
| Original Mac philosophy, yet attention to detail in the UI is
| severely lacking. The paddings are all over the place, the
| gradients on buttons and the menu bar are an absolute eyesore,
| the menus have a 1-pixel white line to the right of the
| highlight, etc.
| wk_end wrote:
| The simple sad reality is that Apple's attention to detail was
| difficult-but-doable...in 1984, on lower resolution screens, in
| monochrome, on computers that did substantially less, when
| riding high off Apple ][ money, with radical vision, for hand-
| selected elite full-time workers being crunched to the bone by
| said radical visionary.
|
| I'm not sure if all the ingredients necessary to brew up that
| magic could ever come together in quite the same way again.
| HelloSystem is dealing with a vastly harder problem with vastly
| fewer resources; it's no surprise that they're not there.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| High DPI and a full color palette are no excuse for not
| getting margins right.
|
| Attention to detail is still doable, it just isn't something
| that is valued by MBA/PM types.
|
| (Being an ambitious personal project made in limited free
| time is a better excuse, and I commend the project author's
| efforts)
| malermeister wrote:
| I feel like elementaryOS [0] comes a lot closer to the
| original mac vision when it comes to UX.
|
| Too bad the project is going through some drama from what I
| understand.
|
| [0] https://elementary.io/
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| elementary also unfortunately shares some GNOME-isms, such
| as avoidance of menubars in favor of hamburger menus, which
| goes against Mac UX. Menubars serve as a central index of
| application functionality under macOS and are a central
| pillar to its UX.
| malermeister wrote:
| I think elementary isn't trying to _be_ Mac OS, it has
| its own UX - even though it 's clearly _inspired by_
| Macs.
|
| It has its own HIG, which you can see here:
| https://docs.elementary.io/hig
|
| Personally, I never loved menubars, so I don't mind that
| difference.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Of course, but it's probably going to be a sticking point
| for many longtime Mac users looking for more FOSS-
| flavored alternatives.
| grishka wrote:
| It's not a matter of hardware capabilities or human
| resources. Sane paddings and proportions and pixel-perfect
| controls are no different on a modern XDR retina display than
| they were on a monochrome CRT. You do have more color and
| pixels to work with, but the underlying principles are all
| the same.
|
| My own standards are high enough that I'd never even show
| such a screenshot to a friend, let alone put it into the
| readme to my project for all of the internet to see.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| Whoa, whoa, and whoa.
|
| The technical hurdles they had to overcome - despite
| targeting lower resolutions, non-color screens - was
| considerably higher and more impressive because none of the
| scaffolding was there to support the work, and the system
| resources were also far, far less. You're significantly
| discounting that effort. It's also worth reminding you that
| -- even among the engineers who left or felt too much
| pressure -- nearly all of them say the emotional investment
| was both necessary and worthwhile in retrospect. There are
| very few ex-Macintosh-team detractors in the world.
|
| Taking nothing away from this open source project, but let's
| not rewrite history.
| wk_end wrote:
| I don't think I'm discounting that effort at all! To be
| honest, given that I mentioned both that they were
| exceptionally talented ("elite" and "hand-picked") and
| worked incredibly hard, I'm not sure where that
| interpretation came from. And retro game programming is a
| hobby of mine, I know all too well what it's like to write
| bare metal 68000 assembler and squeeze every last gasp of
| performance you can get out of an 8MHz CPU and handful of
| RAM.
|
| A comparison I might make, then, is to video games then and
| now: despite extreme technical restrictions, in the 80s, a
| single person or at most a small team could make the
| equivalent of a AAA game in a matter of months in their
| basement. But precisely because those technical
| restrictions have now been lifted and so much more is now
| possible and expected, such a thing these days is absurd,
| and it instead takes teams of hundreds years of work and
| tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to put
| together a modern AAA game. But observing that fact in no
| way discredits the talent, hard work, and ingenuity of
| those basement coders of bygone days; nor does it mean that
| I think game devs these days are orders of magnitude less
| competent, either.
|
| My intention was never to say that what the Macintosh team
| did was easy; but it was possible (clearly) with the
| enormous effort they put in, and I don't think what
| HelloSystem is trying to do really is, especially not with
| the resources they have. After all, Apple can't even do it
| these days, and they have virtually all the resources in
| the world.
| chongli wrote:
| I don't know. Sure, we may likely never see such a crack team
| of programmers and designers driven by a radical visionary
| again. But we do have vastly more computing resources than
| they had. Can't we solve some of these problems with
| software?
|
| Since everyone gave up on native software in favour of web
| frameworks and the browser, there has been precious little
| innovation in native UI frameworks.
|
| So my point is: couldn't most of the attention to detail in
| Apple's Classic Mac OS be replicated with a UI framework that
| understands design concepts such as proportionality, spacing,
| Schelling points, etc?
| wrldos wrote:
| As always, these things look like an average xfce theme.
| rob-olmos wrote:
| Relatedly I wish Mac's "mission control" and "app expose" was
| better, becomes difficult to find frequently used windows.. seems
| to place windows in random places. It'd be nice if it made it
| easier to see browser tabs.
|
| I liked the the UI/UX of David Gelernter's "Scopeware" layer,
| that seemed like it would be a nice alternative to either of
| those.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I'd like to see a return of Spaces as they were in OS X 10.6,
| where they could be arranged in a 2D grid. That felt really
| nice and no desktop environment to date has reproduced it
| exactly, though a few Linux DEs get close.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| I use Spaces a lot with Mission Control and now Stage Manager.
| Anything that's vital gets a full-screen space and I can just
| swap between them with a swipe or with Ctrl+L/R. It's very
| quick and I never need to search for windows outside of 2 or 3
| swipes. I've also turned off the automatic ordering so my
| calendar is always the last swipe and my email is always the
| first.
| boxed wrote:
| I switched to the mac (back before the intel transition) because
| I became more productive writing apps after ~1 week of hobby
| fiddling, than I was at my day job doing win32 programming that I
| had done for several years.
|
| This project doesn't tackle the reason macOS was so great: Cocoa.
| SilentM68 wrote:
| I tried to run it in VMWare and VirtualBox and it just kept on
| rebooting the VMs.
| artificial wrote:
| Will have to dig into this. Seems pretty, would be nice to pick
| apart the API, looks like Python with PyQt is what most utilities
| are written in. The crux with not being mac/windows is driver
| performance. It's a bummer it takes such a massive effort to
| support hardware.
| xwkd wrote:
| Supporting hardware is pretty much what operating systems are
| supposed to do. Computation always supports some human end.
| Humans are doing a lot more with their hardware these days.
| user3939382 wrote:
| It's based on FreeBSD so maybe the driver support isn't too bad
| (?)
| artificial wrote:
| Correct, compared to Linux it's a redheaded step child. I
| love FreeBSD and the resources behind Linux are enormous. I
| wish things turned out differently in the 90s. Total tangent:
| If I had Musk level funding to allocate for a pet project it
| would be Haiku. A purely single user desktop focused OS which
| happens to featured grafted on FreeBSD hardware support. I'd
| love to throw a meager billion at it and shake things up ;) I
| do all my real work on servers as it is and FreeBSD is viable
| for hardware, just look at the PS4, so no shade at pulling
| drivers where you're able to.
| colanderman wrote:
| OS X "Aqua" theme, 20 years on, looks dated to me in a way that
| the 40-year-old Susan Kare-era design of the original Mac OS does
| not. I can't put my finger on why, but I think it has something
| to do with "arbitrariness".
| ithkuil wrote:
| Things first get old, then they become antique
| zokier wrote:
| One part is that the original OSX pinstripes-and-water Aqua and
| the brushed metal look that followed were extremely
| distinctive, and comparatively short-lived. That combination
| makes them inherently pinned to their period. The classic Mac
| OS design was comparatively blander[1], and changed more
| slowly.
|
| [1] What was it with 90s and having medium-grey be dominating
| UI color? And everything having faux-3d bevels?
| ndiddy wrote:
| > What was it with 90s and having medium-grey be dominating
| UI color? And everything having faux-3d bevels?
|
| In the 90s, most large software companies (especially OS
| vendors) would run usability studies with real-world users at
| a variety of skill levels to try to make their software as
| easy to use as possible. Everyone used medium-gray as the
| main UI background color because it makes colored elements
| easily stand out, and doesn't affect an element's perceived
| color. Everything had faux-3D bevels because they make it
| obvious which elements are clickable, and which aren't.
| HollowEyes wrote:
| Colours were pretty crap on CRTs. And greys were better on
| the eyes than dazzling whites. Even Netscape defaulted to
| grey.
|
| I took fvwm and a very simple blue bar, trim and simple
| window buttons. And weirdly now it looks pretty modern and
| fresh.
|
| Anyway there's always the bizarre windows fisherprice theme,
| and over used chrome gradients there to help you bring up
| some bile.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I don't think "modern" flat UI designs will fare any better
| with time, and maybe even worse. Already, the earlier
| variations of flat UI (Windows 8, iOS 7, OS X Yosemite,
| Material 1.0) to my eye look more dated than Aqua during its
| prime (OS X 10.6-10.9) does.
| mech422 wrote:
| I agree - I love the old '3d' interfaces, and Aqua in
| particular. The new 'cell phone' interfaces are just a PITA.
| Really hard on my old eyes - no real indication/border around
| buttons, no color cues, often not even a place to grab the
| window and drag it around. Everything is just the same drab
| shades with no differentiation between elements.
|
| As the 'cell phone' folks get older and eyesight gets worse,
| I think we'll see things shifting back. I basically don't use
| a cell phone for anything except 2fa cuz the silly lil
| screens are too hard to read.
| pndy wrote:
| Hot take: the current mobile flatness we see all around
| mostly serves dark patterns schemes and it's anti-user by
| default. It's easier to hide options within an interface
| that has no clearly distinction between link and the
| button, the interactive object and just the decoration.
| That helps trick users to pick something they didn't want
| or make them keep the defaults that works against them.
|
| And by the way, may I suggest you try to search on the
| Internet what GNOME desktop environment developers did to
| theming with their libadwaita and flat Adwaita design. For
| a start: https://www.osnews.com/story/133955/gnome-to-
| prevent-theming...
| mech422 wrote:
| Thats another pet peeve of mine - web pages where every
| pixel is some sort of link/hotspot. Like I just wanted to
| activate the window, or grab some whitespace and scroll.
| Not switch tabs, not maximize the window and definitely
| not navigate away to some ad or whatnot.
|
| Also, am I the only one sketched out by the javascript
| ads with the internal 'x' close buttons? Its obviously
| part of the ad, and not the program chrome/controls. For
| all I know, it's just a redirect to pwnme.com :-P
| mech422 wrote:
| I was always camp KDE - but that libadwaita thing sounds
| horrible... Maybe Rasterman is due for a comeback -
| enlightenment desktop looks pretty nice!
| HollowEyes wrote:
| I think I have some cognition issues, and can only read
| eink and off of crisp OLED. Love touch screens, pointers
| etc. But don't much like Apple iOS style.
| mech422 wrote:
| heh - I have fat fingers on top of everything else, so
| touch screens always turn into "where did I leave the
| #$%#$%^ stylus" :-D
|
| TBH - I work from home, so I'm never more then 20 feet
| from real monitors. So I just use the phone for 2FA
| stuff...
| HollowEyes wrote:
| Oh God I am still pretty fat fingered on a phone. But I
| do like the 'tactile' simplicity. I still think
| touchscreen UI / OS is in its infancy, and could be
| better. But am amazed in some ways that it's as good as
| it is.
| astrange wrote:
| You should look at them on a monitor from that year to get
| the right impression in either case. Aqua especially will
| look weird on a modern actually-good LCD or OLED.
| [deleted]
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Aqua had a lot of aesthetic positives. 3D skeuomorphism
| blends more easily with the real world compared to flat UIs,
| which lack _presence_ and make computing feel less tangible
| and more disposable.
|
| You could easily manipulate the scroll bars in Aqua, which is
| a useful feature that has been lost in recent updates.
|
| And it was just plain fun and relatable, while flat UIs are
| more corporate and functional.
|
| Flat reminds me of 1950s/mid century corporate design -
| inoffensive, but claustrophobic.
| BuckyBeaver wrote:
| There's a happy medium, though. Overly-photorealistic
| controls are actually counter-productive, especially when
| incompetently chosen. For example, at the height of Apple's
| cheeseball skeuomorphism was Game Center, which featured
| such things as "velvet" card-table surfaces with "painted"
| labels on them... but those labels were actually controls
| in some cases. Now who sits at a blackjack table and tries
| to interact with the paint on the velvet in front of him?
|
| Another example was the "LCD" display at the top of iTunes,
| depicted as having a transparent cover over it with a sheen
| and highlights. Unbeknownst to most users (I suspect), some
| of the labels in that display were actually clickable
| controls. WTF? I've owned numerous audio components with
| displays behind clear plastic windows, and I've never tried
| to poke at one with my finger.
|
| I think mid-'90s GUIs hit the right combination of
| graphical (not photographical) with universal visual cues.
| Buttons had only three or four monochrome shades, but had
| beveled edges whose shadows inverted when the button was
| "depressed."
|
| I'm glad to see some backlash against the lazy obscurity of
| "flat UI," and a return to some proper demarcation of
| controls.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Fully agree. It's the same 'bubble gum' look as Windows XP.
| What were they thinking with those buttons and scrollbars?
|
| On the other hand, MacOS9's UI style has aged remarkably well:
|
| https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos90
|
| (minus the media player, ugh)
| guerrilla wrote:
| I'm still waiting desperately for some DE to get back to
| this. GNOME 4x has in some ways but obviously not in
| others... Please someone re-make an OS 9-like UI for me.
| hexagonwin wrote:
| mlvwm is available and also works on modern *nix. (worked
| on gnu linux and freebsd at least)
| https://github.com/morgant/mlvwm
| layer8 wrote:
| Around 2000 was peak usability in terms of UI design for both
| MacOS and Windows.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Modern macOS is remarkably usable compared to that time,
| especially with a few tweaks in place (Magnet app for
| window management, three-finger dragging, etc.)
|
| It's really easy to forget how far we've come. Going back
| to an old OS and trying to get some real work done can be
| eye-opening.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| "lickable" I think was the phrase Steve Jobs used for it.
|
| Remember that Apple had just made a killing selling jelly-
| bean aesthetic iMacs (running classic Mac OS 9, even). The
| Aqua stuff matched the physical case design of those
| machines.
|
| It all goes along with the late 90s / Y2K times, intense
| colours. "Run Lola Run" and Fifth Element and late 90s club
| culture and whatnot. Nothing restrained about that era in
| terms of style. It was boom times end-of-millennium and that
| aesthetic continued even for a bit after the .com crash and
| 9/11 deflated the tires.
|
| Also as others have pointed out, it had to do with _" we can
| do this now'_; the graphics hardware and the software stack
| (showing off "Quartz" etc)
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| I spent large parts of my life with System 7/8/9, but looking
| back on it now, you'd have thought Apple would have designed
| a better italics...
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| Funnily enough I was playing with a couple of old PowerMac
| G4s a couple of weeks ago (actually wiping them for disposal
| - though I've since decided to keep at least one!)
|
| I realised very quickly that I'd forgotten how good the OS9
| interface is, and how well it stands up against today's
| offerings. Trying out a lookalike theme on Linux [1] is
| definitely on my todo list:
|
| [1] https://github.com/grassmunk/Platinum9
| JieJie wrote:
| I wonder what Mac OS X would have looked like if Susan and
| Bruce had been given access to the power of a G3 and millions
| of colors instead of chunky bits.
|
| I imagine it would have looked like a very, very well-designed
| iPhone app: soft and welcoming, yet with delightful new
| features that became apparent with use, and serious
| functionality that would stay out of the way until it was
| needed.
|
| I bet MacPaint would have looked a lot like Paper or Procreate.
|
| 1. https://wetransfer.com/paper
| csilverman wrote:
| You mean System 1.0? The designers of Mac OS X _did_ have
| access to the power of a G3 and millions of colors :-)
|
| It's a very interesting question, and honestly, I don't know
| how good it would have looked. I know what a lot of websites
| (including Apple's) looked like when designers had access to
| full color, bevels, drop shadows, etc. They looked terrible.
| I think those technological limitations--no color, almost no
| RAM, no hard disk--are one reason the original Mac GUI looked
| as good as it did. There just wasn't room for anything else.
|
| That said, the primary reason why the first Mac OS was so
| tasteful was because Susan Kare is an excellent designer, and
| would probably not have made the mistakes I described above.
| (The Lisa had all those limitations too, and an extremely
| similar feature set, but if you compare the Lisa GUI to the
| Mac's, it looks a _lot_ rougher and more inelegant. Kare was
| not involved with the Lisa, and it shows.)
|
| So who knows. I'd love to see someone reimagine the original
| Mac OS using a more contemporary design language; would be an
| interesting experiment.
|
| (Also, if you meant Bruce Horne, he was a software engineer;
| he wasn't involved with the visual design as far as I know.)
| jfb wrote:
| I would like to see a system that _acts_ like classic
| System 7, too. Less Unix sludge, more focus on a single
| interactive user. More explorability, more hackability. A
| computer that feels like _your_ computer.
|
| I'm not sure that the Spatial Finder needed to die; the
| standard excuses (we have too many files! our displays are
| too large!) feel knee-jerk and not well thought out at all.
| alrs wrote:
| https://www.haiku-os.org/
| flenserboy wrote:
| This, but System 6. 7 never looked or felt right, and I
| preferred MultiFinder.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| Dated or just plain worse?
| jszymborski wrote:
| It is possible we haven't hit the right part of the nostalgia
| cycle with the OS X Aqua theme.
| colanderman wrote:
| Classic Mac looked equally good to me 20 years ago.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| While it was garish its purpose was to stand out and attract
| attention so the the Mac wouldn't die. It worked. I think the
| toned down version of Aqua released only a couple of years
| later for Snow Leopard still looks pretty good today.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Leopard#/media/File:L...
| Rimintil wrote:
| I always preferred the 'platform' for the Dock vs. the
| background we currently have.
|
| I do wish windows rolled up into a bar like MacOS Classic did
| it.
| graypegg wrote:
| I think arbitrariness is a good way to put it.
|
| Was in an era when full colour bitmap graphics were becoming
| effortless to draw on screen, so let's make EVERYTHING a high
| res texture! That will prove how modern and powerful this
| machine is! But now, it's less impressive so the sheen doesn't
| sparkle as much.
|
| Where as maybe the older 1bit display of an old Mac isn't
| trying to sell you anything thru UI fancyness. The fact that
| it's not impressive technically is maybe less of an issue when
| it was obviously not the thing they wanted you to focus on.
| artificial wrote:
| Reminds me of NeWS [0] which was a Window Manager driven by
| PostScript. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Which era of Aqua are we talking about here? I generally group
| Mac OS X design into four broad buckets:
|
| * 10.0 - 10.4
|
| * 10.5 - 10.9
|
| * 10.10 - 10.15
|
| * 11+
| danaris wrote:
| Wasn't only the first of those actually _called_ Aqua? I don
| 't recall exactly when Apple officially retired that
| designation, but it was well before the current era.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I don't know, but I've seen some people use "Aqua" to refer
| to the design through 10.4, through 10.9, or through the
| present day.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Internally, even the current UI is referred to as Aqua. Or
| more specifically, aqua and darkAqua, depending on if dark
| mode is desired.
|
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nsappearan
| c...
| colanderman wrote:
| I was referring to the earlier iterations, with "shiny"
| buttons, lots of gradients, etc.
|
| 11+ to my eyes has more of a "timeless" potential. It's a bit
| more utilitarian, less showy and particular.
| giantrobot wrote:
| The early Aqua look and feel was informed by the industrial
| design of the Macs running it. Consumer Macs were very
| colorful up until about 2003 and had a lot of the texture
| effects the Aqua L&F was emulating.
| torstenvl wrote:
| Agreed. The more idiosyncratic aesthetic features, the more
| something is _marked_ as associated with a point in time.
|
| Cf. shaker furniture and Amish furniture vs. mid-twentieth-
| century furniture.
| ozten wrote:
| I am very attracted to this idea. I want a clean desktop daily
| driver that prioritizes UX.
|
| I love many of the UX-focused priorities, but a much larger % of
| their priorities such as Linux vs FreeBSD aren't high for me and
| don't seem end-user focused.
|
| An interesting idea I had never thought to question was
| considering "App Stores" as package managers.
|
| "Package managers for end-user applications: Those are aimed at
| "managing the system", whereas everything that is to be managed
| on our system can be managed in the file manager and/or other GUI
| elements. --> Use package managers to produce a system image,
| which is considered immutable for the end user (like on almost
| every embedded system/software appliance)"
|
| https://github.com/helloSystem/hello/wiki/Welcome-and-unwelc...
|
| Good food for thought. Elsewhere they criticize App Stores for
| their commercial and centralized aspects. But I don't really see
| an issue with Ubuntu's App Store. It is just a GUI instead of
| only offering CLI, right?
| can16358p wrote:
| While I fully agree with the privacy reasons, I frankly think new
| flat design UI is much better and cleaner.
|
| Whenever I see something from pre-flat era either on macOS or
| iPhone, I want to vomit.
| whartung wrote:
| I was kind of hoping this was something based on MacOS 9-.
|
| Sort of reading it as "Original MacOS Philosophy".
|
| In the early days, there actually was a "better" MacOS. It was
| the Apple IIGS. The GS system software was second stab at what
| was MacOS, but with a bit of "clean slate" ethos to it to fix
| some of the early issues.
|
| Its hard to appreciate the marvel and hoops the system and the
| developers had to jump through on early machines that lacked
| memory protection. The IIGS was a nice little sojourn further on
| in trying to make that kind of system a little bit better. The
| IIGS memory/process manager (which is kind of the heart of all of
| this) on top of the 65816 is a pretty neat piece of kit.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > I was kind of hoping this was something based on MacOS 9-.
|
| I miss proper spatial navigation sometimes. As a Windows owner
| I was often envious of MacOS up 9's spatial navigation. I
| briefly had my own spatial navigation on devices I owned in
| OS/2 WARP and that one time I was running Gnome-based
| distributions when Nautilus still had a somewhat buggy spatial
| navigation mode (which I admittedly compromised some of the
| design reasons behind spatial navigation by eventually
| switching to a tiling window manager). When I was old enough to
| finally own a Macintosh _and_ a PC I was disappointed that Mac
| OS X had dropped some of the things I liked when working on a
| Macintosh such as spatial navigation.
| chungy wrote:
| Could you explain what is meant by "spatial navigation"?
| Searching the web for that term and even including "mac" in
| the search terms doesn't reveal it for me.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Spatial navigation is the idea that folders and files have
| a consistent "place". The basic idea is when a folder opens
| back up exactly "where" you left it (window position, size,
| background wallpaper, other details) and files are arranged
| inside them however you want to leave them without
| necessarily adhering to a grid or a standard order or
| anything like that.
|
| There are definite trade-offs to it: manually arranged
| files and folders without strict grids can create a lot of
| cluttered "mess". (Add to that ideas of custom per-folder
| wallpapers and the "mess" gets even more chaotic.) It can
| be confusing if you aren't expecting it, and teaching it is
| sometimes hard (even though some of it is more
| "intuitive"). The mess can sometimes hide/"lose" important
| files.
|
| But the interesting benefits to it involve sometimes
| superior muscle memory for frequently accessed folders, a
| better recall of "where" you left things, and somewhat
| better uses of some of our human visual data processing
| systems for visual wayfinding via distinct "landmarks".
| [deleted]
| chungy wrote:
| I guess I could see how that's neat, but for me, I
| wouldn't want it. I think the computer should organize
| files for me and I care not where they are on-screen,
| just that they're organized. (Then again I live in a
| terminal, "ls" is my directory viewer.)
| alexdbird wrote:
| I think along the same lines, well, not the living in a
| terminal bit, but have worked with people who would
| probably be described as neurodiverse that absolutely
| hated files moving from the order they'd left them in.
|
| Xcode projects still keep files in the order you leave
| them in, unless you tell it to sort them. I'd guess 99%
| of people, like me, sort a group every time they add a
| file though.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Yeah, it mattered a lot more in the GUI days where your
| file browser was also your document manager was also your
| application launcher. There's a lot of reasons Windows
| never really supported it (depending on one's view of
| Windows 3.x's half-hearted mostly wrong attempt, Active
| Desktop, and/or Live Tiles, of course) and all of the
| best known spatial navigation tools are long gone today.
| (Even GNOME's Nautilus spatial mode was removed more
| years ago than I would like to admit it has been since I
| once briefly heavily used it.)
|
| Still, though, getting back somewhat on topic, I
| sometimes wonder what an OS with modern underpinnings
| committing to older GUI principles like spatial
| navigation might look like.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Reminds me of PrismWM.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/jvnzkb/prismwm_in...
|
| Something like it would be a revival of the OS9 theme and
| philosophy.
|
| Unfortunately the thread was started 2 years ago with no
| reference to a public repo and no updates from the author
| since. Maybe it was always vapourware :(
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| IMHO the "better" MacOS was the LisaOS, and came before the
| Mac. Cooperative multitasking, memory protection, task/object
| oriented user interface.
|
| MacOS took much of the concepts, but was deliberately made
| "worse", so it could fit in the Mac's tiny ROMs, and not use an
| MMU. It was built as if it was a one-off with no serious
| consideration for the future (not an uncommon theme in the
| time, many companies hadn't really caught onto the "platform"
| concept yet).
|
| (Re: the IIgs, building an elegant OS on the 65816 is annoying
| as hell with its banked memory architecture, tiny stack that
| can only be in the bottom 64k of RAM, poverty of registers, and
| lack of e.g. memory protection mechanisms. But the IIgs stuff
| was really a valiant effort, pretty cool.)
| karmakaze wrote:
| It doesn't really say what parts of the MacOS philosophy it's
| aligned with. Seems more like riding on coattails. What is
| listed are a number of differences that apply to most any
| Linux/BSD distro. I think 'philosophy' here means surface
| appearance of the desktop.
|
| And if it's about openness, why link to the branding pages
| rather than the source repo? I couldn't even find a link
| searching for 'source' on the page.
| r00fus wrote:
| Honestly I really liked Aqua. Flat UI may be easier to work with
| (debatable) but seems so characterless.
|
| Something to be said about the right amount of chrome in your UI
| to remind you "where you're at" instead of getting lost in the
| content.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _HelloSystem_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28733897 -
| Oct 2021 (39 comments)
|
| _Hello system, a FreeBSD-based OS designed to resemble Mac_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26092040 - Feb 2021 (267
| comments)
|
| _Hello: Let's make a FreeBSD for "mere mortals"_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25112820 - Nov 2020 (1
| comment)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-01-25 23:00 UTC)