[HN Gopher] MacOS X 10.1 (2001)
___________________________________________________________________
MacOS X 10.1 (2001)
Author : wastedbrains
Score : 129 points
Date : 2023-06-14 08:05 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (toastytech.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (toastytech.com)
| graypegg wrote:
| I think one of the weirdest things to me is how unchanged OSX /
| MacOS is. As much as I like this specific paradigm of computing
| UI, I kind of see why they've been trying new things as of late.
| (Stage manager, new settings panel, iOS-y control centre)
|
| Just because it's old, doesn't mean it NEEDS to change, but I can
| imagine the need to at least explore a bit if something stays
| mostly the same for 20 years.
| nobleach wrote:
| It seems like "EVERYTHING" Apple has done in this arena just
| ensures I'll have to use a search function to find what I want.
| Same is true for Windows 10+. "I just want to format a USB
| Thumbdrive!!! why do I have to search for some sort of Disks
| section in the Control Panel??"
| graypegg wrote:
| I mean, why not? I think a lot of people under-20 will
| instinctively think of "erase this whole disk and put a new
| file system on it" as a very "settings" sort of thing, not
| something to be done in a separate application like Disk
| Manager. (Which is technically a hold over from when OSes did
| not ship with extensive disk management tools, so normally
| you would have some flavour of Norton Utilities installed
| after-market.)
|
| If you've grown up with phones and tablets, anything that's a
| change to the device, even if it's an operation and not a
| setting, is in "settings".
|
| I get it, doesn't mean I agree with it to be fair! I miss old
| system preferences as much as you.
| golergka wrote:
| Why can't this function be found in several places at once?
| graypegg wrote:
| Windows has multiple settings and control panel lists to
| launch the exact same control panel applications. Or even
| duplicate UI to control the same setting.
|
| I think generally that's seen as confusing, and probably
| not something worth striving for IMO.
| ruined wrote:
| embrace search. command+space is dmenu and command+f is dmenu
| for a specific context
| samtheprogram wrote:
| Not that there aren't more settings/apps/etc nowadays, but
| your example doesn't apply well for macOS because Disk
| Utility has been in the same location since the first version
| over 20 years ago, in /Applications/Utilities/.
| nobleach wrote:
| That particular example is Windows 10, that's correct.
|
| My comment was mostly about how to find things in the new
| "settings" experience.
| classified wrote:
| I miss that metal waste basket and the web link "@" spring. And
| some of the Dock animations.
| perihelions wrote:
| Here's that mozilla.org/start page from 2001 if anyone was
| curious how it continues,
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20011017155749/http://www.mozill...
| freedomben wrote:
| > _This screen shot shows the login screen. It displays a
| graphical list of users that can login on this system.
| (Interestingly Windows XP does something similar)_
|
| > _Being based on BSD Unix, MacOS X inherits many useful unix
| features such as real security and user accounts._
|
| > _This means that, for example, you can create a special account
| for someone else to play games and don 't have to worry about
| them deleting system files, accessing your personal files, or
| changing system setting._
|
| > _This can be somewhat confusing to users who are used to having
| complete control over their systems in earlier versions of MacOS.
| To do things like install software you must be logged in as the
| Administrator. While this can be annoying it prevents users from
| accidentally messing up their system or from malicious programs
| or viruses that could otherwise infect the system. There is also
| a hidden "root" account that has slightly more privileges than
| the Administrator, but this is rarely needed._
|
| Reading this now in 2023 it seems laughably primitive, but I
| remember the mass confusion at the time! Very similar thing
| happened with Vista. When old people like me pine for the simpler
| days of yore, it's hard to imagine just how much simpler those
| times were (mostly in a good way!)
|
| I love modern Linux and use it on my family PC and it's great
| having full multi-user tooling for my kids to have their own
| spaces with no root, but I do fondly remember the days before
| user accounts were a thing on your PC. Not to mention how open
| and interopable things were. Those days don't come back
| HeckFeck wrote:
| I get this. I started with Windows 98, and it _was_ much easier
| to mess up the system, but that 's how we learnt. Low security
| invites play.
| Clamchop wrote:
| What kind of interoperability are we talking about? Not between
| platforms, surely? Because I don't remember that being in good
| shape up until maybe 15 years ago.
| abtinf wrote:
| Turns out it wasn't enough.
|
| What we were just barely starting to grasp then was that, among
| the "other users" we need to be protected from, were the
| software vendors themselves.
|
| In other words, I am not a single user; the combination of me
| and various groupings of binaries are the user, and they must
| be carefully isolated. And now, it turns out I want still
| another layer of protection too (e.g. multiple browser
| profiles/containers).
|
| Back then, most people were still on dialup internet. It was
| still relatively rare that software would record everything
| about us and report all of it to HQ. We used to call software
| like this "spyware", which isn't really a word that even exists
| anymore.
|
| The idea for the need for something like Qubes OS would've been
| completely alien.
| freedomben wrote:
| Yes great point and very true. I don't think we have
| complexity for complexities sake, there are real problems we
| are solving. It's sad that we have to protect ourselves from
| software vendors, but you're right we absolutely do. The
| simplicity of the past was based on something that is no
| longer (probably never was but that's another discussion)
| true, which is that code the user is running is running with
| consent of and on behalf of the user.
| tobiasbischoff wrote:
| Yeah, I remember that a fried installed a very early pre-version
| on his powerbook and we where all blown away.
| jraph wrote:
| Notice the Internet Explorer icon?
|
| This may feel unexpected and out of place but Safari was first
| released only in 2003.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| And the Tasman engine that IE for Mac was built around was much
| nicer than the Trident engine that powered IE for Windows. IE
| for Mac had good support for CSS and support for transparent
| PNGs many years before IE for Windows did. I always wondered
| why MS decided to fix up Trident to create the original Edge
| instead of porting Tasman to Windows.
| threeio wrote:
| I miss my candy coated unix as I used to lovingly refer to 10.1
| on my iBook back in the day.
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| Having developed for OSX in that era, IBM ViaVoice, it wasn't a
| completely functional OS. The audio input was broken every
| alternate build, for instance.
|
| I'd come from a NeXT background and was surprised how slow OSX
| (OpenStep in essence) was on PPC.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| I'm curious what you make of the standard narrative that OS X
| was a fuse of NeXTStep with UNIX and MacOS Classic. As far as I
| can tell that's not really accurate and OS X was basically just
| NeXTStep reskinned to look like MacOS, with an emulator for
| Classic apps bolted onto the side, and some C libraries to ease
| the porting process from the old Mac APIs to the new NeXTStep
| APIs without needing to transition to Objective-C. The UNIX
| aspects to it came primarily from NeXTStep and weren't
| something new Apple added.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Blame Adobe and their renegging of their promise to provide a
| free Display PostScript runtime.
|
| Getting Quartz nee "Display PDF" up to where it was took the
| better part of a decade as Mike Paquette explained in detail on
| comp.sys.next.advocacy
| b33j0r wrote:
| So, I've got to ask the practical question. For you early-
| adopters, is it stable enough to upgrade to, yet? :p
| steve1977 wrote:
| Using it since the Public Beta that came out in 2000, no
| complaints here
| selimnairb wrote:
| I'll take Puma's System Preferences, pinstripes and all, over
| what we have today. Blech!
| millerm wrote:
| I hear ya. I was so in love with that interface back in the
| day. I thought it was beautiful. If I have to stare at a screen
| all day I want it to be attractive. Everything is so flat,
| muted, and boring now. A button is so much less intuitively
| discovered these days. Tabs are hard to determine due to
| limited perspective. Window borders are gone and it's so
| difficult to determine the boundaries of applications. I'd
| gladly take back some skeuomorphism please.
|
| Remember how cool those confirmation buttons were? Nice blue
| pill that said "Click me!" They really looked like you could
| touch them. If only Apple hadn't taken away the customization
| capabilities of the UI. Remember themes with Shapeshifter? I
| would love to have that back now to get some old school OS X
| widgets.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Agreed. I think the new System Preferences was a big step back.
| jonhohle wrote:
| And for what reason? There were things that were so easy to
| do - like change network interface priority by reordering the
| list of interfaces - that have obvious method anymore (I want
| to prefer ethernet when it's attached, for example).
|
| I can no longer navigate to settings I frequently used and
| need to search for just about everything. Perhaps I shouldn't
| expect things to stay the same after 20 years(!), but for
| long time users, it's bewildering.
| david422 wrote:
| > I frequently used and need to search for just about
| everything
|
| Because why couldn't they put it in alphabetical order? I
| want to adjust my Keyboard settings ... where the eff is
| Keyboard ...
| selimnairb wrote:
| It's just a big dumb list that I now have to use search to
| find anything in. My guess is that someone doesn't want to
| spend developer and designer resources curating the old
| design. Now they can more or less shove new things into the
| list and call it a day. Sad.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| One thing that I think makes System Settings much worse
| than it has to be is how indistinguishable its sidebar
| icons are. They all have the same shape, some share the
| same background color or have very similar background
| colors, their glyph shapes are thin, and the white glyph
| color has extremely bad contrast with some of the
| background colors.
|
| If the icons were more akin to 10.6 Snow Leopard sidebar
| icons[0] it'd give the sidebar items much more
| substantial visual anchors. Heck even the more muted
| sidebar icons of 10.7 Lion[1] would be a substantial
| improvement.
|
| [0]: https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/operating-
| systems/mac-o... [1]: https://512pixels.net/wp-
| content/uploads/2018/08/10-8-Mounta...
| mattkevan wrote:
| I've used macOS since the early betas and could never
| find what I wanted in the big dumb grid. Had to use
| search every time.
|
| IMO the sidebar is more usable as I can just scan down to
| find the right option, or just use the search as before.
| selimnairb wrote:
| I don't dispute your experience. However, for me the old
| grid provided a two-dimensional spatial hierarchy (if
| that's a thing) that made it easy for me to quickly drill
| down to what I wanted. The new list version has a one-
| dimensional flattened hierarchy with many more categories
| to consider at the top level. With so many choices my
| brain shuts down and I just resort to search.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Yes, the old grid layout was not good for anything that you
| didn't access frequently. It was sometimes hard to find
| things if you didn't already know where to look.
|
| I agree that the actual settings controls and panel layouts
| are not as good as before. They are more autogenerated
| while the old panel layouts were more carefully planned.
| some of the controls seem poorly suited to the data they
| are controlling.
|
| It might have been better if the navigation were changed
| but the original controls retained.
| zwily wrote:
| I'm a long time user (pre-OS X) and I prefer the new
| settings. It always took me longer to find things in the
| icon grid.
| WillAdams wrote:
| I still miss the "Unix Expert" checkbox from NeXTstep, and
| would give a lot to have it back.
| lvl102 wrote:
| The first time I learned about OS X, I blindly bought Apple
| shares. I knew it would set them up for success down the road.
| Sounds silly now but foundation, such as OS for a computer
| company, matter.
|
| Although, OS X was painful for many years.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Hope you held onto them. I sold my apple stock at a mere 2x
| multiple to put the money into buying a house.
| zoky wrote:
| > Although, OS X was painful for many years.
|
| I guess it depends on how you define "many". I bought my first
| Mac in 1998 (the "Smurf" G3) and used MacOS 8/9 for quite a few
| years after that. I remember looking forward to OS X once they
| announced it--it was literally the coolest shit ever. Like, the
| ability to run Photoshop and Emacs on the same system at the
| same time? Wow, was that cool.
|
| There was definitely a period where you had to dual-boot
| between MacOS 9 and OS X for a while, but by the time I bought
| my first iBook in 2002, OS X was the standard, and was way
| better than anything else out there. I don't think I ever
| booted into MacOS 9 on my iBook, except for shits and giggles.
|
| I just don't think there was any question that OS X was leaps
| and bounds better than OS 9, to the point where when I had to
| use OS 9 for work 4-5 years later (the video editing world
| always lags 5-6 years behind the rest of us) I was a little bit
| peeved about having to used such an antiquated system that
| literally had no modern web browser support except for
| something called "iCab".
|
| Anyway, all of this is to say... I wouldn't call 1-2 years, at
| the most, "many".
| lvl102 wrote:
| To be fair, OS X was OK by 2003 but third-party softwares and
| especially MS Office sucked until 2007-08.
| rvense wrote:
| Well, depends. For music that era is just an explosion of
| great things. From 10.3 or so a Mac and a Firewire audio
| interface was an amazingly stable and portable package,
| with possibilities you could hardly have dreamed of even
| with a studio full of gear ten years before. The extra
| power that became available in the Core 2 Duo era was
| transformative, too, but the software was available for a
| good while before.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| As I recall, the main issue with the earliest versions of OS
| X is that they were slow, somewhat unstable, and would
| occasionally do really weird things (like how on my summer
| 2000 iMac DV, OS X 10.0.x once randomly decided it wasn't
| going to draw the cursor any more and had to be reinstalled
| before it was fixed). This led me to spend a fair amount of
| time booted into OS 9 with an Aqua Kaleidoscope scheme
| applied and SmoothType installed for that luxe OS X style
| text rendering.
|
| 10.1 made things a little more stable but wasn't
| revolutionary.
|
| 10.2 Jaguar on the other hand... holy cow. It was so much
| faster and more stable on my iMac it was absurd. The speed
| gap was still there but nowhere near as dramatic, making it a
| lot more usable. This is where I went almost full time booted
| OS X outside of the odd random thing that didn't play nice
| with Classic.
| pram wrote:
| Yup by the time Panther came out I didn't have any
| problems. Having my macports env, X11, Unreal Tournament
| 2k4, and World of Warcraft on the same laptop felt like the
| high water mark of computing at the time lol
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Running on a TiBook G4 I'm guessing? I always wanted one
| of those but couldn't afford it back in the day. Its
| design has barely aged at all, it basically defined what
| a modern laptop looked like, and that persists even now.
| coreyh14444 wrote:
| I was deep into OS explorations in this period. I ran BeOS,
| Yellow Dog linux on PowerPC, had all flavors of NT, etc.
|
| My feeling about OS X at this time was that it was the right
| choice but that it was "too late" and that Apple took too long
| and the window of opportunity had passed.
|
| I take that now as startup advice: It isn't too late!
| tambourine_man wrote:
| OS X was a bet on the future, that double buffering everything
| was OK because graphic cards would get there eventually. They
| certainly did, but we suffered through menus taking a good
| fraction of a second to drop down for a few years. I can still
| feel the pain.
|
| I would never have taken that bet. I want computers to be fast
| _now_. It was the right bet.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Another hard decision that was the right choice in retrospect
| was going with KHTML. I remember watching the keynote and
| waiting for them to announce it was based on Gecko. Camino
| had shown it was possible and worked well. Apple had hired
| David Hyatt. It was obvious they would go with Gecko.
|
| There was an audible gasp when they announced it was based on
| KHTML. What the %^&$ is KHTML?
| mproud wrote:
| The venerable KHTML project was just officially
| discontinued this year.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Yet another one was going with LLVM.
|
| Now that they had a decent running GCC on PowerPC they want
| to build a compiler infrastructure from scratch?
|
| Apple is full of those decisions. I'm just glad they don't
| take advices from me.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| LLVM is because they don't want GPLv3. They just went
| ahead with a stack where they can be in control on their
| own terms.
|
| Basically GNU gambled and lost, they wanted to make a big
| stand against software patents and some other powerful
| forces had different opinions.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| GPL v3 is part of it, but as I understand, back when the
| decision was made GCC was rather inflexible compared to
| LLVM/Clang which was also a big factor.
| [deleted]
| Longlius wrote:
| I believe LLVM was chosen because it was easier to make
| new compilers to work with it. GCC's intermediate
| representation was a bit of a mess for a long time and
| from what I understand, Apple did not find GCC's
| Objective-C support to be satisfactory.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > LLVM is because they don't want GPLv3.
|
| LLVM and Clang are also about having a compiler stack
| that provides the information you need for a modern
| graphical IDE.
|
| For instance, GCC had made some decisions that made it
| difficult to point to which line of code caused a
| particular error message.
|
| Apple's Chris Lattner covered this in a 2007 tech talk he
| gave at Google introducing LLVM and the (then) new Clang
| project.
|
| https://youtu.be/VeRaLPupGks?t=1133
| ori_b wrote:
| > _LLVM and Clang are also about having a compiler stack
| that provides the information you need for a modern
| graphical IDE._
|
| Is that why all GNU utilities shipped with OSX were also
| stuck at the GPLv2 versions and never upgraded?
| cdcarter wrote:
| No. That's why LLVM and Clang were developed.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Yes. Apple won't use GPLv3.
|
| Some things have good replacements with other licenses,
| like zsh. Others, AFAIK, don't, like rsync.
| freedomben wrote:
| I remember feeling that way too but had forgotten about it!
| Wow, what great life lesson I nearly missed, thank you! It's
| never too late (well, usually not)
| sanderjd wrote:
| I need to remember to remind myself of this more often!
|
| The one I remember _so clearly_ is back when I was using Pidgin
| (or Adium I think was another thing I used?) with a few
| different messaging apps, and my company was trying to figure
| out how to make chat work, maintaining an irc server that we of
| course couldn 't get the non-nerds to use, looking at HipChat
| and a couple others that seemed really expensive for their
| feature set at the time. Basically none of this stuff supported
| mobile well.
|
| This was 2008, maybe 2009. I remember thinking "this all sucks,
| but it's waaaay too late to make a chat app; I've been using IM
| apps for over a decade, totally saturated and commoditized".
|
| But then I watched the rise of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger,
| and Slack, all of which were tiny or non-existent at the time,
| and became gigantic businesses.
| code_duck wrote:
| I remember ICQ and Aim. It's not even clear to me why they
| died and were replaced, but that sure did happen.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| ICQ is used a great deal outside the US. Aim, well that's
| AOL, so reason enough.
| lesuorac wrote:
| AOL actively wanted AIM to fail.
|
| https://mashable.com/archive/aim-history
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Isn't that the ultimate survivorship bias?
| Macha wrote:
| In terms of who the winners were, sure. There were many
| also-rans like Viber or companies that won only in certain
| markets like Line or Telegram.
|
| But the idea that the network effects couldn't be overcome
| was definitely false. Not only are MSN, AIM and YIM so dead
| their servers are shut down, but the services which
| displaced them (Facebook Messenger and Skype) have
| themselves been displaced by a third wave of services
| (WhatsApp, iMessage, Discord, Slack)
| cguess wrote:
| Viber is still big in certain places like the
| Philippines.
| pjmlp wrote:
| And several Mediterranean countries, it is easier to
| reach someone on Viber than WhatsApp.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Are you sure that was the right lesson to take for a startup?
|
| Apple had millions of users, an already profitable business (by
| 2001 barely), and marketing reach that was far outside its
| market share.
|
| They had the best marketer and product guy in the business for
| a CEE and one of the best logistics experts for a COO.
|
| A startup probably has none of those things.
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| I wish the would modernize the Dock.
| klocksib wrote:
| What do you mean?
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| E.g. window previews and virtual desktop miniatures.
| LeanderK wrote:
| Wow, unbelievable that it was designed in 2001! It still looks
| fresh and modern, although maybe a bit too playful so that it
| appears a bit childish? But only barely.
|
| It appears to have all the basic functionality expected from a
| modern operating system, I instantly feel right at home although
| I've never used it.
|
| I find the review terrible though, one of the major changes was
| the user interface, revolutionary I would say. It's way more
| important than wether the GUI configuration options are well
| thought out or not.
| beanjuiceII wrote:
| interesting, it looks sterile to me
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| > It still looks fresh and modern, although maybe a bit too
| playful so that it appears a bit childish?
|
| The aesthetics is called ,,Frutiger Aero". Lots of colors and
| especially of blue, lots of transparency effects and fake light
| reflections. It all is inspired by natural landscapes with blue
| skies or blue water surfaces. Also skeuomorphisms everywhere.
|
| Windows 7 could be called the pinnacle of the use of Frutiger
| Aero in UI design when Apple already started to move away and
| embrace material design. Windows 8 was the big cut where its UI
| forcefully pushed material design onto its users without any
| transition grace period. That's one of the reasons why
| everybody hated it.
|
| Edit: On Macs even the hardware design reflected the transition
| from Frutiger Aero to Material Design: The early 2000 Macs were
| all semi-transparent plastic shells with bright shades of blue
| and green. Then Apple discovered Aluminum and silver unibody
| cases. Now there is no color left in the design universe. This
| also marks the time MacOS interfaces started to look decidedly
| more "grown-up".
|
| I wonder what will be next or are we going to stick with
| heartless, cold metal designs forever?
| graypegg wrote:
| I wonder if we'll ever find ourselves in a "aero" nostalgia
| cycle? I already see a lot of hazy glass and reflections on
| some apple UI! Maybe it's time for it's renaissance!
| golergka wrote:
| It was heavily referenced by vaporwave movement alongside
| windows 95 aesthetics. And vaporwave was 12 years ago.
| com2kid wrote:
| > Windows 7 could be called the pinnacle of the use of
| Frutiger Aero in UI design when Apple already started to move
| away and embrace material design.
|
| Windows Media Center was the origins of the Metro UI, Windows
| Phone 7 was the industries 21st century intro to a typography
| first flat design.
|
| Sadly the good design aspects of Windows Phone 7 mostly got
| forgotten about by the time Windows 8 came along, IMHO it is
| because WP7 had a small dedicated design team compared to
| whatever large group I imagine did Windows 8.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Plus Windows 8 with Sinofskys .NET hate, decided to go back
| to the original plan of improving COM, which could have
| been a good idea, if the execution hasn't been so
| tragically performed.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| > I wonder what will be next or are we going to stick with
| heartless, cold metal designs forever?
|
| CARI has probably cataloged it already. Apple is already
| going all in on colorful aesthetics recently, not sure if it
| will spread into hardware.
|
| https://cari.institute/aesthetics
| concinds wrote:
| > not sure if it will spread into hardware
|
| Already has for most of their devices (iPhone and iPhone
| Pro, iPad and iPad Air, iMac, HomePod). Their pro computers
| only come in one/two colors, which is understandable since
| their low volume would create an inventory nightmare if
| available in half a dozen colors.
| robertoandred wrote:
| Nah, the aesthetic is called Aqua, not a name borne out of a
| Windows OS that copied Aqua five years later. And Apple
| hardware never transitioned to a Google software interface
| concept.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| " I wonder what will be next or are we going to stick with
| heartless, cold metal designs forever"
|
| If any design folks have an opinion on which way the winds
| are blowing, I'd love to see an example.
| einr wrote:
| I think there's a tendency recently towards keeping the
| Apple-esque minimalism in terms of shapes, but moving the
| materials to softer, warmer, speckled, textile or textured,
| and the colors to earthier, more natural.
|
| You can see these tendencies in stuff like the recent
| Microsoft Surface laptops and their textured handrests, the
| Acer Aspire Vero and its recycled plastic shell, but also
| in small ways in some Apple products, i.e. power cords for
| the Mac Studio and the handle for the box (!) being made of
| textured fabric instead of featureless plastic/rubber, as
| well as some of the new iPhone colors being Forest Green
| and the like.
|
| It's not a huge change but it feels like a trend to me.
| donatj wrote:
| I'd vote the opposite on the playful aspect. Todays UIs feel
| oppressively monotonous and lacking heart.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I miss the textured Aqua days. Peak was Leopard/Snow Leopard.
|
| Flat is just so... flat. And boring.
|
| And also harder to read, because it's harder to orient
| yourself in a big textureless area than in a space with some
| texture in it.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| 100%. The day I get my chunky aqua scrollbars back, I will
| shed tears.
| Reason077 wrote:
| Boring, perhaps. But definitely not harder to read. The old
| styles with text against textured backgrounds (for example,
| the pinstriped menu bars) detracted from readability.
| Current design is significantly better, especially dark
| mode, although lately there is a trend towards low-contrast
| UI (text against similarly-coloured backgrounds) in recent
| versions of iOS and macOS which is also detracting from
| readability, IMO.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| The pinstripes were only in the earliest versions. By
| Leopard/Snow Leopard (which i also find the best one) the
| theme looked clean without looking flat.
| sangnoir wrote:
| pinstripes, brushed metal, linen; one could follow the
| trends by looking at cargo-culting designers were setting
| as the background image on their blogs. I'm sure they
| _thought_ it looked good when viewing on their freshly
| updated Macs.
| anthk wrote:
| Mac OS X Tiger was not stripper and far more usbable than
| flat interfaces.
| nobleach wrote:
| It got to a point with Apple where I had to tell my mother,
| "just tap everything... there's really no indicator if
| anything's a button anymore". While material/flat can look
| pretty, it is counterintuitive to communication. I'm sure
| Jony Ive read "The Design of Everyday Things" at some point
| in his career. Perhaps he got to a point where he decided
| that didn't apply?
| samtheprogram wrote:
| Historically Jony Ive isn't involved in the user
| interface. Has he been in more recent years? I know that
| back during Scott Forstall's time and Apple's
| skeuomorphism phase that Ive stated in interviews that he
| wasn't involved in any of that. I thought his (direct)
| influence was limited to (hardware) product design.
| pavlov wrote:
| Jony Ive was at least nominally in charge of UI design
| for the post-Forstall iOS 7 update which removed almost
| all textures and pseudo-3D and most button borders,
| replaced the previous earthy color palettes with primary
| colors and gradients, and switched the system font to
| Helvetica Light:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/ios-7-thoroughly-
| rev...
| freedomben wrote:
| Likewise. Leopard/Snow Leopard were the point at which I
| was happen with everything Apple. It truly was peak (for me
| at least). I still had a Windows 7 PC and Linux (Fedora,
| Backtrack) on a laptop for running security tools, but I
| felt most "right" when on the mac.
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| I recall upgrading from Leopard to Snow Leopard on my
| 2008 polycarbonate MacBook. I got back _30 GB_ of disk
| space, and it absolutely _flew_. I straight up don 't
| recall seeing a beachball while using Snow Leopard. Apple
| called it a 'purely bug-fix release', and free of bugs it
| was.
|
| In my opinion, OS X has been (mostly) downhill after
| that. The iOS-ification began with Lion, which changed
| the juicy blue scrollbars to a boring grey, got rid of
| 'Save-As'--an extremely controversial addition, as I
| recall it--and added then-newfangled things like iCloud.
| spider-mario wrote:
| I kind of liked the "brushed metal" texture that could be
| found in Tiger (10.4):
| http://toastytech.com/guis/osx14slideshow.png
| graypegg wrote:
| The "brushed metal means hardware" [0] concept was always
| something I thought would've worked great in practice. Of
| course apple never really committed to that, and made any
| window they could look like a slab of aluminum for a
| while.
|
| But the idea of making a subtle signal that this thing
| you're interacting with will have external effects, in
| the age of MP3 players and digital cameras, was smart.
|
| [0] https://daringfireball.net/2004/10/brushedmetal
| ArtWomb wrote:
| Circa 2000 I recall playing with a developers beta version of
| MacOS X approx 6 months or so pre-release. The move from
| motorola based power pc chips to x86 already felt a decade too
| late. And the nextstep & netbsd origins? Very "meh". Apache,
| Mosaic, Napster all crashing hard requiring system reboots.
| Apple was playing catch-up to professional grade sgi & sunos
| (which is what every one was using to build the early web back
| in those days) ;)
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Just so nobody gets confused, x86 support was released in
| 2006.
| hestefisk wrote:
| I think they might be referring to the transition from 68K
| to PowerPC.
| duskwuff wrote:
| That happened around 1994-95. By 2000, it was old news.
| dsego wrote:
| > It appears to have all the basic functionality expected from
| a modern operating system
|
| The truth is, for the most part operating systems haven't
| really advanced that much, at least from a ux standpoint.
| Speaking as someone who started using computers in 1997 on
| windows 95 and a 133mhz pentium. All the basic metaphors and
| mechanisms have stayed the same. Tabs in browsers were
| considered like a huge leap (I know it's not strictly an OS
| thing), and that was almost 20 years ago.
| tgv wrote:
| One thing that makes macOS stand out, is the frameworks.
| Every version of the OS has come with improvements in the UI
| libraries. I remember being amazed at Cocoa's bindings, which
| developed into a way to bind arbitrary data to UI controls.
| It was reactive before React (although not taken that far,
| because the UI 'language' was limited). That's just one small
| part, and it's why replicating macOS is so hard.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Just like any other desktop OS since 16 bit home micros,
| with exception of MS-DOS.
|
| BSDs and Linux distributions are the exception with their
| fragmentation, even other commercial UNIXes had a proper
| set of desktop frameworks.
| varjag wrote:
| 20 year ago in mainstream; earlier if you used first
| implementations like in Galeon.
| zokier wrote:
| Search as the primary interaction method instead of menus and
| icons is pretty dramatic shift though; compare vscode command
| palette to traditional vs, or windows 7 and later start menu
| to its predecessors. Another thing, especially on Windows, is
| the de-emphasis or straight out removal of menu bars, once
| staple of desktop interfaces. As a more generic trend, I
| think modal dialogs with forms were far more common
| interaction pattern back in the day than these days.
| gedy wrote:
| > Search as the primary interaction method
|
| Thanks, I hate it. Search is terrible for
| browsing/discovery, in spite of many people liking it.
| SllX wrote:
| Personally I love it, but I love it a lot more paired
| with a robust system for browsing.
| robertoandred wrote:
| Macs have the best of both worlds: consistent menu bars
| with built-in function search.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > the de-emphasis or straight out removal of menu bars
|
| This change irks me quite a lot. Hamburger menus are
| terrible and while command palettes are nice, they aren't
| available everywhere, and so on Windows and Linux you end
| up with a lot of software not having any kind of index of
| its functionality and burying functions in dialog tunnels.
| gjvc wrote:
| It had real character, and the first time I used it, I came
| away from the iMac (with its soap-on-a-rope mouse) beaming with
| excitement.
|
| OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was the peak for me.
| Reason077 wrote:
| This was the first version of Mac OS X I ran on my first
| "modern" Mac, a 2001 Titanium PowerBook G4. There were some
| performance issues in this first release, but 10.2 (Jaguar,
| pronounced "Jag-wire" by Steve Jobs) had a focus on performance
| and resolved much of it.
|
| I vaguely remember dual-booting Mac OS 9 and X for a while, but
| it wasn't long before Mac OS X took over full time.
| lannisterstark wrote:
| Where's the childish part? Didn't notice anything.
| tyingq wrote:
| Maybe a few things like the finder and iTunes icons and the
| default choices for user pictures, but otherwise I agree.
| darkstar_16 wrote:
| Feels playful because everything else from that era was ugly in
| my opinion
| baal80spam wrote:
| I wouldn't call XP (Luna) theme ugly. It wasn't as clean as
| Windows2k but it was just fine.
| dsego wrote:
| The fisher price look. For me it was a downgrade in
| aesthetic and seemed like trying too hard to make it
| appealing and friendly for the computer illiterate masses.
| nobleach wrote:
| I called it that too! My backup was, "well, when your UI
| is designed by Hasbro". It really did have that Duplo
| Block look to it. When run at very high resolutions, it
| did get a bit better.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Everything after Windows 2000 was ugly.
|
| Windows 2000 was the last system in the world with coherent
| and beautiful UI.
|
| Those times are over. We can't have good things.
| linguae wrote:
| I disagree; I love pre-flat Mac OS X. I think Aero from
| Windows Vista and 7 was nice (even if I preferred the
| Windows Classic theme), and GNOME 2 was well-done and
| consistent if you stuck to applications written using
| GTK+ 2.
|
| I concur that I'm not a fan of modern UI/UX, though. Give
| me the interfaces and the UI guidelines of Mac OS 8,
| Windows 2000, and Mac OS X Tiger (with Spotlight) any
| day.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| If one took the version of Aqua from Mavericks and
| restored aqua scrollbars (it had flat gray pill
| scrollbars similar to what's in macOS now), that would be
| the most perfect iteration of the look in my opinion.
|
| Tiger's Aqua comes in second, and Leopard/Snow Leopard's
| third. I never really liked the ubiquitous dark grays
| found in 10.5/10.6, it felt kinda gloomy in the same way
| Win95/98 did relative to Win2K (also due to darker
| grays).
| mort96 wrote:
| Hard disagree, Windows 2000's large swathes of grey
| doesn't look good to me at all.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Yeah, I'm surprised to even see this praise. Win2k was
| just a return to the corporate grey Windows theme after
| XP. Just Windows 9x/NT again rather than something
| special.
| twoodfin wrote:
| Windows 2000 predated XP by almost two years.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Oh yeah, that's right. Though the chronology isn't
| important.
|
| I think modern macOS is a decent example of how you can
| increment away from the drab corporate gray of that era
| without using flashy colors like XP and without going too
| far into flashy effects like Vista.
| coldpie wrote:
| Have you tried an XFCE environment? With the right theme,
| it's excellent, in my opinion.
|
| A couple examples I picked off the XFCE screenshots page:
|
| https://cdn.xfce.org/about/screenshots/4.16-1.png
|
| https://cdn.xfce.org/about/screenshots/4.14-1.png
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Linux will never be as coherent as Windows is. It's not
| just about theme. It's about the whole system. Windows
| was built from GUI. Linux is built from CLI and GUI is
| just incomplete buggy slap upon CLI tools. With myriad of
| choices it'll never be comparable.
|
| Linux need some visionary company which will push hard on
| some sane technical choices without alternatives to
| provide coherent vision. It would require tremendous
| resources and it'll cause tremendous resistance from
| community (just observe how much hate systemd receives
| and it's still not as convenient as services.msc from
| Windows 2000). It's unlikely to happen, so that's why I
| think we won't have good things, because Windows itself
| lost its vision as well.
| coldpie wrote:
| > It's not just about theme. It's about the whole system.
|
| Ahh. In that case, yes, I think you're probably right :)
| sylens wrote:
| I really loved the balance Microsoft found in Windows 7
| with Aero Glass
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| I found the bright blue taskbar and window decorators and
| the bright green start button, among other very bright and
| contrasting colors, quite the eyesore both at the time and
| now. Thankfully you could switch to the Windows Classic
| theme.
| zokier wrote:
| There was also the silver version of Luna that was far
| less garish https://twitter.com/zacbowden/status/10891845
| 45201709056/pho...
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| The best thing about Luna is that its existence
| necessitated a capable theme engine, which enabled a
| vibrant ecosystem of third party .msstyle themes. Some of
| those were very well designed and a joy to use.
|
| Aero, or at least the slightly toned down Windows 7
| version of it was better than Luna, but similarly to me
| the bigger benefit it brought was the more capable theme
| engine. There were a lot of awesome third party .msstyles
| for it too.
|
| I'll forever resent Windows 8 for ripping out that nice
| theme engine in favor of one barely more capable than
| what shipped in Windows 1.x.
| spider-mario wrote:
| I found the "Royale" theme from Windows Media Center far
| superior.
|
| https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/Windows_XP_themes#Royale
| icedchai wrote:
| Windows XP looked "childish", too. That was the style for the
| time, it seems.
| Sakos wrote:
| I still remember changing it to the classic Windows theme
| because I didn't like XP's theme.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This was Tog's critique, at about the same time:
| https://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html
| racl101 wrote:
| Still one of the best looking OSes of all time.
| weevil wrote:
| I have such strong nostalgia and latent excitement about the
| early days of OS X. I was just a teenager in the early 2000s, and
| as a young Apple nerd with several iMac G3s in the house (my
| parents are graphic designers; there was a family Mac, and some
| cast-offs from my high school) I'd get so into upgrading them
| through the versions and looking at all the cool new stuff and
| thinking it was so damn clean and futuristic.
| haunter wrote:
| Here is the John Siracusa review from 2001
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2001/10/macosx-10-1/
| blamazon wrote:
| > As in Mac OS 9, it is possible to play DVD movies "on the
| desktop" by setting the desktop pattern to be a particular
| color. The DVD player uses this color as a mask for its video
| display, allowing the movie to appear on the desktop pattern
| even when the player window itself is hidden.
|
| Today I learned!
| netsharc wrote:
| Windows has this too. Something to do with sending the video
| data directly to the graphics card, and the graphics card
| doing the decoding of the MPEG data, and replacing the color
| (which is usually green) with the video image before
| outputing to the screen.
|
| So if you're playing a video and you open a web page, and the
| webpage has the same green color, it looks like there's a
| hole on the browser window and you can see the video playing
| "behind" it.
| akx wrote:
| This isn't probably really used much these days, but yeah,
| it was/is called Overlay mode.
|
| The graphics card isn't necessarily decoding the MPEG data
| (though that could have been an option in the olden days
| too), but it is likely scaling it and spitting it out in
| the given-colored pixels faster than you could've done with
| just software back in the days.
|
| The AVS visualizer for Winamp also supported this; if you
| set the overlay color to black, you could have all of the
| black text on your desktop be very, very funkily animated.
| omnibrain wrote:
| Unrelated: in Windows you can paint on almost everything you
| see. You just have to get the handle and then you can paint
| on the canvas of the UI element at runtime. So you can have
| videos play on buttons for example.
| sproketboy wrote:
| [dead]
| simongray wrote:
| > Also folders can be browsed as a series of menus when placed in
| the dock. http://toastytech.com/guis/osxhddoc.jpg
|
| That is more useful than the icon view it has now.
| cprecioso wrote:
| You can still get it like that, just right click on any folder
| that is pinned to the right side of the Dock, you'll get 4
| different display options.
| simongray wrote:
| Thank you!!
| pantulis wrote:
| Also should mention "Folder Peek" by Sindre Sorhus which
| basically does the same but in the menubar, quite handy and
| free.
| graypegg wrote:
| You made my day! That's actually really slick in the "list"
| mode.
| davidy123 wrote:
| They glossed over the NeXT roots which is telling, the ideas were
| only half-heartedly baked into the OS. It should be strictly
| enforced that everything on-screen has a relationship to
| everything else. But that would have been hard work, and they
| realized eye candy was an easier route when you can just announce
| something else every few years. This is why desktop evironments
| really haven't changed since the first commercial releases and
| Apple is just another PC vendor. Too bad because imagine if the
| relationship based operating environment was well developed for
| their spatial headset.
| CoryAlexMartin wrote:
| What does it mean for everything on screen to have a
| relationship to everything else? Could you elaborate?
| spatulon wrote:
| The classic MacOS's Finder was 'spatial'. Since each folder
| on disk could only be open in a single window, and that
| window remembered its position and layout, there was a
| certain physical consistency - it felt like the windows were
| the actual folders on disk, with the same kind of coherency
| and stability you expect of real-world objects.
|
| Meanwhile, the Mac OS X Finder is not spatial. You can have
| the same folder open in multiple windows, each with different
| layouts. There's no longer that illusion that the window and
| the folder are one and the same - it's just a browser showing
| you the contents of the folder.
|
| This article goes into a lot more detail.
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Yeah the classic Finder exploited human spatial and muscle
| memory to help users navigate filesystems quickly, which
| was pretty smart because those forms of memory are very
| strong -- humans are generally quite good at remembering
| where things are in physical space, retaining such
| information more easily than we do abstract information
| like file paths.
| davidy123 wrote:
| Yes, based on the NeXTSTEP roots, everything should be object
| oriented. Think of it like visual copy/paste. Pretty much
| every on screen item should have a meaning and relationship
| to everything else.
|
| For example, in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5o5liZxnA
| at 35:00 you can see how an application is loaded from the
| network and a live chart dragged from one app to another.
| That isn't a one-off gimmick, it's how the OS and that
| version of Objective C worked.
|
| I bought a Macbook because I was excited by this idea, but I
| quickly realized it was not even surface deep. I could drag
| some on screen elements around, but it was inconsistent at
| best.
|
| But I guess there was a conflict with Raskin's idea of making
| everything resemble a real world equivalent (object as in
| "toaster app," rather than decomposed feature of "can toast")
| and they wanted to let third party applications do their own
| thing. If the whole OS (and network) was effectively the
| application, what's their product? Never let profound world
| changing innovation get in the way of a trillion dollar
| company, I guess.
|
| I think of it, in my muddle headed imagineering way, this
| way: https://wiki.zooid.org/wiki/20120407/Raskin_vs_Engelbart
|
| I suppose by now we would think of it all as a graph rather
| than OO, just add coordinates (and the required couple
| decades of cultural development of how they would relate) and
| you've got your spatial interface.
| mmphosis wrote:
| _Each window has Close, Minimize and Maximize button on it. The
| "X", "-", and "+" symbols only appear when the mouse moves over
| these buttons._
|
| The "+" symbol is Zoom, not Maximize. https://iili.io/H6a1uAG.png
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Having never actually interacted with a mac from that era, are
| the grey and white stripes in the toolbar screenshots actually
| visible on the screen or are they an artifact of old screenshots
| on modern displays?
| tuyiown wrote:
| It's by design, I remember hearing that it would visually match
| the semi translucent plastic stripes of the original iMac
| frame, but those, while a bit similar, are vertical.
| veidr wrote:
| The "pinstripes" were totally there, and celebrated by many.
| Note that they are slightly translucent, too, just like the
| pinstriped housings of the plastic Macs of that era.
|
| They really didn't look bad, though. I think if you zoom the
| image larger it will give you a better impression of what they
| actually felt like.
| rainbowzootsuit wrote:
| The striations were visible and the window panes that were
| unselected became translucent. A lot of themes of translucent
| glass/acrylic with a far-side texture.
|
| The macs of the era had a matching theme to their design. Zoom
| into the front face of the Power Mac G4 "graphite" tower here:
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Apple_G4...
| rsynnott wrote:
| They were toned down a lot by the time most consumers saw this
| (I don't think any machine actually shipped with 10.1? They
| stuck with MacOS9 until 10.2, iirc...) and totally vanished
| soon after. But they were there, to start with.
| fredoralive wrote:
| I got an iBook in mid 2002 that shipped with 10.1 as the
| default OS (with Mac OS 9 as a dual boot option).
|
| In hindsight, the pinstriping in the first couple of releases
| was a bit much, but sadly the buttons also got toned down at
| the same time as the pinstripes, and they've never looked as
| good since.
| neilalexander wrote:
| They are visible. It was a design element throughout the UI at
| the time.
| fathyb wrote:
| I really liked that look. The first iOS versions also had a
| similar pattern in the background:
| https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/setting-
| custom-...
| goosedragons wrote:
| Not just the UI. Apple products in general. The G3 iMac,
| Apple Cinema Display, Power Mac G4 all had pinstriping
| elements.
| em500 wrote:
| I guess it was a carry over from the original Macintosh OS
| all the way back from 1984.
|
| https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/System_1
| gmac wrote:
| They matched the iMac case's stripes. See:
| https://www.theregister.com/2010/11/29/bondi_blue_imac/
| spatulon wrote:
| Yes, and it was actually Microsoft who first brought the
| iMac stripes to Mac software with Internet Explorer 5,
| before OS X.
| kzrdude wrote:
| They were toned down later release by release.
| darkstar_16 wrote:
| IIRC they were part of the "theme".
| rainbowzootsuit wrote:
| "Theme" implies that there might be more than one correct
| answer. This is false
|
| /s
| shrikant wrote:
| They were definitely visible as part of the default theme, and
| you can see this replicated in the other desktop environment
| themes that mimic this, for e.g.:
| https://store.kde.org/p/1290811
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