[HN Gopher] Mac(OS)talgia
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Mac(OS)talgia
Author : mgrayson
Score : 92 points
Date : 2025-02-09 13:55 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (swallowmygraphicdesign.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (swallowmygraphicdesign.com)
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| Always been rather partial to the Windows 9x look myself, but Mac
| OS 9 is a solid runner-up to me in terms of looks. Enjoyed seeing
| some of the reimaginings of modern apps, quite gorgeous.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Agreed. The Platinum UI design holds up extraordinarily well -
| it had a clear design language which was easy for developers to
| use and extend.
| ok123456 wrote:
| This is back when they actually did usability testing with
| people.
|
| Now it's whatever slop in every direction.
| exe34 wrote:
| now we have experts who know everything!
| exabrial wrote:
| All we ever needed was in Snow Leopard. Everything since then (ok
| except maybe for SIP and XProtect) is bloatware.
| andrewclunn wrote:
| Still can't believe we once had an operating system named OS X
| Panther. The puns...
| LiquidPolymer wrote:
| I have an ancient laptop with Snow Leopard running. It keeps
| my Nikon Film Scanner useful since Nikon abandoned the
| software for these scanners rather abruptly.
|
| I've been a pro photographer since 1990 and the Kodachrome
| setting embedded within the Nikon scanner is fantastic for
| capturing the color and detail of this exceptionally sharp
| film.
| Affric wrote:
| Kodachrome was beautiful it's a shame we will never see
| it's like again.
|
| Do you still do film photography? Ektachrome?
| boc wrote:
| Snow Leopard was truly the best. An actual OS release based
| around performance improvements under-the-hood instead of
| flashy, half-baked features.
| ryandrake wrote:
| SIP is quite terrible. Requiring an access level higher than
| root to access system files, and only processes that are signed
| by Apple and have special entitlements can have that access
| level?
|
| It's my computer, I should be at the top of the permissions
| totem pole, not Apple. If they're dead set on using signing to
| enforce the higher-than-root level, then I should be the one
| signing the executables. Fortunately, you can disable this
| crap.
| sitharus wrote:
| SIP is wonderful. I no longer have to completely repave
| machines after my family install crapware because I know it
| can't mess with the base system.
|
| But for those of us who need that access we can disable it,
| with a bit of a dance to make it hard for people who _don't_
| need it.
| astrange wrote:
| Do you want OS updates to work or not? They can't work if you
| randomly edit files.
| jaredklewis wrote:
| No love for APFS?
| bangonkeyboard wrote:
| Not from me. A black box filesystem that can't even
| accurately say how much space is free and destroys mechanical
| hard drives with longer term use. There were other options to
| deal with HFS+'s 2038 problem.
| caseyy wrote:
| Snow Leopard and Windows 7 are from a time when computers were
| made to serve the user.
|
| Then we discovered how much more money could be made by
| focusing on ad tech.
|
| The relationship between people and technology was so different
| in 2009. I miss it.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| 10.6.8 was solid (people often forget that 10.6 and the
| intermediate patches were a bit of a mess) but when I use it I
| definitely feel a few spots where some polish and QoL
| improvements would be welcome. Its theme's dominant gray is
| also a bit too dark.
|
| I don't mind SIP personally. It always unnerved me that any
| random executable was just a single admin password entry away
| from doing whatever it pleased.
|
| My ideal desktop OS environment would be something like a
| polished-up Snow Leopard using the brighter, more refined theme
| from 10.9 Mavericks (except with the flat scrollbars de-
| flattened). If I had that I don't think I could use anything
| else.
| nomel wrote:
| As a multi-computer user, "Continuity"[1] is magical. Being
| able to drag my cursor over to my other computer, drop some
| files, etc, is really great.
|
| [1] https://www.apple.com/macos/continuity/
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Its performance over wifi is also shockingly close to that of
| third party KB+mouse sharing software running hardwired which
| is crazy. Trying to use Synergy, etc over wifi is normally a
| laggy mess.
| markcerqueira wrote:
| I wonder how much of this sentiment is driven by Apple saying
| Snow Leopard was taking Leopard and focusing on performance and
| stability?
| astrange wrote:
| It's certainly not true that it focused on stability even if
| Bertrand said it. Any kind of change reduces stability by
| introducing regressions. This includes performance
| improvements and it even includes other stability fixes.
| astrange wrote:
| App auto saving was added in the next release Lion, I think you
| want that one.
| thunfisch wrote:
| Hugged to death.
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250128175526/https://swallowmy...
| rahoulb wrote:
| I love that.
|
| Also the MacOS "Zoom" button makes so much more sense than the
| OSX/macOS green button - and I still miss window shading.
| cameldrv wrote:
| I get the nostalgia, but boy are computers so much better than
| back then. MacOS 7-8 (not sure about 9, never used it) would
| crash constantly. There was no protected memory, so as soon as
| one app started misbehaving, you'd have to reboot the computer
| and it would take forever and you'd lose your work. My
| recollection was that this would typically happen 3-4 times a
| day. Apple's project to make a new MacOS that didn't do this
| failed and so they had to buy NeXT, and the rest is history.
| feketegy wrote:
| OS X Lion was the most stable operating system I've ever used.
|
| Tbh, it's all downhill from there, every new release gets a
| little worse not to mention all the hardware issues too.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| People aren't nostalgic for the stability of the system,
| they're nostalgic for a time when user interfaces were more
| friendly to humans and less flat/abstract
| Reason077 wrote:
| That's true. The nostalgia nerds can rightly criticise the
| ever-spiralling bloat and inefficiency of modern systems. But
| modern macOS can go for _months_ without a crash /reboot!
| Almost unimaginable in the Mac OS 9 / Win95 era.
| theodric wrote:
| This is what pushed me to get my parents on NT4 in 1997: the
| system would run until _you_ wanted to reboot it, rather than
| crashing twice a day because Netscape decided to have a
| conniption like Win9x did. Never looked back. Win2000 was
| absolutely awesome for them, WinXP was twice the size and
| half the speed but fine and very long-lived, Vista was
| extremely reliable despite all the hate heaped on it...and we
| 're approaching the modern era.
|
| Meanwhile, I was running IRIX (for which my record was _4
| years_ without a reboot, and that only due to a power outage)
| and Linux; and when I got some money, macOS X: all rock
| solid.
|
| edit: I just remembered that Netcraft used to have a server
| uptime leaderboard, and for quite a while in the 1990s,
| Lamborghini was at the top of the list with their IRIX
| servers. The earliest archive I can find of the list is from
| 2001, with ONLY FreeBSD and IRIX occupying the top 29 places:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20010226190549/http://uptime.net.
| ..
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Putting Win2K on my parents' tower, replacing Win98SE,
| absolutely transformed that machine. It instantly went from
| cranky nuisance to unstoppable workhorse. Software updates
| like that have become depressingly rare.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I think it used to be that the back end (hardware, kernel,
| services, libraries) was in many ways worse, but the front end
| (UI/UX) was largely better. And today we have the reverse;
| amazingly fast and mostly reliable hardware, solid underlying
| components, and ugly, hostile interfaces on top. Hence the
| number of folks wishing for the Windows 2k GUI on a modern NT
| OS, a slightly more robust version of some OS X (I think I
| usually hear Snow Leopard?), or those of us running CDE on
| bleeding edge Linux.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| I think it depended on your workload, and how often you
| rebooted them. But yes, macOS reliability has come a long way
| since then.
|
| UX I'm less sure about - I now use a 4K monitor to do a bunch
| of things I used to do quite successfully on 1024x768.
|
| Performance of a bunch of basic apps has also taken a few hits
| here and there (at least in part due to that big resolution
| bump, and despite massive hardware improvements).
|
| I definitely have some nostalgia for that era, but it's
| possibly more nostalgia for the age before the internet
| consumed all of computing...
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| it's possible to bring back the usability of earlier operating
| systems with the stability of also earlier, but not quite as
| earlier, operating systems (OSX has crashed hard-booted three
| times on me this year, haven't had that happen in a long time)
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Well, you've successfully made me nostalgic for the year 2000.
| rcarmo wrote:
| There's something about the Platinum UI that makes it timeless. I
| have been running XFCE with a Platinum theme on several of my
| machines/VMs for a while
| (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330) and I'm a bit
| sad that the XFCE top-level app menu plugin seems to have been
| deprecated in recent releases, since it really adds to the
| experience.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| The XFCE global menubar plugin being deprecated likely happened
| because there's no standardized way for applications on Linux
| to surface their menus to the environment for display (or to
| power a Unity-style HUD or whatever), which means that hackery
| via plugins for GTK and Qt are required to make a global
| menubar work. Keeping that hackery functional probably is a
| constant battle.
|
| There's also how GTK apps have been on a crusade against
| menubars since GTK3 which doesn't help matters. Same goes for
| Linux builds of Electron apps, which don't offer the user the
| option to display a menubar even though all the menu work is
| already done for macOS builds.
|
| Whatever the case it bums me out too. I know a lot of people
| hate global menubars but I've always loved them and it kills me
| that they're not a practical option on the Linux desktop,
| despite ultimate customizability being one of the most
| frequently-cited reasons to use Linux as a desktop OS. You can
| do anything you want, as long as what you want falls within the
| boxes of Win9X-like, tablet-like, or "trendy minimal tiling
| window manager"...
| rcarmo wrote:
| Funnily enough it works on Ubuntu but there seems to be no
| Fedora package.
| simondotau wrote:
| Global menu bars are a great way of making complex
| functionality discoverable without overwhelming the user.
| They should be thought of like an index at the back of a book
| -- not for everyday use, but a universal standard way to call
| upon infrequent tools, and to discover commands which might
| be useful.
| ndrake wrote:
| https://infinitemac.org/
| salgernon wrote:
| The big loss for me was when many apps took over the windows 3.0
| MDI interface style. (Specifically thinking of code here). I was
| doing some hacking in codwarrior on Mac OS 9 a few weeks ago and
| it was such a joy to have 5 source code windows open any once -
| and a separate window with build or find results that weren't
| wrapped in a miserable column. There's actually a lot about Xcode
| I do like - but treating content panels like the old Puzzle desk
| accessory was never an improvement.
| Einenlum wrote:
| Such great work. I'm amazed by the video. I wondered for a moment
| if they managed to tweak these apps (I'm a bit naive I guess).
| Never had a Mac but I remember as a kid when I went to a friend
| who had one. It was so fascinating to me. So weird to be
| nostalgic of something I never owned or used.
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