(mac)ostalgia – how Spotify, Slack, Chrome, Figma could look on Mac OS 9 • Hacker News Board

Re: (mac)ostalgia – how Spotify, Slack, Chrome, Figma could look on Mac OS 9

#71

Post by User23 » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 5:35 AM UTC

nebula8804 wrote: post #45

martinald wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, watching that video really reminds me how poor slack performance is. It genuinely feels like it could fit into a couple of MB of RAM back in those days and been super snappy. I literally do not use slack for anything that IRC wouldn't do back in the late 90s, with the exception of threads, embedded images, and emojis. It is crazy how close but how far IRC was. Session persistence, notification support even when…

You know whats crazy? A few years back I had this Core i3 Haswell system and I installed Windows 7 with Office 2003 on it. The PC shipped with Windows 8 but I decided to go backwards. My god the performance was out of this world. Everything was instant! It was such a pleasant experience I didn't feel again until I got my M1 mac. Even now the bloat is slowly beginning on even the m1 Mac. I think we need to find every…

The most responsive computer I ever used was a Macintosh 512ke upgraded with an additional megabyte of memory. I booted the system software and applications off a ramdisk and used floppies only for documents. Resedit and MacPaint, just to name a couple, launched inside the time it took to double click. That machine didn’t have any fans either so I usually just turned the brightness nob down to zero instead of turning it off.

Re: (mac)ostalgia – how Spotify, Slack, Chrome, Figma could look on Mac OS 9

#72

Post by com2kid » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 5:42 AM UTC

srvmshr wrote: post #63

com2kid wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Flat design" is a disaster The original flat designs, Zune HD and the Zune software, Windows Phone 7, Windows Media Center, was incredibly usable. All those were produced by small design teams at Microsoft, and for, relative to an entire OS, small projects. (Settings aside Windows Phone 7 for a bit, which IMHO actually had very few distinct UI elements.) Heck Windows Phone 7, to this day, is unlike anything else o…

Windows Metro UI was not well received on the PC platform. But it was genuinely a leap forward in mobile space. It was very futuristic and ahead of its time.

The Metro UI that debuted in Windows 8 was an abomination, it violated many of the design principles of the original Metro.

It was born out of Microsoft's fears that Tablets were going to take over everything, but at the same time Microsoft didn't want to invest 100% in a pure tablet experience, viewing the escape hatch to traditional Windows land as being a necessity. Win32 apps were going to be the advantage Windows tablets had over iPad!

So anyway that OS release was terrible.

To this day, Apple being the only company that was willing to go all in on tablets, is the only company with a successful tablet product and tablet software ecosystem.

Re: (mac)ostalgia – how Spotify, Slack, Chrome, Figma could look on Mac OS 9

#73

Post by srvmshr » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 5:43 AM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #70

srvmshr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why the fixation on "kids pick it up just fine". The OS caters to a wide variety of people. If kids start with these design elements, by observing what parents do, they will do just fine. A similar argument can exist for why CLI when most devs can simply use graphical apps with same functionality. There is a subjective choice to what tool is most comfortable to use. The reason this MBP was running 10.7 is be…

> Not sure why the fixation on "kids pick it up just fine". Well that was the original claim in the thread. > by observing what parents do My daughter seems to pick things up by experimentation rather than by observation, and material design works for this.

The spirit of the comment was to demonstrate usability among absolute beginners. It is well established that people connect with visuals which are descriptive of inanimate objects in the real world. Some people find it comfortable, while some - simply don't and want futuristic interface. There are people who swear by Metro UI till today. This was not an argument for the sake of an argument.

I grew up with a 386 which was locally available. Then Windows 95 & 98. I shifted to Mac OSX around 10.4. I still feel the skeumorphic iconography was simply beautiful. And by saying that I am saying it as a subjective opinion. And an aggregate opinion which I observe, specially among elderly, is that the icons and UI layout is hard to navigate.

Re: (mac)ostalgia – how Spotify, Slack, Chrome, Figma could look on Mac OS 9

#74

Post by Aeolun » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 5:45 AM UTC

jen20 wrote: post #56

I definitely can’t help but wish a version of Slack that actually gave a passing concern for integration into a system UI exists. The “look we can do custom CSS everywhere and not look like ANY of our target platforms” garbage has the bane of my work day since it became popular.

At least Slack has an API where you could potentialy build one yourself. I wish that were true for Teams…

Re: (mac)ostalgia – how Spotify, Slack, Chrome, Figma could look on Mac OS 9

#75

Post by bbkane » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 5:48 AM UTC

jen20 wrote: post #56

I definitely can’t help but wish a version of Slack that actually gave a passing concern for integration into a system UI exists. The “look we can do custom CSS everywhere and not look like ANY of our target platforms” garbage has the bane of my work day since it became popular.

You might like https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ . I haven't tried it, but it's a QT client for Slack/Discord

Re: (mac)ostalgia – how Spotify, Slack, Chrome, Figma could look on Mac OS 9

#76

Post by qudat » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 5:49 AM UTC

jonpurdy wrote: post #9

jonpalmisc wrote: post #2

Wow, this is incredible. Can’t imagine how much work this took. Seeing this makes me think about how many modern applications could learn a few things from the old Mac OS 8/9 Human Interface Guidelines. [0] [0] http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/doc...

It’s amazing to me how much more usable those UIs are. Not to mention how much more performant they’d be than modern Electron garbage. But forget about Mac OS 9, we don’t even have native OS X or Windows interfaces anymore. Doesn’t help that Apple dropped the ball on following their own UI guidelines.

browsers are the new operating systems

Re: (mac)ostalgia – how Spotify, Slack, Chrome, Figma could look on Mac OS 9

#77

Post by chrisseaton » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 6:03 AM UTC

srvmshr wrote: post #73

chrisseaton wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not sure why the fixation on "kids pick it up just fine". Well that was the original claim in the thread. > by observing what parents do My daughter seems to pick things up by experimentation rather than by observation, and material design works for this.

The spirit of the comment was to demonstrate usability among absolute beginners. It is well established that people connect with visuals which are descriptive of inanimate objects in the real world. Some people find it comfortable, while some - simply don't and want futuristic interface. There are people who swear by Metro UI till today. This was not an argument for the sake of an argument. I grew up with a 386 which…

> It is well established that people connect with visuals which are descriptive of inanimate objects in the real world.

Is it really? Or is it just assumed that they do?

Re: (mac)ostalgia – how Spotify, Slack, Chrome, Figma could look on Mac OS 9

#78

Post by Aeolun » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 6:04 AM UTC

kalleboo wrote: post #23

I miss when application software was allowed to have multiple windows.

I kind of like having one window per application. I already have 15 different applications open at the same time, I don’t need them to have 4 windows each.

Re: (mac)ostalgia – how Spotify, Slack, Chrome, Figma could look on Mac OS 9

#79

Post by rconti » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 6:04 AM UTC

jen20 wrote: post #56

I definitely can’t help but wish a version of Slack that actually gave a passing concern for integration into a system UI exists. The “look we can do custom CSS everywhere and not look like ANY of our target platforms” garbage has the bane of my work day since it became popular.

I rarely used Windows, but I remember Trillian was one of the first applications I truly hated for exactly this reason.

Re: (mac)ostalgia – how Spotify, Slack, Chrome, Figma could look on Mac OS 9

#80

Post by jjoonathan » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 6:14 AM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #68

jjoonathan wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll find a lot of people, myself included, that point to the 10.6 era as peak OSX aesthetics. I personally prefer "steel and grass," some people prefer space, the specifics vary person-to-person but a lot of people agree on the trend. Skeuomorphism has an uncomfortably high skill floor, but it has an astronomical skill ceiling. With Apple, it shows. It really shows. In contrast, flat design has a skill ceiling so…

> a lot of people, myself included, that point to the 10.6 era as peak OSX aesthetics Just guessing... is that what you grew up with?

No, growing up was OS9 with lime green highlights on a lime green iMac playing Bugdom. I'd argue that it was still better than flat design, but I would have to concede that nostalgia goggles might play a role in blinding me to how garish it all was. In contrast, the "I love 10.6" crowd extends considerably beyond my cohort in both directions. It's pretty clearly a skeuomorphism thing.

One thing I'll give flat design: it's better than the Fischer Price design that happened between the era of skeuomorphism and present day. Also, it brought dark mode mainstream.