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

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

#171

Post by linguae »

dragonwriter wrote: post #129
porcoda wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing and bad reputation are not mutually exclusive. Electron is an impressive engineering accomplishment, but it also has some dimensions that not everyone likes. Electron is great if you're a developer who wants to write apps in javascript+HTML+CSS and put developer preferences over preferences of users. Not everyone agrees that the decisions behind Electron and using it are good decisions.

> Electron is great if you're a developer who wants to write apps in javascript+HTML+CSS and put developer preferences over preferences of users I’m so tired of this. Sure, the case for Electron is that it allows leveraging web-targeting code and skills, which makes more devs able to work on desktop software give the current prevalence of web skills and makes their job easier given the prevalence of web-targeting cod…

Maybe people have a preference for software that conforms to a set of often well-thought-of platform UI standards and interoperates seamlessly with their other applications instead of Web applications that don't conform with the platform's standards. Part of what made the Mac and Windows attractive compared to MS-DOS is that the former had UI standards that made it easier for people to use new apps and to interoperate among apps, while in MS-DOS each application implemented its own UI and things like interoperability and accessibility were challenging. The Web is a throwback to MS-DOS-style development, where there are no standard UI guidelines. It's one thing to deal with this when using remotely-hosted Web applications, but it's another thing when an increasing number of desktop apps are essentially locally-hosted Web applications.

The Web is fundamentally a different platform from modern desktop environments; writing desktop applications as if they were Web applications running on beefy servers leads to bad user experiences, just like how Web applications that do not take into account network latency, security, and other aspects of the Web that don't normally apply in native desktop applications leads to bad user experiences.

I'm not saying that Electron is automatically bad. Cross-platform GUIs and other tools have existed for decades due to their labor-saving characteristics, and this is a recurring controversy (for example, Microsoft Word 6 for Macintosh was widely panned by Mac users due to its feeling like a simple port of Word for Windows instead of a tailor-made Mac application, and certain Java GUIs don't fit with the underlying platform's UI standards, though Java does support native UIs). However, I think it's a bad thing for software vendors and developers to take the attitude that users should be grateful for whatever they release, though I admit there is a thin line between expressing dissatisfaction and acting entitled.

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

#172

Post by jeroenhd »

jcelerier wrote: post #155
edgyquant wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never seen anyone argue Mac OS was anything but beautiful but I guess there’s a first for everything. These threads pop up constantly and I always jump in to ask people claiming they find the blocky beige of late 90s OSS more aesthetically pleasing to explain how it is they believe this to be true. There are lots of complaints about modern OSs one can make but none of the major three are anything close to ugly…

> when just using these OSs was unintuitive to anyone but a tech enthusiast That's very far from my experience. I know a fair amount of people who had no trouble going from DOS -> win 3.1 -> 95, 98, XP, but starting from Vista using their computer became much harder and much more external assistance started to be required. I know no one who is learning how to use computers as easily with, say, Win 10 or the latest Ma…

I think this is because modern computers abstract as much of the underlying system away as they can. Smartphones are hiding the concept of the file system under a layer of custom selectors and UI controls to the point of confusion about where files will end up.

Another factor is that (for some mind-boggling reason) it's still acceptable in some office jobs to "not be good at computers" despite working with them 40 hours a week. Whether it's laziness, learned helplessness or something else, people seem to accept that anything beyond the most basic functionality you need for your day job is left for the IT department or techy family members. There's no incentive to even try to learn, even if learning would increase your productivity and make your life much easier, because "computer stuff" is considered too difficult.

On the other hand, a lot more people are using computers today than they did 20 years ago. If you used a computer around the 2000s, you either had an interest in them or your boss had sent you a manual or a training course with instructions on how to use them for your work. Today, almost everyone owns at least one computer, regardless of their training and interest. People are just expected to know how computers work, despite no effort being spent on that in many educational facilities, while content consumption devices get ever more dumbed down.

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

#173

Post by grishka »

edgyquant wrote: post #150
2-718-281-828 wrote: post #116

Mac OS UI is a great example for why one shouldn't "improve" software just for the sake for changing something. UI design peaked at Windows XP style. the design portraied here falls for my opinion in that category. As a user of xfce (on Linux Mint) which is basically Windows XP with different icons I am super happy. Apple actually came up with only a single valuable UI element and that is the three finger swipe to sw…

I have never seen anyone argue Mac OS was anything but beautiful but I guess there’s a first for everything. These threads pop up constantly and I always jump in to ask people claiming they find the blocky beige of late 90s OSS more aesthetically pleasing to explain how it is they believe this to be true. There are lots of complaints about modern OSs one can make but none of the major three are anything close to ugly…

Two things.

- The UIs of the 90s were made with mice and keyboards in mind. The designers' minds weren't yet compromised by the existence of touchscreens, both on phones and Windows laptops.

- IT companies were building tools to empower users and actually competed with each other fiercely. It was important to make sure your UI doesn't suck, because otherwise someone else will. This competition required the companies to put users' needs before their own.

And tangential to that: "developer experience" wasn't a thing. Writing software was an engineering job done by people knowing what they're doing. The bar was set pretty high. Compare that to now, when it's almost encouraged to be a junior developer and pile libraries into your project without ever looking under to hood to assess the compromises you're making. And the way the code looks and builds is considered more important by many than the end result that ships.

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

#174

Post by petepete »

zozbot234 wrote: post #20
29athrowaway wrote: post #10

This would not only look great, but run incredibly fast: Low-res bitmap icons, bitmap fonts, no antialiasing, no composition, etc. On Linux you can still have a pretty old school desktop with some of these elements... but may not run well on HiDPI.

There is a nice Win9x style theme for GTK+3 that works quite well IME. And the look is quite faithful to the original (with some minimal changes for, e.g. modern headerbars).

https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 - if anyone's wondering

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

#175

Post by AndyJames »

micheljansen wrote: post #156

Surprisingly I found myself not preferring the OS 9 versions nearly as much as I thought. I have always thought of the OS 9 UI and the late '90s to early 2000s as representing the peak of OS UI design before everything went skeuomorphic, but a lot of the general aesthetic of that time just doesn't seem to have aged that well. I still miss the crisp lines and clear affordances of actual buttons and other elements of t…

Yes, the resolution could be higher but for me almost all of the apps (except Zoom) looks great. I would love to have that option today. Old design is much thinner and clearer. Buttons are buttons, they're visible and easy to click, almost every decoration is minimal, they're not taking unnecessary space just for sake of it. This is why I didn't like anything after Windows 7, this is the reason why current Gnome is is just wasteful. I much prefer simplicity and "smallness" of Gnome 2 UI hence I'm using Mate as my daily driver

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

#176

Post by AndyJames »

userbinator wrote: post #69
jonpurdy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Native Windows - Win32 - still exists, but all the trendy "modern" stuff seems to be avoiding it, probably because the web stuff is easier to find developers for.

Everything goes JS (and derivatives) now. At some point we decided to throw cores and RAM at the problem instead of optimizing for speed with limited resources in mind.

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

#177

Post by floam »

laputan_machine wrote: post #131
floam wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"542 lines of code" (a configuration file), "best viewed in tahoma size 7"... cringe. In my defense, it was 2001-2002, I mostly had MS Paint at my disposal, and I was 14 (and not like a smart 14).

For some reason when I was that age I loved tiny fonts, too. Actually a nice theme, I probably would have used it!

I know my vision is still good, but there is no debate that my vision back then was a lot better. And focusing for tens of hours certainly wasn't any kind of effort.

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

#178

Post by bitigchi »

grishka wrote: post #166
frereubu wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I still miss the crisp lines and clear affordances of actual buttons and other elements of that time..." If you go into System Preferences > Accessibility > Display and turn "Increase contrast" on, it adds clear lines around almost everything, which is the closest I've found to that. I tried it for a while, but I found it too harsh in the end. It would be nice to have a setting which was inbetween the two extremes.

There's a setting to "show shapes of toolbar buttons" or whatever it's called in English. It adds 1px faint grey lines around them. I turned it on the day I got my M1 mac. Doesn't help with the fact that the icons on these buttons are drawn as if there's no pixel grid and so are a blurry mess, but better than nothing still.

Where is it? Can you add a screenshot?

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

#179

Post by grishka »

bitigchi wrote: post #178
grishka wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a setting to "show shapes of toolbar buttons" or whatever it's called in English. It adds 1px faint grey lines around them. I turned it on the day I got my M1 mac. Doesn't help with the fact that the icons on these buttons are drawn as if there's no pixel grid and so are a blurry mess, but better than nothing still.

Where is it? Can you add a screenshot?

It's the last checkbox in display accessibility settings: https://imgur.com/5mEgihY

The one above it is also useful, it brings back the tiny draggable file icons in title bars in apps that edit files.

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

#180

Post by KptMarchewa »

linguae wrote: post #171
dragonwriter wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Electron is great if you're a developer who wants to write apps in javascript+HTML+CSS and put developer preferences over preferences of users I’m so tired of this. Sure, the case for Electron is that it allows leveraging web-targeting code and skills, which makes more devs able to work on desktop software give the current prevalence of web skills and makes their job easier given the prevalence of web-targeting cod…

Maybe people have a preference for software that conforms to a set of often well-thought-of platform UI standards and interoperates seamlessly with their other applications instead of Web applications that don't conform with the platform's standards. Part of what made the Mac and Windows attractive compared to MS-DOS is that the former had UI standards that made it easier for people to use new apps and to interoperat…

That's only mac thing. Windows never (maybe in early 90s?) had any consistency and nobody cares. Just look at control panel.
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