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Infinite Mac

macos8.app

151–160 of 340 posts

Re: Infinite Mac

#152

When I look at this I think how these old UIs like MacOS, windows 95 or 2000 were designed for clarity and usability. And how things have gone downhill since then. I really miss easily distinguishable UI elements.

I'm of two minds. The Mac famously had User Interface Guidelines that tried to keep everything consistent. I loved it and, like you, miss it. But then designers came along and we got drawers (and then we lost the drawers), editable toolbars, brushed metal (and then not), etc... The point at which I called bullshit was when Safari combined the URL text field with the loading progress bar. I disagreed with the design a…

Interestingly, that the progress bar/URL field combo was co-invented by Steve Jobs: See https://donmelton.com/2014/04/10/memories-of-steve/

Re: Infinite Mac

#153

What does one have to do to get as clear and pretty of a UI as that on the modern desktop OSes? Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out. Of course you can always run dwm on linux with a hodgepodge of makeshift utility apps, write your own keybinds to set your brightness and volume and other such inanities, but in order to g…

> What does one have to do to get as ... pretty of a UI Are you being intentionally disingenuous? It is objectively not a pretty UI, it's a functional but quite ugly one.

I think, this is a rather relative statement. Modern UIs would have been perceived as toy-like and not fit for business back then. It all comes down to what we are used to. (That said, personally, I always favoured the System 7 UI over OS 8.)

Re: Infinite Mac

#154
post #99

Creator of the site here. There's a blog post with the technical details if you're curious about how it works and whose work it builds on: https://blog.persistent.info/2022/03/blog-post.html There are also a couple of variants that boot either System 7.5.3 or KanjiTalk 7.5.3 (the Japanese version of MacOS): https://system7.app/ and https://kanjitalk7.app/

In middle school, we had a math teacher with an old mac setup that ran a physics simulator program. It came with a variety of starter templates, one of them was this crash test dummy in a car. It was all polygons, but you could hit run and the car would accelerate and hit a wall then the circle head and arms would sort of fly around. Anyone know what this software was? I remember running and re-running little simulat…

MATLAB or something from MathWorks?

Re: Infinite Mac

#155

What does one have to do to get as clear and pretty of a UI as that on the modern desktop OSes? Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out. Of course you can always run dwm on linux with a hodgepodge of makeshift utility apps, write your own keybinds to set your brightness and volume and other such inanities, but in order to g…

I switched to a Mac recently, prior to that I'd been using Elementary OS. I'm still using the same monitor though (a large 4k display), so any visual differences are quite obvious to me.

The Mac is definitely fuzzier than Elementary; that clarity is the main thing I miss. It seems pretty obvious that modern MacOS is designed for high DPI displays.

Re: Infinite Mac

#157

Some of y'all are YOUNG. LOL. I first used a Mac in about 1989, in college. I first got DEEP into one, for desktop publishing, a couple years later. I didn't OWN one until my late 20s, which by that point was an OS 9 environment for a couple years until OS X happened. I never loved the old System like some Mac people do. It was faster and more stable than Win98, and definitely worked better on laptops, but that was a…

Yeah, I remember thinking how awesome it was to open up a bash shell and ssh into a server while using a Macintosh.

Re: Infinite Mac

#159

Some of y'all are YOUNG. LOL. I first used a Mac in about 1989, in college. I first got DEEP into one, for desktop publishing, a couple years later. I didn't OWN one until my late 20s, which by that point was an OS 9 environment for a couple years until OS X happened. I never loved the old System like some Mac people do. It was faster and more stable than Win98, and definitely worked better on laptops, but that was a…

Yeah, I remember thinking how awesome it was to open up a bash shell and ssh into a server while using a Macintosh.

That's cool, but even cooler was that for many things you didn't even NEED to do that.

OS X shipped with regular Apache, and builds existed for all the dev tools and server languages you could want. I ran Mason on my Mac for a project I was on. I could develop locally, and then just rsync to my dev server to do next level tests, etc.

Re: Infinite Mac

#160

When I look at this I think how these old UIs like MacOS, windows 95 or 2000 were designed for clarity and usability. And how things have gone downhill since then. I really miss easily distinguishable UI elements.

I'm of two minds. The Mac famously had User Interface Guidelines that tried to keep everything consistent. I loved it and, like you, miss it. But then designers came along and we got drawers (and then we lost the drawers), editable toolbars, brushed metal (and then not), etc... The point at which I called bullshit was when Safari combined the URL text field with the loading progress bar. I disagreed with the design a…

> The Mac famously had User Interface Guidelines that tried to keep everything consistent. I loved it and, like you, miss it.

> But then designers came along

I mean, the Guidelines were written by designers. I don't have a problem with designers; I don't care for the Mac design, but at least it was consistent. But I don't think there's an OS with guidelines anymore; at least not any OS where 95%+ of what ships with the OS follows the guidelines (never mind what else the OS developer ships or 3rd party software).

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