This is so great. The 90s/pre OS-X Apple (the "BuT tHeREs No SOFtWaRe!" and "ApPLe is GoING tO DiiEE" Apple) had a sense of playfulness in their UIs that was largely lost when they became the Apple we know today. The Mac OS classic architecture definitely had some problems with its non-protected memory and cooperative multitasking, but what it _allowed_ were extensions that could really get in there and muck around w…
I never had a Mac in the 90s/early 2000s, but a lot of this still sounds pretty familiar as a passionate Palm OS user at the time: No memory protection, no multitasking (not even threads!), more minimalistic than the competition at the time in many ways in its core features – but on the flip side, extremely extensible in almost every way. As I later learned, PalmOS was heavily inspired by Mac OS!
Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura
61–70 of 145 posts
Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura
#62Sure, this is a sweet little hit of nostalgia -- but it's also symptomatic of just how far Apple's come (back) with the Mac, and why. It's clear that we're way, way over the doldrums of the butterfly keyboard, abandoned Mac Pro, "continues to be a product in our line-up" years. Little things like this, little acknowledgements of the past and the Mac community, suggest to me why: the people in charge of the Mac are no…
> the people in charge of the Mac are now people who _grew up with it_, who love it, and who have that same nostalgia as (some) of us outside Apple. So then how does one explain the unending UI regressions with every single major update? This whole system preferences thing for example? The terrible, terrible toolbars combined with window titles? The borderless buttons (with borders being an accessibility feature)? Th…
> So then how does one explain the unending UI regressions with every single major update?
Strategy Tax. They have a bigger strategy they are pursuing to align iOSMacOS. This is the big ecosystem play that raises ARPU and improves customer loyalty. This means standardization of UI to improve approachability for iOS users, who outnumber MacOS users considerably but whom are less loyal customers than combined iOS+MacOS users.
There's a secondary argument about moving off ObjC and code maintenance, since they want to gain the value of more modern language & to have new devs be able to jump on old products. This means every part of MacOS & every app is probably slated to be rewritten in Swift & SwiftUI as time goes on.
Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura
#63Sure, this is a sweet little hit of nostalgia -- but it's also symptomatic of just how far Apple's come (back) with the Mac, and why. It's clear that we're way, way over the doldrums of the butterfly keyboard, abandoned Mac Pro, "continues to be a product in our line-up" years. Little things like this, little acknowledgements of the past and the Mac community, suggest to me why: the people in charge of the Mac are no…
> the people in charge of the Mac are now people who _grew up with it_, who love it, and who have that same nostalgia as (some) of us outside Apple. So then how does one explain the unending UI regressions with every single major update? This whole system preferences thing for example? The terrible, terrible toolbars combined with window titles? The borderless buttons (with borders being an accessibility feature)? Th…
If you can run the beta you should complain about it to feedback but the new UI is harder to navigate. It seems like they are incrementally changing the UI to be the same across the product line though….
Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura
#64This is so great. The 90s/pre OS-X Apple (the "BuT tHeREs No SOFtWaRe!" and "ApPLe is GoING tO DiiEE" Apple) had a sense of playfulness in their UIs that was largely lost when they became the Apple we know today. The Mac OS classic architecture definitely had some problems with its non-protected memory and cooperative multitasking, but what it _allowed_ were extensions that could really get in there and muck around w…
I had many of those fun extensions, I think my favorite was one that added physics to your desktop icons so they’d hang from your cursor at an angle if you dragged them from a point other than their “center of gravity”. Sometimes I’d just twiddle icons while thinking through things I was working on. I too miss that sort of whimsy and playfulness–I don’t think it’s inherently incompatible with modern expectations of p…
The Grouch was great. Or "great" if there were little kids around, intermittent fun reward for throwing file in the trash, what could possibly go wrong?
Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm very doubtful that by the time it reaches release, they'll bring back the icon grid and the sensible layouts (instead of those stupid iOS-like lists) in the panes themselves.
Frankly, the icon grid was arranged somewhat arbitrarily to begin with. I'd be quite happy to have a largely-alphabetical list, making it much easier to actually find the specific preference pane I'm looking for.
You can make the current preferences panel alphabetical.
Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This whole system preferences thing for example Do you remember what the battery icon in System Preferences looked like in the first beta of Mac OS 12? It's a beta. Give it some time. It's not out yet.
I'm very doubtful that by the time it reaches release, they'll bring back the icon grid and the sensible layouts (instead of those stupid iOS-like lists) in the panes themselves.
Every time I would open system preferences I would just use the search bar to open what I was looking for. I think they should have just either grouped the icons better or let you choose. Right now the current layout doesn’t fit unless you make it bigger which is weird on my XDR when I can just make it longer …
Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the people in charge of the Mac are now people who _grew up with it_, who love it, and who have that same nostalgia as (some) of us outside Apple. So then how does one explain the unending UI regressions with every single major update? This whole system preferences thing for example? The terrible, terrible toolbars combined with window titles? The borderless buttons (with borders being an accessibility feature)? Th…
If you can run the beta you should complain about it to feedback but the new UI is harder to navigate. It seems like they are incrementally changing the UI to be the same across the product line though….
> It seems like they are incrementally changing the UI to be the same across the product line though….
And this is a misguided idea to begin with. Input devices are different, interaction paradigms are different, why should UI ever be similar? IMO when designing macOS, they should simply forget that iOS exists.
Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura
#68This is so great. The 90s/pre OS-X Apple (the "BuT tHeREs No SOFtWaRe!" and "ApPLe is GoING tO DiiEE" Apple) had a sense of playfulness in their UIs that was largely lost when they became the Apple we know today. The Mac OS classic architecture definitely had some problems with its non-protected memory and cooperative multitasking, but what it _allowed_ were extensions that could really get in there and muck around w…
Oof, sorry for that botched list formatting, all.
Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So then how does one explain the unending UI regressions with every single major update? That's easy: not everyone agrees they're regressions.
They clearly are regressions because they confuse many people and make a worse use of the same screen area. Also what are the problems being solved by these redesigns and rearrangements? What was solved by going flat in 10.9 -> 10.10? What was solved by going even flatter, and using the dreaded SF Symbols icons everywhere, in 10.15 -> 11.0? It's a done product — it's been one for quite a while. Could they just stop m…
> It's a done product — it's been one for quite a while. Could they just stop meddling with the UX already and maybe rewrite their PDF parser in a memory-safe language instead?
Can't wait for this. And the same for the e-mail app. Even just a Swift rewrite of the 'hairy' parser code would be a reasonable starting point.
Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura
#70This is so great. The 90s/pre OS-X Apple (the "BuT tHeREs No SOFtWaRe!" and "ApPLe is GoING tO DiiEE" Apple) had a sense of playfulness in their UIs that was largely lost when they became the Apple we know today. The Mac OS classic architecture definitely had some problems with its non-protected memory and cooperative multitasking, but what it _allowed_ were extensions that could really get in there and muck around w…
I had many of those fun extensions, I think my favorite was one that added physics to your desktop icons so they’d hang from your cursor at an angle if you dragged them from a point other than their “center of gravity”. Sometimes I’d just twiddle icons while thinking through things I was working on. I too miss that sort of whimsy and playfulness–I don’t think it’s inherently incompatible with modern expectations of p…
gravite was delightful!
> I too miss that sort of whimsy and playfulness–I don’t think it’s inherently incompatible with modern expectations of professionalism/accessibility/security but it definitely seems to have been lost from most software these days.
Agreed completely but every now and then it still pops up. Recently, Notchmeister [0]
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/notchmeister/id1599169747