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Mac OS 9

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Re: Mac OS 9

#31

Post by Cockbrand »

mk_stjames wrote: post #21
slowmotarget wrote: post #10

It's a great reminder of how well MacOS 9 UI and UX were designed, and how space efficient the whole OS was on screen. Even the window handle bars were subtly shadowed, the window shadows evolved when they were collapsed. Like Windows 95 at the time, Mac OS 9 was a beautiful work of interaction design.

The whole system.. from the sizing of the borders and titlebars to the font and the menu density to the icon sizing, spacing, and design in general... All feels more coherent than anything today. It feels like it was sketched out by a small group of people and executed incredibly well. Meanwhile things today look more disjointed like the product of a lot of design-by-committee. Susan Kare's 'Chicago' in this renderin…

I'll be that guy... the system font for menus, etc in OS 8 and 9 is "Geneva" [EDIT: It's "Charcoal", of course. Thanks for the heads up!]. It was "Chicago" up to and including System 7.x.

I do agree on all other points :)

Re: Mac OS 9

#32

Post by cogman10 »

sph wrote: post #23

Look at that subtle off-grey colouring, the tasteful thickness of it... What the hell happened to modern GUIs, man. We peaked in the 1990s.

And why is everything just so slow!

That's what always annoys me. I have a computer that's easily 100x or 1000x more powerful than my 1995 desktop yet so many actions have noticeable lag.

Like, try it, resize outlook right now (just stretch the side left and right). You'll see so much jank and jitter. How is something like that not instantaneous?

Re: Mac OS 9

#36

Post by ihatepython »

Cockbrand wrote: post #31
mk_stjames wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole system.. from the sizing of the borders and titlebars to the font and the menu density to the icon sizing, spacing, and design in general... All feels more coherent than anything today. It feels like it was sketched out by a small group of people and executed incredibly well. Meanwhile things today look more disjointed like the product of a lot of design-by-committee. Susan Kare's 'Chicago' in this renderin…

I'll be that guy... the system font for menus, etc in OS 8 and 9 is "Geneva" [EDIT: It's "Charcoal" , of course. Thanks for the heads up!]. It was "Chicago" up to and including System 7.x. I do agree on all other points :)

Pretty sure it was Charcoal and not Geneva.

Re: Mac OS 9

#37

Post by dri_ft »

sph wrote: post #23

Look at that subtle off-grey colouring, the tasteful thickness of it... What the hell happened to modern GUIs, man. We peaked in the 1990s.

Let's see Paul Allen's operating system.

Re: Mac OS 9

#38

Post by Cockbrand »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #26

Seems like it's not running at the highest bit depth, or something funky with the emulator is causing the Finder to display low bit depth icons. On a real machine and on qemu-ppc on my machine OS 9 displays icons that are more shaded and detailed. Impressive that it runs in a web browser, but it seems that it has some quirks.

You can change the color depth in the Control Strip in the bottom left corner. It's indeed set by default to "256 Colors", setting it to "Millions of Colors" (=24bit) removes the dithering from the icons.

Re: Mac OS 9

#40

Post by Cockbrand »

ihatepython wrote: post #36
Cockbrand wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be that guy... the system font for menus, etc in OS 8 and 9 is "Geneva" [EDIT: It's "Charcoal" , of course. Thanks for the heads up!]. It was "Chicago" up to and including System 7.x. I do agree on all other points :)

Pretty sure it was Charcoal and not Geneva.

You're right, I mixed up the two font names in my head. I edited my post above.
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