Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mac OS 9

macos9.app

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 356 posts

Re: Mac OS 9

#91

Post by asveikau »

mk_stjames wrote: post #87
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.

I completely understand people like Andreas from SerenityOS and the idea that there was a time that was a peak of GUI simplicity yet usefulness for power users.. In their case it's the Win2K aesthetic but I think OS9 is pretty close to that level of streamlining. As amazing as OSX seemed when it was launched, I partially blame OSX and the whole "make everything round and groovy and graphical goodness" trend that star…

> As amazing as OSX seemed when it was launched

This reminds me: There was pretty interesting community of Linux users customizing X11 desktops in the late 90s and the very early 2000s... When the first screenshots and demos of OS X and Aqua came out, almost immediately, people tried to imitate that.

Re: Mac OS 9

#92

Post by asveikau »

toasteros wrote: post #72
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.

Are there any decent implementations of this UI for Linux?

It's not maintained, but a few years ago I was feeling nostalgic and playing with "mlvwm", the mac-like virtual window manager, a project from the late 90s.

At least a small amount of C knowledge is sometimes helpful for getting those old projects working. Sometimes a new compiler or new libc will expose old bugs.

My experience with old window managers is they need tweaks to work reasonably on modern high dpi displays.

Iirc mlvwm builds with imake, which is positively ancient. It's the build tool that X.org got rid of after taking over from XFree86.

Re: Mac OS 9

#94

Post by dkonofalski »

j1elo wrote: post #68

Oh well, I almost got to play Another World :-) (I recently finished it on PC so it was the first thing to catch my eye). Didn't work, either on Firefox or Chrome ( memory access out of bounds at void powerpc_cpu::execute_loadstore ) but I get it, playing AW is not the ultimate purpose of this emulator!

And here I thought the purpose of this emulator was to play Battle Chess. Unfortunately, that doesn't work either.

Re: Mac OS 9

#95

Post by chrisco255 »

dzikimarian wrote: post #45
cogman10 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Javascript/Electron - single code base for multiple desktop platforms.

VS Code works great in my experience.

Re: Mac OS 9

#96

Post by mattl »

foobiekr wrote: post #51
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.

NeXTSTEP was peak traditional UI. Everything since has been gradual degradation. And I include with that Apple's butchering of what made MCCA on NeXTSTEP so amazing.

MCCA?

Re: Mac OS 9

#97

Post by ty_2k »

Thanks for sharing this. It's stuff like this that really makes the web feel mysterious and magical.

Re: Mac OS 9

#98

Post by chrisco255 »

IncRnd wrote: post #43
cogman10 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's created with javascript in the browser, which is not efficient.

JavaScript is very efficient. It compiles to native on the fly in v8 engines. The DOM itself, however, has a lot of foot guns for performance.

Re: Mac OS 9

#99

Post by retrac »

toasteros wrote: post #72
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.

Are there any decent implementations of this UI for Linux?

You could theme some window manager, but it's not the same. It'd be a tough project! The Mac UI was holistic. Early on, it didn't even make much of a distinction between application and operating system. Just getting the menu bar right (shared between OS and application) when every program has its own idea on how to present a menu would be a major challenge. Applications really do need to be designed for the classic Mac environment. Back in the day software was almost never ported directly, but had to be substantially redesigned for the Mac.

Re: Mac OS 9

#100

Post by s1k3s »

bovermyer wrote: post #77
s1k3s wrote: post #64

Damn what a terrible UX this is, no wonder Windows kicked their ass so hard with ME and XP. This reminded me to keep it simple and stupid proof whenever I want users to actually enjoy what I build, thanks!

Two questions: 1. Are you being serious, or are you being sarcastic? 2. If you're being serious, what about it is terrible?

I am serious, and it's all about how things are named and how the OS interacts with you.

Some examples (imagine you've never used a computer before):

- "file explorer" on Windows, "finder" on Mac. This is just an example of naming that I think it's just confusing to users, among many other names

- a red "X" to close a program on windows, a random square with no color differentiation on the Mac

- a clear view of what programs are running in the taskbar on Windows vs. the current active program in the top right

- taskbar showing date + time and the calendar "on click" on Windows vs. time, date on click & no calendar on the Mac

... and the list can go on. I honestly believe they screwed up by acting too smart, when people wanted something simple that makes sense to them.

Post reply on HN