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?
Mac OS 9
141–150 of 356 posts
Re: Mac OS 9
#142It'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.
Sure, but— The fat borders for the windows and the control strip at the bottom left of the screen took up a lot of space on real monitors of the era. Try running at a more modest 800x600 or 640x480 and it will seem less efficient. Modern Mac OS X is actually quite efficient, with zero-pixel window borders on three sides, and narrower scroll bars. Worse, a bunch of applications had code that would set up window locati…
Re: Mac OS 9
#143Re: Mac OS 9
#144Re: Mac OS 9
#145Wow, what a blast from the past. I was only 9 at the time this was released and every bit enamored with the world of computers. My dad owned a data recovery business that also developed software. I was home-schooled and would visit his office frequently after class as I loved looking at all the hard drives and also loved the "computer room smell". There was also the office tradition of playing a game of Bungie's Mara…
So asking me for something to fix a broken old thing usually involves me making a cross face, handing you whatever it is, and then taking a nap after washing my hands twice.
Re: Mac OS 9
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Modern macOS is a significant counterexample to that claim. Most of it is janky. Zooming and dezooming the Finder is not something a 2.5 years old MacBook Air (€1200) can keep up with smoothly, for instance. Opening a Save dialog takes over 3 seconds, and expanding/collapsing the file explorer in it is comically janky.
None of this sounds right based on my experience. Wondering which model you have? Is it fanless? I’ve never used until o got my 2022 m2 air. It’s the best computer I’ve ever used. Before that, 10 years of Mac Pro, and they’ve all been old (2010 models) and fast.
The 2010 Mac Pro doesn’t run macOS 11+, that might be its X factor.
Re: Mac OS 9
#147It'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.
Apple isn't so great. For example why aren't Copy and Paste separate or specifically marked keys and do we have to use Cmd+C and Cmd+V? Same for Undo/Redo, etc. This is stuff any UX student can figure out.
Re: Mac OS 9
#148I love using it when I need a break from GNOME.
Re: Mac OS 9
#149Earlier 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 not slow. It's just that modern OS's redraw at every intermediate size between the initial size and the final size. The name of the setting in Windows is "Show window content while dragging", you can disable it and all your windows will be 100x snappier than Mac OS 9.
Re: Mac OS 9
#150Oh 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.