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Mac OS 9

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Re: Mac OS 9

#241

Post by edgyquant »

realgeniushere wrote: post #170
philistine wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe it or not, full screen apps are a Windows thing. Apple has added full screen app support only recently, and any Windows convert who has switched to macOS and has problems adapting to its UI has one thing in common: they haven’t let go of the idea that all apps need to use the whole screen at all times.

This is a funny cope. > Believe it or not, full screen apps are a Windows thing. Nope. It’s just that maximizing—single action to expand a window the whole screen minus the OS docks/taskbars—is present in every widely used OS except for Mac OS. > they haven’t let go of the idea that all apps need to use the whole screen at all times Not sure where you’re getting “at all times” from. Windows and Linux desktops all eas…

Maximization of windows most certainly exists in MacOS.

Re: Mac OS 9

#242

Post by kitsunesoba »

sho_hn wrote: post #134
retrac wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Linux has a standard protocol (dbusmenu) for exporting menu structures supported by most common app UI libraries, and environments like KDE's Plasma use this to offer a global menu bar option, too.

Unfortunately there's a number of Linux apps that don't publish any menus, including most GTK3/4 and Electron apps. I don't think Firefox does either. I remember trying the global menu option in KDE and being sorely disappointed in how few apps populated it.

To get consistent usage out of a dbus-based global menu (KDE's or that one XFCE panel plugin) one would need to fork quite a number of packages, and for proprietary Electron apps you'd probably just be stuck.

Re: Mac OS 9

#243

Post by eyesee »

azinman2 wrote: post #219
eyesee wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s interesting: my recollection of that period was I rarely stored anything on the desktop. The file system was so much smaller and easier to handle that I stored things in folders and didn’t have trouble finding them again. Not until OS X did I pick up the desktop-as-staging-area habit because navigation was so painful.

But then how do you easily navigate / launch apps? Dig thru your folder trees each time in Finder? Most apps I’m finding have folder structures with a bunch of aux files. It’s not so seemless as a dock or even a start menu. Back even then I used my desktop heavily too.

More often than not I was opening documents, not apps. But with spatial windows in Finder I used to just arrange my Applications folder the way I wanted (sometimes using Aliases) and have it open on the left of my screen, then have my Documents on the right. I kept a row of Desktop icons visible with an In and Out box.

There wasn’t a default folder structure in the early days. Your hard drive had a “System” folder with merely a few hundred files in it (in a hierarchy) that you can ignore day-to-day. Otherwise the whole drive was your playground.

Re: Mac OS 9

#244

Post by sbuk »

mattl wrote: post #96
foobiekr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Mission Critical Custom Apps.

Re: Mac OS 9

#245

Post by kitsunesoba »

mdasen wrote: post #70

I've always loved Apple Platinum (the Mac OS 8 and 9 interface). I'm not a UI/art person, but the gray color they used always seemed so clean compared to the dull gray of Windows 95/98. Likewise, it wasn't the blinding white of light-mode in macOS/Windows today. The purple used was soft and pleasant, unlike the harsh yellow of folders in Windows or the harsh royal blue of Windows progress bars. Plus, everything had l…

>I've always loved Apple Platinum (the Mac OS 8 and 9 interface). I'm not a UI/art person, but the gray color they used always seemed so clean compared to the dull gray of Windows 95/98.

I feel similarly. The Win9X gray is just a touch too dark, it reminds me of a dark overcast day or something.

Platinum's shade of gray is great, and the shade that they switched to in Windows 2000 is also very good. For this reason on the Windows side of the fence I've always considered Win2K's UI the peak of Win9X-type UIs.

Re: Mac OS 9

#246

Post by firecall »

cogman10 wrote: post #32
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?

I 100% agree with your broader point!

However in support of Apple's M1/M2 macs, I dont have this problem so much!

Apart from Electron based apps...

Which is why I find the wide spread love of VS Code so befuddling!

It's fine.. but so laggy when redrawing windows, switching tabs and so on!

Maybe it doesn't seem slow when in isolation, but compared to a GUI editor like Sublime Text, it's very noticeable!

But yes - your broader point stands and drives me nuts!

Somewhat gone are the days of upgrading your computer and everything being noticable faster because the software is the same! (to be fair, the M1 upgrade from Intel was impressive)

These days to have a decent experience (as a self confessed geek with high standards) you need an M1 Mac or on Linux and Windows a modern CPU, decent GPU and as much RAM as you can fit!

Re: Mac OS 9

#247

Post by firecall »

retrac wrote: post #107
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?

When you resized a window on classic Mac OS, your program had to actually like, draw the new window. Your program is spinning in a loop listening for events, you get a window-resize event. So you allocate space for the new bitmap, calculate what you need to display within the enlarged view, and then draw it. Did the user drag another window over your window, and then drag it away again? You get an event for that. Got…

Classic MacOS only draws an outline of windows on any interaction!

There was an extension to enable window previews whilst dragging.

Re: Mac OS 9

#248

Post by klodolph »

kccqzy wrote: post #217
klodolph wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prior to full-screen mode on macOS, you would option-click the window resize button to resize it to the full size of the screen. This still works. It just doesn’t snap.

That's a Zoom button not a Maximize button. Apps like Safari zoom based on the content, not the screen.

Sure, under some circumstances it won't fill the screen.

Re: Mac OS 9

#249

Post by duskwuff »

klodolph wrote: post #188
jameshart wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HyperCard was a fullscreen app. A stack could hide the menu by just… saying ‘hide menuBar’ in its background script.

You can think of HyperCard as a fullscreen app, and that’s not wrong. Look at it another way, and it’s displaying a 512x342 pixel window. On B&W compact Macs, that’s the size of the display. If you ran Hypercard on a later 640x480 color Mac, you could see the border of the window and move it around. Later versions of HyperCard let you choose the size of the window. Various extensions would let you use a borderless wi…

HyperCard did some particularly weird things to draw to the screen quickly on older machines. If you try dragging a HyperCard stack window around, you'll notice that its horizontal position is quantized to 8-pixel increments, probably to accelerate drawing on low-bit-depth displays. :)

Re: Mac OS 9

#250

Post by II2II »

klodolph wrote: post #177
outworlder wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but also keep in mind that the pointing devices in use were very primitive compared to what we have today and that many users were not as proficient. All contemporary operating systems had thick borders and some had very prominent resizing handles.

The thick borders took up valuable screen space and weren’t necessary. They weren’t present prior to Mac OS 8, and they weren’t present after Mac OS 9. You might consider the era of thick borders as a 5-year blip on the timeline from 1997 to 2002. If anything, modern pointing devices are often less precise. We now commonly use trackpads, touch, and pens. In the 1990s, it was usually the mouse, so you find a lot of 19…

> If anything, modern pointing devices are often less precise.

You're discounting the joys of using a dirty mouse, where the mouse would momentarily stick due to gunked up rollers.

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