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Mac OS 9

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Re: Mac OS 9

#311

Post by VapidLinus »

firecall wrote: post #246
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?

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…

I have the same feelings about VS Code. JetBrains is working on a competitor (Fleet) that is running on the JVM and renders using Skia. But everywhere I keep seeing it get flack for not being web-based...

Re: Mac OS 9

#312

Post by ben-schaaf »

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…

> That right there is tens of megabytes of RAM overhead.

FWIW the slowest spec of DDR3-800 transfers 100MB is about 15ms.

Re: Mac OS 9

#313

Post by jwr »

A desktop where windows remember their positions… so refreshing in today's world, where every window and app has total amnesia and launches in random places.

Re: Mac OS 9

#314

Post by bodge5000 »

truetraveller wrote: post #155
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.

Mac UX is far worse compared to Windows, in my opinion. I feel very claustrophobic using it. How do you live without a simple maximize button? "Maximimze to contents" is ambiguous, and in practice, does not work at all for most apps. I find myself having to "manually" maximize windows. And now, I don't want a third party app. To add to this, even after I "maximimze" windows, I have an ugly menu bar at the top, in add…

I only started using MacOS a few months ago. For the first ~2 weeks, I hated it. I actually remember thinking that it felt like a poorly implemented clone of MacOS ironically. But the truth is, whilst you can jump between Windows and most Linux distros (even Fedora) without much trouble, MacOS is an entirely different beast.

For example, I learnt that, completely different than Windows, on MacOS you're not really supposed to minimise windows, at least not as you would on Windows. Instead, you open the command centre or whatever its called and switch between them. Workspaces also arent an optional extra, they're pretty crucial to using the OS if you have multiple windows open. Its for these reasons I can see why people praise the trackpad so much, its actually preferable to use over a mouse because its so deeply embedded in the flow of the OS.

I'm not saying MacOS is objectively better in its workflow, for that I'm still not sure what I'll end up using as my main computer, just that its different and should be treated as such.

Re: Mac OS 9

#315

Post by Someone »

Mogzol wrote: post #191
flenserboy wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few quick answers — >Why do folders all open in a new window? Spacial Finder (see https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/ ). It remembers window position, icon positions within the window, and the like. >Why can't I maximize a window by double-clicking the title bar? Why can I only resize windows with the little handle in the bottom corner? Nobody really thought about maximizing by double-clicking, as there…

Thanks for the replies, I guess a lot of it does boil down to "that's just the way things were". Although, like I mentioned, all those features do work on Windows 98, which released over a year before Mac OS 9, so I think the parent's comment of "no wonder Windows kicked their ass so hard" does have a point. Windows 98 feels far more "modern" than this, at least in my opinion. Also, in response to "Choose shut down,…

Shut down is in the Finder, in the “Special” menu.

That’s an evolutionary left-over from the first Mac. It ran only a single program at the time [1]. It booted up running the Finder. From there, you could launch a single program. If you quit that program, it launched the Finder again.

[1]: except for desk accessories, a special kind of device driver (!) that could present an UI (https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...)

Re: Mac OS 9

#316

Post by simondotau »

WoodenChair wrote: post #290
simondotau wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OS9 was really just 8.7 but, as you describe, a stepping stone towards 10, both numerically and with a few nods to the future, e.g. Keychain Access, CarbonLib, and file/printer sharing over TCP.

Carbon worked all the way back with Mac OS 8.1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API)

Correct, but it wasn't shipped with the OS until MacOS 9.

Re: Mac OS 9

#317

Post by 1ko »

Joeri wrote: post #192
asveikau wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The frustrating part is that OS X was NeXTStep under the covers, and that had the late 90’s look down better than any OS. http://toastytech.com/guis/ns332.html I ran windowmaker on my linux systems around 2000 to get that same look, but I had serious NeXT envy.

I feel like BeOS was even cleaner. And it made my old PC feel really snappier than win98.

https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/beos-1....

Re: Mac OS 9

#318

Post by spongeb00b »

siruva07 wrote: post #73

I can hear "Sosumi" while clicking around :) "Sosumi is an alert sound introduced by Jim Reekes in Apple Inc.'s Macintosh System 7 operating system in 1991. The name is derived from the phrase "so, sue me!" because of a long running court battle with Apple Corps, the similarly named music company, regarding the use of music in Apple Inc.'s computer products." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sosumi

For me it was weird not hearing that very specific sort of grinding noise of old hard drives while watching the boot screen :)

Re: Mac OS 9

#319

Post by stuaxo »

mihaip wrote: post #165

I'm the creator of the site, thanks for the submission. This is an in-progress port of the SheepShaver emulator to WebAssembly/Emscripten, https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac/issues/34 is tracking the remaining work. If you're interested in running older Mac software in the browser, the BasiliskII-based sites at https://system7.app/ and https://macos8.app/ may be better bets. They will boot faster and have fewer c…

Fantastic work.

Could this have implement dynamic screen resolutions, like Qemu/Virtualbox/Vmware guest extensions do when virtualising other operating systems ?

Re: Mac OS 9

#320

Post by stuaxo »

deergomoo wrote: post #179
truetraveller wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac UX is far worse compared to Windows, in my opinion. I feel very claustrophobic using it. How do you live without a simple maximize button? "Maximimze to contents" is ambiguous, and in practice, does not work at all for most apps. I find myself having to "manually" maximize windows. And now, I don't want a third party app. To add to this, even after I "maximimze" windows, I have an ugly menu bar at the top, in add…

> How do you live without a simple maximize button? Why would I want a webpage which stops showing additional content after ~1200 pixels wide to take up the entire of my 2560px wide monitor?

To avoid everything else distracting you.
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