331–340 of 356 posts
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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.
The Apple menu top left is the start menu, you organize it however you want.
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That's because it's never just nostalgia. Sometimes things were better in the past. Take Google search for example. Everyone on HN knows it used to be better and that it's been getting worse every year. Of course, a lot of that was not (originally) Google's fault because spammers get more sophisticated every year, but I think Google deserves a share of the blame because they have a conflict of interest by running the…
Can’t grandma still use the old computer while we all use our new computers with new software that’s enriching our lives? I have countless instruments at my disposal in VST form, 3D software like blender, DAW to write music in, stable diffusion to help with the creative process.
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WindowShade was amaaaazing . There was something that - for a while, was an OSX equivalent…I want to say ‘ShapeShifter’(?) - but it only worked for versions from like 10.2-10.4.
You might be thinking of SheepShaver, a Mac emulator for BeOS and Linux. Its name is a play on the name ShapeShifter, an earlier emulator by the same develope, which was an Apple II emulator for the Amiga.
https://www.macintoshrepository.org/11531-shapeshifter-osx-t...
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 o…
That said, you _could_ customize all the colors in Win9x if you liked, which you couldn't do with Macs.
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.
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DragThing
But now we're just adding 3rd party software to change the fundamental UX. The GP was talking about how much better it was back then, but if you need 3rd party tools to make it work, then it really wasn't.
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>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 o…
The win9x default gray was from an age where you didn't necessarily have the option to use an arbitrary shade of gray - meanwhile Macs had full control of the hardware (as they still do) and could pick any old color. That said, you _could_ customize all the colors in Win9x if you liked, which you couldn't do with Macs.
Well, until Kaleidoscope[0] was created way back in 1991, followed by Apple's own Appearance Manager[1] in Mac OS 8.5 in 1998, both of which allowed all-encompassing theming that could stop just short of changing colors or radically change your UI's appearance. Windows wouldn't get an equivalent until the addition of visual style themes in XP in 2001 (which still had to be hacked to allow arbitrary third party themes) and was by predated the third-party WindowBlinds[2] by three years.
To date I've not seen OS theming that was as capable as Kaleidoscope was. Kaleidoscope schemes could change practically any aspect of the Mac OS UI (e.g. moving titlebars to the bottom or left/right edges of windows) which led to the creation of some extremely creative and zany schemes. Even the theming systems of modern Linux desktop environments which are built with customization as a central tenant aren't as capable as Kaleidoscope was.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidoscope_(software) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appearance_Manager [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowBlinds
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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 propriet…
Not sure about the state of things with Electron. I'm sure you're generally right and there are some gaps, and of course, on Mac OS you do only very rarely encounter an app with an empty menu bar (I have though).
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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 propriet…
GTK apps can support the global menu. There's a GTK plugin that adds support, and many distros install it by default. I think it was originally written by Canonical (their custom Unity desktop also used a global menu bar). Not sure about the state of things with Electron. I'm sure you're generally right and there are some gaps, and of course, on Mac OS you do only very rarely encounter an app with an empty menu bar (…
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?