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Microsoft had a secret Windows XP theme that made it look like a Mac

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Re: Microsoft had a secret Windows XP theme that made it look like a Mac

#101

Post by TheRealPomax »

Shinotiy wrote: post #99

I would love if we would stop analyzing every single detail in public. I wish HN would have a limited amount of articles, news paper have that already and if the internet is 'out' and i would need to be forced to do something else for the day. Its probably nice to think and discuss something that specific in desktop/computer historian fansub or so but that should be searched and discovered. I got so fed up with all t…

Sounds like you want to make a new website. Or use something like lobsters, which has stricter quality control.

If HN users upvote something enough, it's on the front page: HS shows you your HN-reading peers apparently like to talk about. Nothing more.

Re: Microsoft had a secret Windows XP theme that made it look like a Mac

#102

Post by spideymans »

marbletiles wrote: post #100
unnouinceput wrote: post #46

Quote: "Microsoft was developing Windows XP during an era when there was fierce competition with Apple over desktop operating systems" I'm sorry, what? Talk about joke of the week. Apple never had desktop world bigger than 10% as market share. Not even today when it's at the highest peak ever, and in 2001 they were more like 1%. Sorry to burst your bubble Tom Warren, you do realize US is like 35 people out of 800. As…

OK, here are the receipts: internal MS emails from just a couple of years after this (in the run-up to Vista) literally saying that they expect to be compared to Tiger and found wanting: https://www.crn.com/news/applications-os/197001811/microsoft... Marketshare isn’t everything. You can have outsized mindshare with a tiny market share. You can compete for more than marketshare, too

iOS and Android demonstrate pretty succinctly that market share isn’t everything with regards to competition and market success.

Re: Microsoft had a secret Windows XP theme that made it look like a Mac

#103

Post by anthk »

chrisseaton wrote: post #62
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But what is the market for affluent and influential tech workers in the West? Probably like 95% MacBook Pro. I'm also dev in the West and no, it's not even close to being 95% MacBook Pro. Maybe in The Bay Area it's 95% but where I live(Europe) It's mostly Windows 10 + WSL or Ubuntu. And I wouldn't call tech workers here as influential, not at all. Again, Maybe in the Bay Area they are but here nobody cares about wha…

I live in Europe myself and it's MacBook Pros where I live. And I go to conferences all around the world and all I see is MacBook Pros everywhere. > And I wouldn't call tech workers here as influential, not at all. Tech works who influence other tech workers. This is important because if everyone you see speaking at conferences is using a MacBook, and all the software available is for MacBooks, then other people are…

I live in Spain and the rest of Europe is not like the UK at all.

Re: Microsoft had a secret Windows XP theme that made it look like a Mac

#104

Post by cpuguy83 »

qz2 wrote: post #89
solarkraft wrote: post #33

Mac OS wasn't this ugly. Seriously: You can't just incorporate some design element and go "see, it looks like X". It won't. What most people making software seem to miss is that software look & feel isn't the design of widgets, but also click behavior, layouts, click paths, description texts, animations, delay after a click ... /tangentially related rant

There were lots of copycat themes for Linux window managers and toolkits around then which looked much worse than this attempt. I really miss the windows XP theme. It was super clean and consistent compared to the shit show we have now.

Back then people called it Fisher Price.

Probably my fav was during the betas before they added the intense blue/green "Luna" theme.

Re: Microsoft had a secret Windows XP theme that made it look like a Mac

#105

Post by kzrdude »

flohofwoe wrote: post #44
Ayesh wrote: post #6

XP was the peak of desktop customizations. There were "theme packs", one of the most popular being a Vista Theme Pack. The teen in me, with a Nokia 6600 besides the computer, was in awe when a single installation of Vista Theme Pack and rebooting a couple times meant that everything on my 40GB HDD Pentium computer was changed from the login screen to icons, wallpaper, fonts, shell, file copy boxes, disk space meter,…

I'd argue that Linux desktop was always the peak of customization via themes, and today remains the last platform to even allow such customization. Most Linux desktop themes don't look all that great (simply because of the '90% of everything is crap' rule), but there are a few really great ones that are aesthetically much more pleasing than both Win10 and macOS (of course this is very personal and subjective, which m…

Old Mac OS - System 7.5 days and thereabouts had a really great theming situation, with Kaleidoscope schemes making it possible to change everything. I remember I made my own.

Something like this shows the diversity in themes:

https://macgui.com/downloads/?cat_id=25

Wayback machine link

https://web.archive.org/web/20040404162223fw_/http://www.kal...

Re: Microsoft had a secret Windows XP theme that made it look like a Mac

#106

Post by laumars »

Zenst wrote: post #80
rbanffy wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple never had desktop world bigger than 10% as market share. And that would make Apple the single largest PC manufacturer.

Depends upon how you define Personal Computer and what time-frame you look at. So if you define a personal computer as a computer people use for personal tasks as a tool, then a mobile phone fits that. In that definition and if you look at all the years history wise, It does look like Nokia have sold the most computers for personal use. At least going by the numbers sold per manufacturer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki…

Smart phones are not personal computers and the kind of dumb phones around in that year weren’t even smart enough to be computing devices. My phone back then was “amazing” because it had an inbuilt FM tuner AND supported custom ring tones (think PC speaker quality rather than MP3s). I think I could store a maximum of 50 text messages too and that felt like a lot.

It’s sometimes hard to believe how young smart phones (and in fact portable mobile phones in general) are by just how much we now depend on them and take them for granted.

Re: Microsoft had a secret Windows XP theme that made it look like a Mac

#107

Post by vaidhy »

schwinn140 wrote: post #94
chrisseaton wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple never had desktop world bigger than 10% as market share. Right but you can differentiate markets. Apple may be 10% worldwide, including Asian markets like India. But what is the market for affluent and influential tech workers in the West? Probably like 95% MacBook Pro. Which market do you think they care more about?

My data does not support that conclusion. To the contrary, the vast majority of business decision makers are still on a Windows based machine in the US. I can validate this directly as we operate the largest library of long-form professional/technical content library on the web. Over 700k professionals per month are registering and downloading content specific to their needs. Below is the current breakout of their de…

Numbers do not add up. Maybe Windows is more like 90%?

Re: Microsoft had a secret Windows XP theme that made it look like a Mac

#108

Post by oblio »

spideymans wrote: post #102
marbletiles wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, here are the receipts: internal MS emails from just a couple of years after this (in the run-up to Vista) literally saying that they expect to be compared to Tiger and found wanting: https://www.crn.com/news/applications-os/197001811/microsoft... Marketshare isn’t everything. You can have outsized mindshare with a tiny market share. You can compete for more than marketshare, too

iOS and Android demonstrate pretty succinctly that market share isn’t everything with regards to competition and market success.

Yeah, but Windows never had the money problem Android has. Windows had at least the same amount of money spinning on top of it, due to the sheer amount of enterprise apps, especially financial ones, running on top of it.

Android is basically a loss leader for Google ads :-)

Re: Microsoft had a secret Windows XP theme that made it look like a Mac

#109

Post by toast0 »

specialist wrote: post #98
derefr wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XP was a rewrite of the shell window decorations + controls system, to support drawing these as collections of bitmaps with fonts on top. Likely they were inspired to do this by the fact that macOS was doing things with buttons, modal backgrounds (pinstripe!), etc. that Windows couldn’t do at the time with its hardcoded GDI-draw-call based theming. Microsoft knew that they wanted the flexibility to be able to do what…

Microsoft has never understood that appearance (UI) is the last step. They've never been able to understand and therefore seriously address the stuff behind the veneer. Anecdata: The 2008 presentation by the guy in charge of the Office Ribbon best demonstrates their organizational blindness. TLDR: They only set out to better organize the complexity, and make it more pretty. They never considered making the underlying…

> Having been trained as a real world architect (eg buildings, not software), he understood and accepted that he was jut putting lipstick on a pig. But the pay was a lot better and he had family, mortgage for a nice house, shorter commute with a newer car. Real world architects don't expect to actually do the work they love and trained for.

(Building) Architecture as a career sucks. There's too many people going into it, and not enough jobs. Getting licensed is currently very onerous. Wages are low unless you're a partner or owner of a firm. When you're a partner or owner, you don't do very much in the way of drawing buildings (which is what people think architecture is like). Architecture is actually mostly managing lots of groups, the client (sometimes also their clients), engineering contractors, building contractors, permitting offices and inspectors, etc.

Re: Microsoft had a secret Windows XP theme that made it look like a Mac

#110

Post by fuzzfactor »

vaidhy wrote: post #107
schwinn140 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My data does not support that conclusion. To the contrary, the vast majority of business decision makers are still on a Windows based machine in the US. I can validate this directly as we operate the largest library of long-form professional/technical content library on the web. Over 700k professionals per month are registering and downloading content specific to their needs. Below is the current breakout of their de…

Numbers do not add up. Maybe Windows is more like 90%?

>Windows = 97.26% Mac = 8.21% Linux 2.92% Chrome OS = 0.27%

Roger, data seems to already show more than 100 percent of registrees are using personal-style computers?

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