Brings so much good memories!
[Edit] and their macos8 emulation is even better
Mac OS 9
101–110 of 356 posts
Re: Mac OS 9
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll be that guy... the system font for menus, etc in OS 8 and 9 is "Geneva" [EDIT: It's "Charcoal" , of course. Thanks for the heads up!]. It was "Chicago" up to and including System 7.x. I do agree on all other points :)
Huh, TIL. I had always thought it was always just up-res'ing variations on Chicago, up thru and including the first iPod. They look pretty similar but now that I look it them side by side I see it a bit. As much as it is the style, it's also that kinda.. not-True-type still-a-bit-pixelated edges look that is the nostalgia factor, I guess.
Original iPod did use Chicago though! Then when they got color screens they switched to Lucida Grande.
Re: Mac OS 9
#103Damn what a terrible UX this is, no wonder Windows kicked their ass so hard with ME and XP. This reminded me to keep it simple and stupid proof whenever I want users to actually enjoy what I build, thanks!
Two questions: 1. Are you being serious, or are you being sarcastic? 2. If you're being serious, what about it is terrible?
I don't know if they were being serious, but as someone who never used a mac back then, I really struggled with this UI. Why do folders all open in a new window? 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? What is the point of the settings dock in the bottom left of the screen? Do I really need to change resolution and colors that often? Why do I have to browse the whole hard drive to find any of my applications? Why can't I right-click files/folders? What is the point of the bigger/smaller window button, why not maximize? Why does minimizing just collapse windows to their title bar? How do you even turn off the computer?
These are all features that work how I would expect on Windows 98. I'm sure if I had used a mac back then this would all make sense to me, but even as someone who uses modern macs, I was very lost in the old UI.
Re: Mac OS 9
#104Question from someone who never used MacOS 9: why does the Sherlock UI look so... OS X like?
Because it was built with the newer design language that Apple was developing - they used it in Quicktime too. I'd hazard a guess that the key difference was that at the time that MacOS 9 came out, you could get something in as long as it appealed to Steve.
It's not that Apple didn't experiment in earlier days, but this was a time when the push to the next OS and design was really strong after so many failed efforts to get a next-gen OS out the door.
Re: Mac OS 9
#105Re: Mac OS 9
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two questions: 1. Are you being serious, or are you being sarcastic? 2. If you're being serious, what about it is terrible?
I am serious, and it's all about how things are named and how the OS interacts with you. Some examples (imagine you've never used a computer before): - "file explorer" on Windows, "finder" on Mac. This is just an example of naming that I think it's just confusing to users, among many other names - a red "X" to close a program on windows, a random square with no color differentiation on the Mac - a clear view of what…
- a clear view of what programs are running in the taskbar on Windows vs. the current active program in the top right
The top right current program name has the running programs in a dropdown on click. You can 'tear off' the dropdown menu to create an always-visible task bar, either in the dropdown format or as nice little icons.
Re: Mac OS 9
#107Look 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?
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. Gotta draw what was there all over again.
This is all very close to the metal. On early 68K Macs, this is driven by QuickDraw, some very tightly coded assembly routines in ROM. Invoking them is only 2 bytes of code, as they're simply CPU opcodes (trap instructions). Render this string at this point size with this font at this X, Y location. Redraw the menu bar. Draw a rectangle. And so on. If you sequence these Toolbox invocations correctly, as a great master programmer of coroutines who never mistreats a handle as a pointer, you can render a complex scene with hundreds of polygons and a full screen of text in 200 milliseconds at 8 MHz.
But it takes thousands of lines of hand-holding the machine to do it.
Today, all of this is typically handled by instantiating a window object which draws into a private framebuffer which the system composites. That right there is tens of megabytes of RAM overhead. Then you use a thread to handle the UI and a thread to draw and etc. There's almost no boilerplate to just show a window. Perhaps one line of code. And it doesn't get overwritten by intrusive neighbour windows. Creating frameworks that can do all that bookkeeping in a flexible and general way (don't forget you want to be able to render vector fonts for any Unicode language) has a tremendous overhead.
Re: Mac OS 9
#108It’s amazing how much more central search is in modern OS’s. This feels more like the original’84 Mac, but gussied up. I like OS6 better. It was 10 years ahead of anything else, except perhaps Amiga, in the hands of a developer. This Mac OS9 actually looks like it came from a low point in Mac’s penetration and power.
Re: Mac OS 9
#109How do I send the command key (propeller)?