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MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

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Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

#171

Post by mike_hearn »

OnlyMortal wrote: post #49

Having developed for OSX in that era, IBM ViaVoice, it wasn’t a completely functional OS. The audio input was broken every alternate build, for instance. I’d come from a NeXT background and was surprised how slow OSX (OpenStep in essence) was on PPC.

I'm curious what you make of the standard narrative that OS X was a fuse of NeXTStep with UNIX and MacOS Classic. As far as I can tell that's not really accurate and OS X was basically just NeXTStep reskinned to look like MacOS, with an emulator for Classic apps bolted onto the side, and some C libraries to ease the porting process from the old Mac APIs to the new NeXTStep APIs without needing to transition to Objective-C. The UNIX aspects to it came primarily from NeXTStep and weren't something new Apple added.

Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

#172

Post by bacchusracine »

G3rn0ti wrote: post #41
LeanderK wrote: post #2

Wow, unbelievable that it was designed in 2001! It still looks fresh and modern, although maybe a bit too playful so that it appears a bit childish? But only barely. It appears to have all the basic functionality expected from a modern operating system, I instantly feel right at home although I've never used it. I find the review terrible though, one of the major changes was the user interface, revolutionary I would…

> It still looks fresh and modern, although maybe a bit too playful so that it appears a bit childish? The aesthetics is called „Frutiger Aero“. Lots of colors and especially of blue, lots of transparency effects and fake light reflections. It all is inspired by natural landscapes with blue skies or blue water surfaces. Also skeuomorphisms everywhere. Windows 7 could be called the pinnacle of the use of Frutiger Aero…

> Also skeuomorphism everywhere.

I miss skeuomorphic design. :(

I hate how flat everything is these days.

Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

#173

Post by andrekandre »

tambourine_man wrote: post #78
coreyh14444 wrote: post #56

I was deep into OS explorations in this period. I ran BeOS, Yellow Dog linux on PowerPC, had all flavors of NT, etc. My feeling about OS X at this time was that it was the right choice but that it was "too late" and that Apple took too long and the window of opportunity had passed. I take that now as startup advice: It isn't too late!

OS X was a bet on the future, that double buffering everything was OK because graphic cards would get there eventually. They certainly did, but we suffered through menus taking a good fraction of a second to drop down for a few years. I can still feel the pain. I would never have taken that bet. I want computers to be fast now . It was the right bet.

  > double buffering everything was OK because graphic cards would get there eventually.
and they showed it in the very next version 10.2 jaguar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OaRF9W1bJk&t=3m33s

Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

#174

Post by andrekandre »

Tagbert wrote: post #135
jonhohle wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for what reason? There were things that were so easy to do - like change network interface priority by reordering the list of interfaces - that have obvious method anymore (I want to prefer ethernet when it’s attached, for example). I can no longer navigate to settings I frequently used and need to search for just about everything. Perhaps I shouldn’t expect things to stay the same after 20 years(!), but for long…

Yes, the old grid layout was not good for anything that you didn’t access frequently. It was sometimes hard to find things if you didn’t already know where to look. I agree that the actual settings controls and panel layouts are not as good as before. They are more autogenerated while the old panel layouts were more carefully planned. some of the controls seem poorly suited to the data they are controlling. It might…

maybe they can take a hybrid approach and have grid for favorites and a mile-long list for everything else (with just a plain alphabetical ordering or logical grouping perhaps)

Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

#175

Post by andrekandre »

davidy123 wrote: post #44
CoryAlexMartin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it mean for everything on screen to have a relationship to everything else? Could you elaborate?

Yes, based on the NeXTSTEP roots, everything should be object oriented. Think of it like visual copy/paste. Pretty much every on screen item should have a meaning and relationship to everything else. For example, in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5o5liZxnA at 35:00 you can see how an application is loaded from the network and a live chart dragged from one app to another. That isn't a one-off gimmick, it's how the…

  > I bought a Macbook because I was excited by this idea, but I quickly realized it was not even surface deep.
same, in some ways macos (x) still hasn't caught up with next/openstep...

Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

#177

Post by kzrdude »

jraph wrote: post #40

Notice the Internet Explorer icon? This may feel unexpected and out of place but Safari was first released only in 2003.

I have a memory of browsing on my mac with 5 staggered internet explorer windows (this was before tabs, and I was clearly showing my tab-addiction to come already then by using five windows in parallel.)

Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

#178

Post by wildrhythms »

bacchusracine wrote: post #172
G3rn0ti wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It still looks fresh and modern, although maybe a bit too playful so that it appears a bit childish? The aesthetics is called „Frutiger Aero“. Lots of colors and especially of blue, lots of transparency effects and fake light reflections. It all is inspired by natural landscapes with blue skies or blue water surfaces. Also skeuomorphisms everywhere. Windows 7 could be called the pinnacle of the use of Frutiger Aero…

> Also skeuomorphism everywhere. I miss skeuomorphic design. :( I hate how flat everything is these days.

Yup. We used to apply shadows to things to give the user a sense of depth and contrast. Now everything is on a flat plane, and any overlapping elements are either indecipherable, or live on a full bleed scrim. Very boring!

Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

#179

Post by wildrhythms »

gedy wrote: post #136
zokier wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search as the primary interaction method instead of menus and icons is pretty dramatic shift though; compare vscode command palette to traditional vs, or windows 7 and later start menu to its predecessors. Another thing, especially on Windows, is the de-emphasis or straight out removal of menu bars, once staple of desktop interfaces. As a more generic trend, I think modal dialogs with forms were far more common inter…

> Search as the primary interaction method Thanks, I hate it. Search is terrible for browsing/discovery, in spite of many people liking it.

The Mac OS menubar search actually opens the relevant menus and submenus and puts a big floating indicator on the result. It does teach rather than simply surfacing the result.

Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

#180

Post by wildrhythms »

spider-mario wrote: post #73
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss the textured Aqua days. Peak was Leopard/Snow Leopard. Flat is just so... flat. And boring. And also harder to read, because it's harder to orient yourself in a big textureless area than in a space with some texture in it.

I kind of liked the “brushed metal” texture that could be found in Tiger (10.4): http://toastytech.com/guis/osx14slideshow.png

I've seen speculation that we are slowly returning to a less flat, more depth-oriented design trend based on what Apple showed in the Vision UI demo (skip to 15:13 to see all the components): https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10076/

Notice the shadows inside of the in the inputs, and the 'shine' applied on the bottom. Web designers from the 2000s will remember all this stuff. What's old is new again!

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