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Mac OS 9

macos9.app

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Re: Mac OS 9

#181

Post by klodolph »

david422 wrote: post #142
klodolph wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but— The fat borders for the windows and the control strip at the bottom left of the screen took up a lot of space on real monitors of the era. Try running at a more modest 800x600 or 640x480 and it will seem less efficient. Modern Mac OS X is actually quite efficient, with zero-pixel window borders on three sides, and narrower scroll bars. Worse, a bunch of applications had code that would set up window locati…

Not a fan of the new trend of zero window borders. I wish there was at least a way to make them customizable.

By “new trend” are you talking about how the borders got eliminated in Mac OS X in 2001? That trend is old enough to buy beer.

Although for a while (starting with 10.3?), some windows had a chunky brushed-metal look.

Re: Mac OS 9

#182

Post by truetraveller »

philwelch wrote: post #158
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? Classic Mac OS apps did not put the entire application UI in a single full screen window. Instead, it was typical for an application to contain multiple windows that could all be visible at once. > To add to this, the "top" menu bar is lame. This is related. In Windows, the entire UI of the app is contained in a single window, which you would typically maximize to f…

I understand all of that. And that is precisely my point. Isolate everything concerning an app to its own window, and allow that to be maximized. If an app has multiple windows, contain them within the main app window. Don't pollute the "global" window space with app-specific windows.

Re: Mac OS 9

#183

Post by truetraveller »

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?

Because it removes the clutter of your desktop + other windows. I think many would agree. Sure, there are times you need to see windows side-by-side, and there is affordance for that. But mostly, a person is doing one task at a time.

Re: Mac OS 9

#184

Post by klodolph »

realgeniushere wrote: post #170
philistine wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe it or not, full screen apps are a Windows thing. Apple has added full screen app support only recently, and any Windows convert who has switched to macOS and has problems adapting to its UI has one thing in common: they haven’t let go of the idea that all apps need to use the whole screen at all times.

This is a funny cope. > Believe it or not, full screen apps are a Windows thing. Nope. It’s just that maximizing—single action to expand a window the whole screen minus the OS docks/taskbars—is present in every widely used OS except for Mac OS. > they haven’t let go of the idea that all apps need to use the whole screen at all times Not sure where you’re getting “at all times” from. Windows and Linux desktops all eas…

Prior to full-screen mode on macOS, you would option-click the window resize button to resize it to the full size of the screen. This still works. It just doesn’t snap.

Re: Mac OS 9

#185

Post by deergomoo »

sph wrote: post #23

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.

I would prefer we leave the window borders in the 1990s but I do wish we'd stop hiding controls in overflow menus when we have more pixels available than ever before.

I appreciate that dropping a user in a window with 150 unlabelled icons is intimidating for them, but needing to hover over the magic space or find the correct icon abstraction of "junk drawer" to find core features is hardly intuitive either.

Re: Mac OS 9

#187

Post by IncRnd »

chrisco255 wrote: post #98
IncRnd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's created with javascript in the browser, which is not efficient.

JavaScript is very efficient. It compiles to native on the fly in v8 engines. The DOM itself, however, has a lot of foot guns for performance.

That's a distinction without a difference. Running JS is slower than native. The user of JS cares about the real world speed of emulating a quadra machine, which is shown as very slow at this webpage.

Re: Mac OS 9

#188

Post by klodolph »

jameshart wrote: post #160
retrac wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic Mac OS supported full screen applications since the beginning. I'm not sure if Apple allowed it or whatever in their very strict interface guidelines, but from a programming perspective you just have to turn off the menu bar and take the entire screen as the GrafPort.

HyperCard was a fullscreen app. A stack could hide the menu by just… saying ‘hide menuBar’ in its background script.

You can think of HyperCard as a fullscreen app, and that’s not wrong. Look at it another way, and it’s displaying a 512x342 pixel window. On B&W compact Macs, that’s the size of the display. If you ran Hypercard on a later 640x480 color Mac, you could see the border of the window and move it around.

Later versions of HyperCard let you choose the size of the window. Various extensions would let you use a borderless window for the stack, and put a big black window behind it covering the rest of the screen.

Re: Mac OS 9

#189

Post by jxdxbx »

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…

I really love your project. It is a giant pain in the ass to get BasiliskII and/or SheepShaper working, at least the few times I've messed with them. Is it possible to run this offline or in some kind of encapsulated web app form?

Re: Mac OS 9

#190

Post by tambourine_man »

grishka wrote: post #135
tambourine_man wrote: post #14

I managed to get over most of the nostalgia in my life. After a certain age, I feel it’s a bit counterproductive and not a net positive. But old Macs hit me hard and it’s something I can’t seem to build an immunity to. The aesthetics, the simplicity, the cohesion of the metaphors… so good.

I don't share any of the nostalgia about old Macs most of HN seems to have. They weren't around me in my childhood, and even trying to get anything meaningful done on classic MacOS in the modern times on an emulator is an exercise in frustration because of how poor the support for Cyrillic characters is. But! I do have a similar feeling about old Windows versions. The UIs of both the system and the applications were…

It has more to do with what you were brought up with than any intrinsic merit, I'm sure.

Being a Mac die hard I despised DOS and Windows 3.11. But I remember seeing Windows 95 and being as impressed as my young self would allow itself to be while still exhaling my Mac superiority fumes.

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