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(mac)ostalgia – how Spotify, Slack, Chrome, Figma could look on Mac OS 9

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Re: (mac)ostalgia – how Spotify, Slack, Chrome, Figma could look on Mac OS 9

#191

Post by Toutouxc »

2-718-281-828 wrote: post #116

Mac OS UI is a great example for why one shouldn't "improve" software just for the sake for changing something. UI design peaked at Windows XP style. the design portraied here falls for my opinion in that category. As a user of xfce (on Linux Mint) which is basically Windows XP with different icons I am super happy. Apple actually came up with only a single valuable UI element and that is the three finger swipe to sw…

> congratulations to Apple for conning even IT experts

Which one is more plausible?

a) Apple actually "conning" tens of thousands of highly skilled, [mostly] intelligent, [mostly] educated people into spending money on hardware they don't actually need.

b) You not understanding some important aspect of the situation and/or having different personal preferences.

Re: (mac)ostalgia – how Spotify, Slack, Chrome, Figma could look on Mac OS 9

#192

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #127
waspight wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Electron is quite amazing. It does not deserve this bad reputation that it for some reason has on HN.

Example: On Fedora, I'd install the Arc Theme + some fancy icon pack. The majority of the applications uses the operating system's theming system, which makes all applications look the same. The same buttons, same spacing, same font sizes/types, same colours, same systems shell/window decorations, scroll bars etc. It all behaves and feels native. Most of them also uses the same keyboard shortcut system and accessibil…

In the 90s and early 00s it was a sign of professionalism that applications used native OS widgets and respected the theming choices of the user. Sadly, that all went away (about the time the iPhone was released?) and we entered a UX dark age where users only ever get at most 2 choices about theming and UI is considered part of your brand.

People used to say one of the reasons Linux Desktop was shit was that it had so many different look-n-feel's for its disparate applications. Now it is one of the most consistent. People used to say one of the reasons Java was shit because it didn't use native widgets[0] and looked out of place, but now that's the default even for native software. Now we live in an age where developers loudly proclaim their love for bundling an entire web browser as their UI, nothing even remotely resembles the native look-n-feel, and they consider adding a bespoke 'Dark Mode' theme some kind of actually noteworthy achievement.

If personal computing survives the next few decades, future historians will judge us very poorly.

[0] It could, but people used Swing in practice.

Re: (mac)ostalgia – how Spotify, Slack, Chrome, Figma could look on Mac OS 9

#193

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

porcoda wrote: post #110
waspight wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Electron is quite amazing. It does not deserve this bad reputation that it for some reason has on HN.

Amazing and bad reputation are not mutually exclusive. Electron is an impressive engineering accomplishment, but it also has some dimensions that not everyone likes. Electron is great if you're a developer who wants to write apps in javascript+HTML+CSS and put developer preferences over preferences of users. Not everyone agrees that the decisions behind Electron and using it are good decisions.

> Electron is an impressive engineering accomplishment

...it is? How? It's just a web browser hacked up to allow shit we decided it was a terrible idea to allow a web browser to do just so it can be a GUI for a local application that's probably an order of magnitude or more smaller than it is.

Re: (mac)ostalgia – how Spotify, Slack, Chrome, Figma could look on Mac OS 9

#194

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #180
linguae wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe people have a preference for software that conforms to a set of often well-thought-of platform UI standards and interoperates seamlessly with their other applications instead of Web applications that don't conform with the platform's standards. Part of what made the Mac and Windows attractive compared to MS-DOS is that the former had UI standards that made it easier for people to use new apps and to interoperat…

That's only mac thing. Windows never (maybe in early 90s?) had any consistency and nobody cares. Just look at control panel.

People don't get much of a choice. It's a bit like saying people must love Joe Biden because they elected him, which could only be true if you ignored a whole universe of other factors.

Re: (mac)ostalgia – how Spotify, Slack, Chrome, Figma could look on Mac OS 9

#196

Post by KptMarchewa »

laputan_machine wrote: post #136
chrisseaton wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, the old icons are objectively better. Do you mean you're used to the old icons? My seven-year-old wouldn't recognise them.

Are you a UI Researcher? If you are, your approach to gathering research by rebuking everyone else's opinions seems less than optimal. FWIW I prefer skeumorphic design. Flat design won because it made scaling everything easier. It doesn't need to be this way now that SVG support has become widespread

Tons of people below 40 don't have the same instincts as you do.

Re: (mac)ostalgia – how Spotify, Slack, Chrome, Figma could look on Mac OS 9

#199

Post by deergomoo »

grishka wrote: post #166
frereubu wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I still miss the crisp lines and clear affordances of actual buttons and other elements of that time..." If you go into System Preferences > Accessibility > Display and turn "Increase contrast" on, it adds clear lines around almost everything, which is the closest I've found to that. I tried it for a while, but I found it too harsh in the end. It would be nice to have a setting which was inbetween the two extremes.

There's a setting to "show shapes of toolbar buttons" or whatever it's called in English. It adds 1px faint grey lines around them. I turned it on the day I got my M1 mac. Doesn't help with the fact that the icons on these buttons are drawn as if there's no pixel grid and so are a blurry mess, but better than nothing still.

> Doesn't help with the fact that the icons on these buttons are drawn as if there's no pixel grid and so are a blurry mess

Are you using a MacBook by any chance? Out of the box the Air and 13” Pro are set to render to a higher resolution than the panel, which is then non-integer scaled down. So everything is just sort of fuzzy.

Re: (mac)ostalgia – how Spotify, Slack, Chrome, Figma could look on Mac OS 9

#200

Post by elzbardico »

dragonwriter wrote: post #129
porcoda wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing and bad reputation are not mutually exclusive. Electron is an impressive engineering accomplishment, but it also has some dimensions that not everyone likes. Electron is great if you're a developer who wants to write apps in javascript+HTML+CSS and put developer preferences over preferences of users. Not everyone agrees that the decisions behind Electron and using it are good decisions.

> Electron is great if you're a developer who wants to write apps in javascript+HTML+CSS and put developer preferences over preferences of users I’m so tired of this. Sure, the case for Electron is that it allows leveraging web-targeting code and skills, which makes more devs able to work on desktop software give the current prevalence of web skills and makes their job easier given the prevalence of web-targeting cod…

Of course it is user hostile!!!! I should not feel like an intel i-7 processor with six cores and 12 threads in a machine with 32 GB of Ram is sometimes not enough to run a fucking chat application without it stuttering; or ramping up the fan like a fucking 747 during take-off should I decide to use to have a video call on this application.
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