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Mac OS 9

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Re: Mac OS 9

#191

Post by Mogzol »

flenserboy wrote: post #120
Mogzol wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 colo…

A few quick answers — >Why do folders all open in a new window? Spacial Finder (see https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/ ). It remembers window position, icon positions within the window, and the like. >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? Nobody really thought about maximizing by double-clicking, as there…

Thanks for the replies, I guess a lot of it does boil down to "that's just the way things were".

Although, like I mentioned, all those features do work on Windows 98, which released over a year before Mac OS 9, so I think the parent's comment of "no wonder Windows kicked their ass so hard" does have a point. Windows 98 feels far more "modern" than this, at least in my opinion.

Also, in response to "Choose shut down, and turn it off with the switch when it told you it was safe to do so." That's what I was asking, where do I choose "shut down"? I expected it to be in the Apple menu but it wasn't there. After searching some more I eventually found it in the "Special" menu, still seems like a weird place for it.

Re: Mac OS 9

#192

Post by Joeri »

asveikau wrote: post #91
mk_stjames wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely understand people like Andreas from SerenityOS and the idea that there was a time that was a peak of GUI simplicity yet usefulness for power users.. In their case it's the Win2K aesthetic but I think OS9 is pretty close to that level of streamlining. As amazing as OSX seemed when it was launched, I partially blame OSX and the whole "make everything round and groovy and graphical goodness" trend that star…

> As amazing as OSX seemed when it was launched This reminds me: There was pretty interesting community of Linux users customizing X11 desktops in the late 90s and the very early 2000s... When the first screenshots and demos of OS X and Aqua came out, almost immediately, people tried to imitate that.

The frustrating part is that OS X was NeXTStep under the covers, and that had the late 90’s look down better than any OS. http://toastytech.com/guis/ns332.html

I ran windowmaker on my linux systems around 2000 to get that same look, but I had serious NeXT envy.

Re: Mac OS 9

#193

Post by klodolph »

retrac wrote: post #139
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.

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.

I think the recommended route is to make a window that fills the screen, rather than taking the entire screen as a GrafPort. If you want the code to be portable, you can make your fullscreen window, draw to an offscreen GWorld, and CopyBits to the window. There’s a whole song and dance that you do in order to make sure that this is fast.

Later on, there was DrawSprocket. It solved the problem of figuring out how to do “portable” and “fast” at the same time, and let you use features like page flipping, if the hardware supported it (saving you the call to CopyBits).

Re: Mac OS 9

#194

Post by SoftTalker »

mk_stjames wrote: post #87
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 completely understand people like Andreas from SerenityOS and the idea that there was a time that was a peak of GUI simplicity yet usefulness for power users.. In their case it's the Win2K aesthetic but I think OS9 is pretty close to that level of streamlining. As amazing as OSX seemed when it was launched, I partially blame OSX and the whole "make everything round and groovy and graphical goodness" trend that star…

I have always felt that Win2K Pro was the pinnacle of the Windows UI.

Re: Mac OS 9

#196

Post by bri3d »

rzzzt wrote: post #118
bri3d wrote: post #5

This is really impressive and goes way above and beyond the normal "emscripten an emulator into a browser" shenanigans. There's seamless file copy in/out, and a really clever setup where accessing the same subdomain as someone else puts you in an AppleTalk zone together. Extremely cool stuff.

If you open the developer console, it is revealed that the experience is provided by SheepShaver, a traditional desktop emulator (packaged presumably with Emscripten) running in the browser. :) The integration portions are pretty nice, no doubt. Edit: https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac#building-the-emulator... reveals that it is indeed built using Emscripten.

Oh sure, I didn't expect it to be a from-scratch emulator, but it's way beyond the usual low-effort "type make and send it" type stuff.

Re: Mac OS 9

#197

Post by bacchusracine »

walrus01 wrote: post #81
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.

> What the hell happened to modern GUIs, man. We peaked in the 1990s. People of this opinion will probably enjoy using the latest version of XFCE4 on a Linux or BSD environment. It's "less terrible" than most other modern GUIs that waste space and are full of bubble shaped smooth looking jellybean UI elements.

>People of this opinion will probably enjoy using the latest version of XFCE4 on a Linux or BSD environment.

Mate desktop might also be something they'd enjoy. I personally recommend the Ubuntu-Mate version since it inherits a lot of the papercut fixes from when it was used in Ubuntu as Gnome 2.x. I was very excited to hear that the lead developer of Ubuntu-Mate was working with Debian to port those changes over.

Re: Mac OS 9

#198

Post by resters »

mk_stjames wrote: post #21
slowmotarget wrote: post #10

It's a great reminder of how well MacOS 9 UI and UX were designed, and how space efficient the whole OS was on screen. Even the window handle bars were subtly shadowed, the window shadows evolved when they were collapsed. Like Windows 95 at the time, Mac OS 9 was a beautiful work of interaction design.

The whole system.. from the sizing of the borders and titlebars to the font and the menu density to the icon sizing, spacing, and design in general... All feels more coherent than anything today. It feels like it was sketched out by a small group of people and executed incredibly well. Meanwhile things today look more disjointed like the product of a lot of design-by-committee. Susan Kare's 'Chicago' in this renderin…

I agree it was a high point for UI/UX logic. The filesystem was part of the OS experience and it generally made sense with little magic going on.

I have wondered in the years since whether the newer abstractions and UI patterns we find in MacOS and Windows are actually necessary. These days both OSes are trying to be tablet friendly, trying to discourage user-installed/curated software, and trying to promote bundled cloud services, so it's not even clear to me whether the MacOS 9 abstractions are really the correct ones anymore, as evidenced by the many problems with cloud backed file explorer interfaces, synchronization, etc.

Re: Mac OS 9

#199

Post by Joeri »

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…

The UIs of both the system and the applications were denser

I’m not so sure about that. The pixel density was lower so apparent size was the same for the “denser” UI. A 14 inch vga monitor in the late 90’s would run 800x600, where a modern 14 inch laptop runs 1920x1080.

Re: Mac OS 9

#200

Post by amadeusz »

klodolph wrote: post #44
slowmotarget wrote: post #10

It's a great reminder of how well MacOS 9 UI and UX were designed, and how space efficient the whole OS was on screen. Even the window handle bars were subtly shadowed, the window shadows evolved when they were collapsed. Like Windows 95 at the time, Mac OS 9 was a beautiful work of interaction design.

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…

Compared to amount of space wasted in modern applications on margins, padding, etc, I would take Mac OS 9 window borders with rest of the interface.

Not to say it was perfect, but overall old computer interfaces were more information dense than todays one.

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