Mac OS 9 • Hacker News Board

Re: Mac OS 9

#21

Post by mk_stjames » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 5:31 PM UTC

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 rendering hits hard in the nostalgia factor to me a well.

Re: Mac OS 9

#22

Post by winrid » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 5:31 PM UTC

Amazing that this boots faster in Chrome on my phone than it did on my laptop in the day.

Re: Mac OS 9

#23

Post by sph » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 5:31 PM UTC

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.

Re: Mac OS 9

#24

Post by lostgame » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 5:31 PM UTC

johnthuss wrote: post #4

This is awesome! I still love the look of the Finder from this era, and I love that this has the Window Shade extension turned on too.

WindowShade was amaaaazing. There was something that - for a while, was an OSX equivalent…I want to say ‘ShapeShifter’(?) - but it only worked for versions from like 10.2-10.4.

Re: Mac OS 9

#25

Post by heywire » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 5:31 PM UTC

jdlyga wrote: post #18

Brings me back to being a kid playing with Mac OS making folders and colorizing them with labels. This was the first time in my life I ever heard the word "essential" and had no idea what it meant. I used to pronounce it like "assess natal".

I have some words like this too. I still read archive as arch-ive in my head all these years later. Native speaker too, just wasn’t a word I heard a lot when I was younger I guess.

Re: Mac OS 9

#26

Post by kitsunesoba » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 5:33 PM UTC

Seems like it's not running at the highest bit depth, or something funky with the emulator is causing the Finder to display low bit depth icons. On a real machine and on qemu-ppc on my machine OS 9 displays icons that are more shaded and detailed.

Impressive that it runs in a web browser, but it seems that it has some quirks.

Re: Mac OS 9

#27

Post by Cockbrand » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 5:36 PM UTC

Oh man, it's even got the "Grouch" extension for the Trash Can. Can't install it on Chrome/Mac, though, as it can't be read.

Still, very very nice! And as others have pointed out, the UI/UX design is immaculately well thought out, discoverable and very clean.

Re: Mac OS 9

#28

Post by smallstepforman » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 5:38 PM UTC

johnthuss wrote: post #13

Civilization 1 runs! I played this for SO many hours back then. I loved that game so much. This VM locked up after 100 turns or so, but man, this really brings me back.

Whatever you do, dont attack Spearmen with a battleship.

Re: Mac OS 9

#29

Post by DrBenCarson » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 5:39 PM UTC

Really cool. Is this running in Web Assembly?

Re: Mac OS 9

#30

Post by rocketbop » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 5:40 PM UTC

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.

Me too. I think it's because Macs were around when I was a child, and they seemed to represent all the possibility of the future. At the turn of the 90s I connected to bulletin boards before I'd heard of the internet, and it seemed like whatever sci-fi future was ahead of me, these machines were pointing the way.