I want to zap the pram and fire up Myst.
Mac OS 9
261–270 of 356 posts
Re: Mac OS 9
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Doesn't a "14-inch" CRT monitor have a smaller viewable area? I remember LGR saying that at least. So, 800x600 at 13" yields 76.92 dpi.
The once extremely common 1280x1024 19" monitors are 86.27 dpi.
My modern 14" laptop has a resolution of 3024x1964@2x. That's an effective resolution of 1512x982. And it's 128.78 dpi, ignoring the retina thing. But then the thing to keep in mind is that you usually sit closer to a laptop screen than to a monitor. I have no trouble reading 11px font on that screen from my usual viewing distance.
And yes there is an issue with some Windows laptop manufacturers shipping their laptops without the correct DPI set in the system, thus everything becoming way too small with default settings, and thus designers designing those gigantic UIs to compensate for that.
Re: Mac OS 9
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s interesting: my recollection of that period was I rarely stored anything on the desktop. The file system was so much smaller and easier to handle that I stored things in folders and didn’t have trouble finding them again. Not until OS X did I pick up the desktop-as-staging-area habit because navigation was so painful.
Finder aided this by being spacial. If you moved a window, then closed it, it stayed there the next time you opened it. If you moved a folder or file icon around it similarly stayed where you put it when you next opened up the window.
Exactly. And the muscle memory you built over time made you open and click through folders extremely fast.
But I don’t know if it would scale to the terabytes of today.
Re: Mac OS 9
#264It'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.
I love the purple color used in the "Platinum" interface theme in Mac OS 8/9, even the scrollbar is purple: https://i.imgur.com/WwFdpJH.png They even offered a crazy "Memphis" art themed option: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSLWbFUG_ig "High-tech" wasn't very pretty either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBUgDnPT8Ps https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Appearance_Manage...
There was Drawing Board which I found exquisite, but as a work of art, not for everyday usage.
Re: Mac OS 9
#265I'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…
so cool, thanks for making this! Love that you have escape velocity!
Re: Mac OS 9
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love the purple color used in the "Platinum" interface theme in Mac OS 8/9, even the scrollbar is purple: https://i.imgur.com/WwFdpJH.png They even offered a crazy "Memphis" art themed option: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSLWbFUG_ig "High-tech" wasn't very pretty either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBUgDnPT8Ps https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Appearance_Manage...
There was Drawing Board which I found exquisite, but as a work of art, not for everyday usage. https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/2-jpg.330369/ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KOEMz_saHCE
That is quite nice from a purely visual perspective.
Re: Mac OS 9
#267I'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…
This is really great. I can't seem to get sound working on Firefox, though.
Re: Mac OS 9
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wi…
HyperCard did some particularly weird things to draw to the screen quickly on older machines. If you try dragging a HyperCard stack window around, you'll notice that its horizontal position is quantized to 8-pixel increments, probably to accelerate drawing on low-bit-depth displays. :)
Yes, that’s something you’ll need to do if you want to stay on the fast path :-)
The Motorola 68000 does not have a barrel shifter. You want to shift by 4 bits? That’s four cycles, buddy! Avoiding shifts keeps you on the fast path for CopyBits().
Re: Mac OS 9
#269Earlier 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…
If they’re anything like this, almost none of your frustrations are going to be objective - they are going to be things that grate on you because of the design and interaction models you are used to. There’s nothing wrong with that! You’re allowed to prefer particular approaches. It’s like when I use Windows or Ubuntu, and get frustrated at how particular interactions work. It’s not because the Mac is objectively bet…
>Distinct control/option/command
Way too much cognitive load. Just have a single "ctrl". Coupled with shift, that's more than enough for most hotkeys.
Re: Mac OS 9
#270I'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…
so cool, thanks for making this! Love that you have escape velocity!
I immediately checked for EV and was stoked to see it!! I haven’t played that game in decades…so many good memories. SOL?