MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

> Although, OS X was painful for many years.

I guess it depends on how you define "many". I bought my first Mac in 1998 (the "Smurf" G3) and used MacOS 8/9 for quite a few years after that. I remember looking forward to OS X once they announced it—it was literally the coolest shit ever. Like, the ability to run Photoshop and Emacs on the same system at the same time? Wow, was that cool.

There was definitely a period where you had to dual-boot between MacOS 9 and OS X for a while, but by the time I bought my first iBook in 2002, OS X was the standard, and was way better than anything else out there. I don't think I ever booted into MacOS 9 on my iBook, except for shits and giggles.

I just don't think there was any question that OS X was leaps and bounds better than OS 9, to the point where when I had to use OS 9 for work 4-5 years later (the video editing world always lags 5-6 years behind the rest of us) I was a little bit peeved about having to used such an antiquated system that literally had no modern web browser support except for something called "iCab".

Anyway, all of this is to say… I wouldn't call 1-2 years, at the most, "many".

Yes, based on the NeXTSTEP roots, everything should be object oriented. Think of it like visual copy/paste. Pretty much every on screen item should have a meaning and relationship to everything else.

For example, in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5o5liZxnA at 35:00 you can see how an application is loaded from the network and a live chart dragged from one app to another. That isn't a one-off gimmick, it's how the OS and that version of Objective C worked.

I bought a Macbook because I was excited by this idea, but I quickly realized it was not even surface deep. I could drag some on screen elements around, but it was inconsistent at best.

But I guess there was a conflict with Raskin's idea of making everything resemble a real world equivalent (object as in "toaster app," rather than decomposed feature of "can toast") and they wanted to let third party applications do their own thing. If the whole OS (and network) was effectively the application, what's their product? Never let profound world changing innovation get in the way of a trillion dollar company, I guess.

I think of it, in my muddle headed imagineering way, this way: https://wiki.zooid.org/wiki/20120407/Raskin_vs_Engelbart

I suppose by now we would think of it all as a graph rather than OO, just add coordinates (and the required couple decades of cultural development of how they would relate) and you've got your spatial interface.

If one took the version of Aqua from Mavericks and restored aqua scrollbars (it had flat gray pill scrollbars similar to what’s in macOS now), that would be the most perfect iteration of the look in my opinion.

Tiger’s Aqua comes in second, and Leopard/Snow Leopard’s third. I never really liked the ubiquitous dark grays found in 10.5/10.6, it felt kinda gloomy in the same way Win95/98 did relative to Win2K (also due to darker grays).

As I recall, the main issue with the earliest versions of OS X is that they were slow, somewhat unstable, and would occasionally do really weird things (like how on my summer 2000 iMac DV, OS X 10.0.x once randomly decided it wasn’t going to draw the cursor any more and had to be reinstalled before it was fixed). This led me to spend a fair amount of time booted into OS 9 with an Aqua Kaleidoscope scheme applied and SmoothType installed for that luxe OS X style text rendering.

10.1 made things a little more stable but wasn’t revolutionary.

10.2 Jaguar on the other hand… holy cow. It was so much faster and more stable on my iMac it was absurd. The speed gap was still there but nowhere near as dramatic, making it a lot more usable. This is where I went almost full time booted OS X outside of the odd random thing that didn’t play nice with Classic.

The best thing about Luna is that its existence necessitated a capable theme engine, which enabled a vibrant ecosystem of third party .msstyle themes. Some of those were very well designed and a joy to use.

Aero, or at least the slightly toned down Windows 7 version of it was better than Luna, but similarly to me the bigger benefit it brought was the more capable theme engine. There were a lot of awesome third party .msstyles for it too.

I’ll forever resent Windows 8 for ripping out that nice theme engine in favor of one barely more capable than what shipped in Windows 1.x.