41–50 of 82 posts
All we ever needed was in Snow Leopard. Everything since then (ok except maybe for SIP and XProtect) is bloatware.
I wonder how much of this sentiment is driven by Apple saying Snow Leopard was taking Leopard and focusing on performance and stability?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. The Platinum UI design holds up extraordinarily well - it had a clear design language which was easy for developers to use and extend.
This is back when they actually did usability testing with people. Now it's whatever slop in every direction.
I get the nostalgia, but boy are computers so much better than back then. MacOS 7-8 (not sure about 9, never used it) would crash constantly. There was no protected memory, so as soon as one app started misbehaving, you'd have to reboot the computer and it would take forever and you'd lose your work. My recollection was that this would typically happen 3-4 times a day. Apple's project to make a new MacOS that didn't…
It was the 90s equivalent of a kernel panic - you'd get a dialog that basically went "the computer is about to explode. click here to restart"
All we ever needed was in Snow Leopard. Everything since then (ok except maybe for SIP and XProtect) is bloatware.
SIP is quite terrible. Requiring an access level higher than root to access system files, and only processes that are signed by Apple and have special entitlements can have that access level? It's my computer, I should be at the top of the permissions totem pole, not Apple. If they're dead set on using signing to enforce the higher-than-root level, then I should be the one signing the executables. Fortunately, you ca…
Here are the instructions to enable logging in as root, since privilege escalation seems inconvenient for you:
Such great work. I'm amazed by the video. I wondered for a moment if they managed to tweak these apps (I'm a bit naive I guess). Never had a Mac but I remember as a kid when I went to a friend who had one. It was so fascinating to me. So weird to be nostalgic of something I never owned or used.
For what it's worth, I feel the same way about the Nintendo 64, and the Mario franchise, etc.
Makes me think that nostalgia requires a certain quality, not just familiarity.
There’s something about the Platinum UI that makes it timeless. I have been running XFCE with a Platinum theme on several of my machines/VMs for a while ( https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330 ) and I’m a bit sad that the XFCE top-level app menu plugin seems to have been deprecated in recent releases, since it really adds to the experience.
The XFCE global menubar plugin being deprecated likely happened because there’s no standardized way for applications on Linux to surface their menus to the environment for display (or to power a Unity-style HUD or whatever), which means that hackery via plugins for GTK and Qt are required to make a global menubar work. Keeping that hackery functional probably is a constant battle. There’s also how GTK apps have been…
It seems that the Stallman-esque "FOSS or die" attracts a lot of people who think about engineering problems more than HCI ones, and there is a vocal subset of "FOSS or die" in every Linux community I've encountered.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a multi-computer user, "Continuity"[1] is magical. Being able to drag my cursor over to my other computer, drop some files, etc, is really great. [1] https://www.apple.com/macos/continuity/
Its performance over wifi is also shockingly close to that of third party KB+mouse sharing software running hardwired which is crazy. Trying to use Synergy, etc over wifi is normally a laggy mess.
The amount of low-latency bandwidth modern computers have available is mindboggling.
All we ever needed was in Snow Leopard. Everything since then (ok except maybe for SIP and XProtect) is bloatware.
SIP is quite terrible. Requiring an access level higher than root to access system files, and only processes that are signed by Apple and have special entitlements can have that access level? It's my computer, I should be at the top of the permissions totem pole, not Apple. If they're dead set on using signing to enforce the higher-than-root level, then I should be the one signing the executables. Fortunately, you ca…
"General purpose computing" is a niche market. Most buyers would be more than content with a machine that lets them run the specific software they need for their specific use cases, and otherwise protects them from executing malicious code. Joanna Rutkowska's "evil maid attack" is a real security threat; and one of the edges that Apple has in the marketplace is being one of the first vendors to design practical, evil-maid-resistant personal computers.