Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft had a secret Windows XP theme that made it look like a Mac

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 118 posts

Re: Microsoft had a secret Windows XP theme that made it look like a Mac

#71

Post by sokoloff »

unnouinceput wrote: post #55
marbletiles wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of it as "rivalry", perhaps. Think of a mass-market car company that outsells a luxury brands 5x or 10x but whose designers still swipe ideas from them.

Rivalry? In 2001? When only 2 years earlier Billy boy had to buy Apple's shares to keep them afloat? I know Billy boy did that to get off the hook with US govt., not like he was any saint - but from that to "rivalry" is a tall order.

“Billy boy” adds nothing and IMO detracts from what is otherwise a good point.

Re: Microsoft had a secret Windows XP theme that made it look like a Mac

#72

Post by shawnz »

solarkraft wrote: post #33

Mac OS wasn't this ugly. Seriously: You can't just incorporate some design element and go "see, it looks like X". It won't. What most people making software seem to miss is that software look & feel isn't the design of widgets, but also click behavior, layouts, click paths, description texts, animations, delay after a click ... /tangentially related rant

Yes, obviously the complete finished product of Mac OS looked better than this half-finished "programmer art" demonstration that never even shipped. What were you expecting?

Re: Microsoft had a secret Windows XP theme that made it look like a Mac

#73

Post by rbanffy »

unnouinceput wrote: post #46

Quote: "Microsoft was developing Windows XP during an era when there was fierce competition with Apple over desktop operating systems" I'm sorry, what? Talk about joke of the week. Apple never had desktop world bigger than 10% as market share. Not even today when it's at the highest peak ever, and in 2001 they were more like 1%. Sorry to burst your bubble Tom Warren, you do realize US is like 35 people out of 800. As…

> Apple never had desktop world bigger than 10% as market share.

And that would make Apple the single largest PC manufacturer.

Re: Microsoft had a secret Windows XP theme that made it look like a Mac

#74

Post by ziml77 »

cpach wrote: post #63

I don’t really understand why they did this though…? For inspiration…?

Probably a dev having fun showing off what theming can do. I could see myself doing that if I needed an internal example of how much the themes could change.

Re: Microsoft had a secret Windows XP theme that made it look like a Mac

#75

Post by jeroenhd »

SammyNameTaken wrote: post #2

this is likely some Microsoft's employee's uncredited work, like most windows components

It's a theme from the Windows XP source code leak. Obviously it's going to be uncredited; it was never intended to be seen outside Microsoft. This was probably a developer messing with the theme engine to see what it could do and to test its limits.

Re: Microsoft had a secret Windows XP theme that made it look like a Mac

#76

Post by jack_pp »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #64
chrisseaton wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Europe myself and it's MacBook Pros where I live. And I go to conferences all around the world and all I see is MacBook Pros everywhere. > And I wouldn't call tech workers here as influential, not at all. Tech works who influence other tech workers. This is important because if everyone you see speaking at conferences is using a MacBook, and all the software available is for MacBooks, then other people are…

By Europe I meant continental Europe, no the UK. The UK is heavily US influenced so there it's more popular. And by devs I mean all SW devs, not just Web Devs who seem to heavily favor Macs. Conferences are not relevant as they mostly draw huge enthusiasts/geeks of various niches who are very self conscious about their perceived status there(since you go there to network) and don't want to be judged by their high-val…

Enthusiasts that consider Linux plebian over Macs? You mean fanboys.

I consider myself much more elite with my 500$ refurb thinkpad running Linux with i3 than anyone I would ever see owning a Mac. And it's far easier to show off with a machine only very few even know how to use.

Re: Microsoft had a secret Windows XP theme that made it look like a Mac

#77

Post by II2II »

solarkraft wrote: post #33

Mac OS wasn't this ugly. Seriously: You can't just incorporate some design element and go "see, it looks like X". It won't. What most people making software seem to miss is that software look & feel isn't the design of widgets, but also click behavior, layouts, click paths, description texts, animations, delay after a click ... /tangentially related rant

The article suggests that it was being used to test theming. In other words, it was not intended to ship. It is probable that it would be shot down if anyone proposed shipping it. (Why elicit a lawsuit from a competitor over something trivial?)

Given that, why would they go to the effort or recreating the whole visual appearance. The actual "feel" part was unlikely to be within the scope of the project.

Re: Microsoft had a secret Windows XP theme that made it look like a Mac

#78

Post by jeroenhd »

wodenokoto wrote: post #58
Arainach wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being close but not identical causes confusion and frustration. A radically different UI sets expectations that things don't work the same. A skin can't change the fact that Mac is document-centric and Windows is program-centric. It's similar to Linux window managers - things that try to copy Windows exactly inevitably cause frustration when certain behaviors (hovering over taskbar icons, dragging to edges) or keyboa…

> A skin can't change the fact that Mac is document-centric and Windows is program-centric. I would have said that windows is window centric and macOS is application-centric. On windows you alt-tab between windows and on MacOS you alt-tab between applications and alt-~ between windows inside the currently selected application.

Is that where GNOME got their idiotic alt+tab behaviour from? I absolutely hate having to use two shortcuts in sequence to switch to a specific window. Thankfully it's easy to correct the shortcuts but I still don't get what person would want this behaviour.

Re: Microsoft had a secret Windows XP theme that made it look like a Mac

#79

Post by pedrosorio »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #64
chrisseaton wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Europe myself and it's MacBook Pros where I live. And I go to conferences all around the world and all I see is MacBook Pros everywhere. > And I wouldn't call tech workers here as influential, not at all. Tech works who influence other tech workers. This is important because if everyone you see speaking at conferences is using a MacBook, and all the software available is for MacBooks, then other people are…

By Europe I meant continental Europe, no the UK. The UK is heavily US influenced so there it's more popular. And by devs I mean all SW devs, not just Web Devs who seem to heavily favor Macs. Conferences are not relevant as they mostly draw huge enthusiasts/geeks of various niches who are very self conscious about their perceived status there(since you go there to network) and don't want to be judged by their high-val…

> Conferences are not relevant as they mostly draw huge enthusiasts/geeks of various niches who are very self conscious

This doesn’t sound like a fair rebuttal to me.

> as the bean counters couldn't justify to management the extra cost

This is the simple explanation for why people don’t use Macs, and reflects a key difference between the tech industry in the US (Bay Area in particular) and Europe.

Re: Microsoft had a secret Windows XP theme that made it look like a Mac

#80

Post by Zenst »

rbanffy wrote: post #73
unnouinceput wrote: post #46

Quote: "Microsoft was developing Windows XP during an era when there was fierce competition with Apple over desktop operating systems" I'm sorry, what? Talk about joke of the week. Apple never had desktop world bigger than 10% as market share. Not even today when it's at the highest peak ever, and in 2001 they were more like 1%. Sorry to burst your bubble Tom Warren, you do realize US is like 35 people out of 800. As…

> Apple never had desktop world bigger than 10% as market share. And that would make Apple the single largest PC manufacturer.

Depends upon how you define Personal Computer and what time-frame you look at.

So if you define a personal computer as a computer people use for personal tasks as a tool, then a mobile phone fits that. In that definition and if you look at all the years history wise, It does look like Nokia have sold the most computers for personal use. At least going by the numbers sold per manufacturer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph... and mobiles selling way more than other forms of computers.

Post reply on HN