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

theverge.com

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

#81

Post by fortran77 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #54
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. Right but you can differentiate markets. Apple may be 10% worldwide, including Asian markets like India. But what is the market for affluent and influential tech workers in the West? Probably like 95% MacBook Pro. Which market do you think they care more about?

It depends what you mean by "influential"

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

#82

Post by RBerenguel »

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…

I think I have only met one person using Windows for development (recently-ish). All people I know in UK, Spain, France, Germany, and Italy are either Mac or Linux.

Edit: added UK

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

#83

Post by derefr »

cpach wrote: post #63

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

XP was a rewrite of the shell window decorations + controls system, to support drawing these as collections of bitmaps with fonts on top. Likely they were inspired to do this by the fact that macOS was doing things with buttons, modal backgrounds (pinstripe!), etc. that Windows couldn’t do at the time with its hardcoded GDI-draw-call based theming.

Microsoft knew that they wanted the flexibility to be able to do what macOS was doing with theming. But they didn’t have a clear vision of what they were going to use it for. They likely built the theming engine first, and then handed it to their designers to actually come up with a visual identity.

But the new theme engine needed to be tested while it was being built. And what better test, than to see if it can replicate all the things macOS can do that Windows, until then, could not? Probably they considered the theming engine “done” when it reached parity with macOS’s capabilities.

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

#84

Post by ksec »

chrisseaton wrote: post #54
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. Right but you can differentiate markets. Apple may be 10% worldwide, including Asian markets like India. But what is the market for affluent and influential tech workers in the West? Probably like 95% MacBook Pro. Which market do you think they care more about?

>Apple may be 10% worldwide, including Asian markets like India.

Well in 2000 there wasn't much computer in China or India.

Of course today that is a lot different. But if Apple's numbers were correct [] then MacBook Pro market share isn't growing, as a matter of fact MBP usage may be shrinking in the West.

[] For a number of years they claim nearly 50% of Mac buyers are new to the platform. That is nearly 10M per year.

Nearly all of the new Mac users are from China.

And yet their reported Active Mac User dont grow any where near as much.

2019 was also the first year in recent history Apple stopped reporting on Mac user satisfaction.

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

#85

Post by jjoonathan »

II2II wrote: post #77
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.

I think the complaint was more about the article being clickbait than about some jankily borrowed assets used to test theming.

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

#86

Post by raverbashing »

dr_hooo wrote: post #53
raverbashing wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. This memo also applies to some Linux interfaces (usually one that begins with G and ends with ome)

I strongly disagree with your example: Gnome has one of the nicest and consistent designs besides MacOS

It's fine to disagree but my point is with this:

> isn't the design of widgets, but also click behavior, layouts, click paths, description texts, animations, delay after a click ...

Which I find troublesome with Gnome

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

#87

Post by qz2 »

dboreham wrote: post #48
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…

Perhaps he means "in the Bay Area"?

That's about right. Here in the UK you were lucky to see a mac ever back then. A colleague bought the lamp style iMac unit in 2002 and we were quite frankly shocked at it. It was actually a pretty horrid machine compared to our windows 2000 PCs at the time.

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

#88

Post by qz2 »

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.

They'd have to ship just over twice that to touch Lenovo now.

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

#89

Post by qz2 »

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

There were lots of copycat themes for Linux window managers and toolkits around then which looked much worse than this attempt.

I really miss the windows XP theme. It was super clean and consistent compared to the shit show we have now.

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

#90

Post by boomboomsubban »

flohofwoe wrote: post #44
Ayesh wrote: post #6

XP was the peak of desktop customizations. There were "theme packs", one of the most popular being a Vista Theme Pack. The teen in me, with a Nokia 6600 besides the computer, was in awe when a single installation of Vista Theme Pack and rebooting a couple times meant that everything on my 40GB HDD Pentium computer was changed from the login screen to icons, wallpaper, fonts, shell, file copy boxes, disk space meter,…

I'd argue that Linux desktop was always the peak of customization via themes, and today remains the last platform to even allow such customization. Most Linux desktop themes don't look all that great (simply because of the '90% of everything is crap' rule), but there are a few really great ones that are aesthetically much more pleasing than both Win10 and macOS (of course this is very personal and subjective, which m…

It's the peak of customization yet the community is full of people saying "I didn't like GNOME's palette so I use Plasma now." I never know how to respond to those people. If they're happy, whatever, but it feels like most people are unaware themes exist.
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