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Infinite Mac

macos8.app

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Re: Infinite Mac

#81

Post by makerofspoons »

gr33nq wrote: post #25

This took me on a trip down memory lane back to my days in elementary school. I recall our class going to the computer lab once a week and having an hour to spend on an iMac G3, of which some were on OS8 and others OS9. Going back even further to kindergarten, our logins on those Macs were forced to use a simplified UI that displayed only icons/tiles of applications -- no browsing files or anything sophisticated from…

Now if only someone could replicate the fan noise and that old computer smell.

Re: Infinite Mac

#84

Post by OnlyMortal »

Heh. I’ve still got a G4 PowerBook and can run Clsssic. Not that I’ve tried in many a year.

The OSX on it seems still pretty spritely today though I’ve obviously had to get the FireFox back port branch to be able to use a browser.

Re: Infinite Mac

#85

Post by xvolter »

dkonofalski wrote: post #80
moth-fuzz wrote: post #69

What does one have to do to get as clear and pretty of a UI as that on the modern desktop OSes? Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out. Of course you can always run dwm on linux with a hodgepodge of makeshift utility apps, write your own keybinds to set your brightness and volume and other such inanities, but in order to g…

>Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out. That makes no sense. Bitmaps have a fixed pixel density while vectors are infinitely scalable.

Sounds like he used to be younger and needs to see an optometrist.

Re: Infinite Mac

#86

Post by JKCalhoun »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #38

When I look at this I think how these old UIs like MacOS, windows 95 or 2000 were designed for clarity and usability. And how things have gone downhill since then. I really miss easily distinguishable UI elements.

I'm of two minds.

The Mac famously had User Interface Guidelines that tried to keep everything consistent. I loved it and, like you, miss it.

But then designers came along and we got drawers (and then we lost the drawers), editable toolbars, brushed metal (and then not), etc...

The point at which I called bullshit was when Safari combined the URL text field with the loading progress bar. I disagreed with the design and said so — it looked to me like the URL was being text-selected as the page loaded. (Ah well, it appears to be gone now anyway.)

But I digress. I had begun to consider that users are now more comfortable with inconsistent UI with the ubiquity of the Web. That has perhaps freed designers to try random stuff on a per-app basis and not adhere so religiously to User Interface Guidelines.

But, yeah, it made life easier for developers too.

Re: Infinite Mac

#87

Post by OnlyMortal »

jbverschoor wrote: post #13

You know what's nice? The 13" (rescaled) 4:3 screen is easier to read than my current setup. Also, the menu's are nice and short. Very focus. I totally understand how I, and many people in the past, were able to pump out huge amounts of code in a week

Menus are supposed to have 7 +/- 2 items. Inside Macintosh Volume 1, if memory serves.

Re: Infinite Mac

#89

Post by m_eiman »

moth-fuzz wrote: post #69

What does one have to do to get as clear and pretty of a UI as that on the modern desktop OSes? Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out. Of course you can always run dwm on linux with a hodgepodge of makeshift utility apps, write your own keybinds to set your brightness and volume and other such inanities, but in order to g…

> now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out.

Use a high-DPI screen, for starters.

Re: Infinite Mac

#90

Post by shadowgovt »

dkonofalski wrote: post #80
moth-fuzz wrote: post #69

What does one have to do to get as clear and pretty of a UI as that on the modern desktop OSes? Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out. Of course you can always run dwm on linux with a hodgepodge of makeshift utility apps, write your own keybinds to set your brightness and volume and other such inanities, but in order to g…

>Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out. That makes no sense. Bitmaps have a fixed pixel density while vectors are infinitely scalable.

Back in the day, the fixed pixel density of the bitmaps was 1-to-1 aligned with the pixel density of the monitors. Every line was crisp and clean because there was no antialiasing across partial pixels.

The world in which we now live allows for a lot more crispness when it matters (because the pixel density approaches indistinguishable-by-the-human-eye-at-viewing-distance), but with the tradeoff that UIs designed to work at whatever scale on whatever monitor with whatever DPI do a lot of aliasing, and things tend to look, sometimes, just a tad muddier. Especially when vectorized icons get drawn in a rendering pipe that passes through the graphics accelerator.

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