I'll take Puma's System Preferences, pinstripes and all, over what we have today. Blech!
Agreed. I think the new System Preferences was a big step back.
MacOS X 10.1 (2001)
81–90 of 185 posts
Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d vote the opposite on the playful aspect. Todays UIs feel oppressively monotonous and lacking heart.
I miss the textured Aqua days. Peak was Leopard/Snow Leopard. Flat is just so... flat. And boring. And also harder to read, because it's harder to orient yourself in a big textureless area than in a space with some texture in it.
100%. The day I get my chunky aqua scrollbars back, I will shed tears.
Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I miss the textured Aqua days. Peak was Leopard/Snow Leopard. Flat is just so... flat. And boring. And also harder to read, because it's harder to orient yourself in a big textureless area than in a space with some texture in it.
I kind of liked the “brushed metal” texture that could be found in Tiger (10.4): http://toastytech.com/guis/osx14slideshow.png
The “brushed metal means hardware” [0] concept was always something I thought would’ve worked great in practice. Of course apple never really committed to that, and made any window they could look like a slab of aluminum for a while.
But the idea of making a subtle signal that this thing you’re interacting with will have external effects, in the age of MP3 players and digital cameras, was smart.
Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everything after Windows 2000 was ugly. Windows 2000 was the last system in the world with coherent and beautiful UI. Those times are over. We can't have good things.
Have you tried an XFCE environment? With the right theme, it's excellent, in my opinion. A couple examples I picked off the XFCE screenshots page: https://cdn.xfce.org/about/screenshots/4.16-1.png https://cdn.xfce.org/about/screenshots/4.14-1.png
Linux will never be as coherent as Windows is. It's not just about theme. It's about the whole system. Windows was built from GUI. Linux is built from CLI and GUI is just incomplete buggy slap upon CLI tools. With myriad of choices it'll never be comparable.
Linux need some visionary company which will push hard on some sane technical choices without alternatives to provide coherent vision. It would require tremendous resources and it'll cause tremendous resistance from community (just observe how much hate systemd receives and it's still not as convenient as services.msc from Windows 2000). It's unlikely to happen, so that's why I think we won't have good things, because Windows itself lost its vision as well.
Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)
#85> This screen shot shows the login screen. It displays a graphical list of users that can login on this system. (Interestingly Windows XP does something similar) > Being based on BSD Unix, MacOS X inherits many useful unix features such as real security and user accounts. > This means that, for example, you can create a special account for someone else to play games and don't have to worry about them deleting system…
I get this. I started with Windows 98, and it was much easier to mess up the system, but that's how we learnt. Low security invites play.
Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)
#86I was deep into OS explorations in this period. I ran BeOS, Yellow Dog linux on PowerPC, had all flavors of NT, etc. My feeling about OS X at this time was that it was the right choice but that it was "too late" and that Apple took too long and the window of opportunity had passed. I take that now as startup advice: It isn't too late!
OS X was a bet on the future, that double buffering everything was OK because graphic cards would get there eventually. They certainly did, but we suffered through menus taking a good fraction of a second to drop down for a few years. I can still feel the pain. I would never have taken that bet. I want computers to be fast now . It was the right bet.
Another hard decision that was the right choice in retrospect was going with KHTML. I remember watching the keynote and waiting for them to announce it was based on Gecko. Camino had shown it was possible and worked well. Apple had hired David Hyatt. It was obvious they would go with Gecko.
There was an audible gasp when they announced it was based on KHTML. What the %^&$ is KHTML?
Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d vote the opposite on the playful aspect. Todays UIs feel oppressively monotonous and lacking heart.
I miss the textured Aqua days. Peak was Leopard/Snow Leopard. Flat is just so... flat. And boring. And also harder to read, because it's harder to orient yourself in a big textureless area than in a space with some texture in it.
It got to a point with Apple where I had to tell my mother, "just tap everything... there's really no indicator if anything's a button anymore". While material/flat can look pretty, it is counterintuitive to communication. I'm sure Jony Ive read "The Design of Everyday Things" at some point in his career. Perhaps he got to a point where he decided that didn't apply?
Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)
#88I was deep into OS explorations in this period. I ran BeOS, Yellow Dog linux on PowerPC, had all flavors of NT, etc. My feeling about OS X at this time was that it was the right choice but that it was "too late" and that Apple took too long and the window of opportunity had passed. I take that now as startup advice: It isn't too late!
I need to remember to remind myself of this more often!
The one I remember so clearly is back when I was using Pidgin (or Adium I think was another thing I used?) with a few different messaging apps, and my company was trying to figure out how to make chat work, maintaining an irc server that we of course couldn't get the non-nerds to use, looking at HipChat and a couple others that seemed really expensive for their feature set at the time. Basically none of this stuff supported mobile well.
This was 2008, maybe 2009. I remember thinking "this all sucks, but it's waaaay too late to make a chat app; I've been using IM apps for over a decade, totally saturated and commoditized".
But then I watched the rise of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Slack, all of which were tiny or non-existent at the time, and became gigantic businesses.
Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It still looks fresh and modern, although maybe a bit too playful so that it appears a bit childish? The aesthetics is called „Frutiger Aero“. Lots of colors and especially of blue, lots of transparency effects and fake light reflections. It all is inspired by natural landscapes with blue skies or blue water surfaces. Also skeuomorphisms everywhere. Windows 7 could be called the pinnacle of the use of Frutiger Aero…
> I wonder what will be next or are we going to stick with heartless, cold metal designs forever? CARI has probably cataloged it already. Apple is already going all in on colorful aesthetics recently, not sure if it will spread into hardware. https://cari.institute/aesthetics
> not sure if it will spread into hardware
Already has for most of their devices (iPhone and iPhone Pro, iPad and iPad Air, iMac, HomePod). Their pro computers only come in one/two colors, which is understandable since their low volume would create an inventory nightmare if available in half a dozen colors.
Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you tried an XFCE environment? With the right theme, it's excellent, in my opinion. A couple examples I picked off the XFCE screenshots page: https://cdn.xfce.org/about/screenshots/4.16-1.png https://cdn.xfce.org/about/screenshots/4.14-1.png
Linux will never be as coherent as Windows is. It's not just about theme. It's about the whole system. Windows was built from GUI. Linux is built from CLI and GUI is just incomplete buggy slap upon CLI tools. With myriad of choices it'll never be comparable. Linux need some visionary company which will push hard on some sane technical choices without alternatives to provide coherent vision. It would require tremendou…
> It's not just about theme. It's about the whole system.
Ahh. In that case, yes, I think you're probably right :)