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slowmotarget | 3 years ago

It's a great reminder of how well MacOS 9 UI and UX were designed, and how space efficient the whole OS was on screen.

Even the window handle bars were subtly shadowed, the window shadows evolved when they were collapsed. Like Windows 95 at the time, Mac OS 9 was a beautiful work of interaction design.

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mk_stjames|3 years ago

The whole system.. from the sizing of the borders and titlebars to the font and the menu density to the icon sizing, spacing, and design in general...

All feels more coherent than anything today. It feels like it was sketched out by a small group of people and executed incredibly well. Meanwhile things today look more disjointed like the product of a lot of design-by-committee.

Susan Kare's 'Chicago' in this rendering hits hard in the nostalgia factor to me a well.

Cockbrand|3 years ago

I'll be that guy... the system font for menus, etc in OS 8 and 9 is "Geneva" [EDIT: It's "Charcoal", of course. Thanks for the heads up!]. It was "Chicago" up to and including System 7.x.

I do agree on all other points :)

resters|3 years ago

I agree it was a high point for UI/UX logic. The filesystem was part of the OS experience and it generally made sense with little magic going on.

I have wondered in the years since whether the newer abstractions and UI patterns we find in MacOS and Windows are actually necessary. These days both OSes are trying to be tablet friendly, trying to discourage user-installed/curated software, and trying to promote bundled cloud services, so it's not even clear to me whether the MacOS 9 abstractions are really the correct ones anymore, as evidenced by the many problems with cloud backed file explorer interfaces, synchronization, etc.

ralphc|3 years ago

I have several Macs that run OS 9, I pull them out just to use the UI at times, I enjoy it so much. It all flows and works together so well.

klodolph|3 years ago

Sure, but—

The fat borders for the windows and the control strip at the bottom left of the screen took up a lot of space on real monitors of the era. Try running at a more modest 800x600 or 640x480 and it will seem less efficient. Modern Mac OS X is actually quite efficient, with zero-pixel window borders on three sides, and narrower scroll bars.

Worse, a bunch of applications had code that would set up window locations with the assumption that the window borders were 1 pixel wide, like they were prior to Mac OS 8. This often meant that controls which were supposed to be visible would be partially covered by another window’s border.

I remember the Mac OS 8 era as a bit of “excess” that got cleaned up somewhat with the arrival of Mac OS X.

On the other hand, Mac OS 8 came with a fresh batch of standardized widgets (Appearance Manager) which made all the apps look better. These widgets came with guidelines for how they should be sized and placed, something which is missing from a lot of modern UI toolkits.

amadeusz|3 years ago

Compared to amount of space wasted in modern applications on margins, padding, etc, I would take Mac OS 9 window borders with rest of the interface.

Not to say it was perfect, but overall old computer interfaces were more information dense than todays one.

david422|3 years ago

Not a fan of the new trend of zero window borders. I wish there was at least a way to make them customizable.

outworlder|3 years ago

Yes, but also keep in mind that the pointing devices in use were very primitive compared to what we have today and that many users were not as proficient. All contemporary operating systems had thick borders and some had very prominent resizing handles.

azinman2|3 years ago

You say that but I’ve recently been programming an app in system 7, which isn’t totally dissimilar to 9 in UX, and I keep thinking “wow how did I ever use this.” Windows constantly occluding each other, no easy way to switch between them outside of the mouse, finder windows filled with grids that I have to scroll through, no easy way to just see the desktop, etc. Current macOS is miles ahead in usability.

eyesee|3 years ago

It’s interesting: my recollection of that period was I rarely stored anything on the desktop. The file system was so much smaller and easier to handle that I stored things in folders and didn’t have trouble finding them again. Not until OS X did I pick up the desktop-as-staging-area habit because navigation was so painful.

dmix|3 years ago

I love the purple color used in the "Platinum" interface theme in Mac OS 8/9, even the scrollbar is purple:

https://i.imgur.com/WwFdpJH.png

They even offered a crazy "Memphis" art themed option: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSLWbFUG_ig "High-tech" wasn't very pretty either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBUgDnPT8Ps

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Appearance_Manage...

munificent|3 years ago

I love that color too. Fun trivia that I discovered doing pixel art way back then: That color is blue.

It appears purplish, but it's actually a desaturated blue with hue right at 240°. Something about the lack of saturation and brightness gives it a purplish cast.

JonathonW|3 years ago

None of the alternate themes actually made it into a final release of Mac OS; just Platinum.

There was a fairly healthy third-party theming community, though, and the Apple-developed themes (Memphis, High-Tech, and a sketch-styled theme called Drawing Board) would still work if you got your hands on them.

oaiey|3 years ago

I came here to say the opposite: The folder icons ... a mess. Dynamic spacing depending how long the folder name is, free style sorting, "arranging", ... that is a lot of things but not a folder system ;) .. maybe a "desktop" folder ... but not a structural archiving system.

I was a macOS 9 user before I switched to Windows ... and I have to say: I had a fonder memory of it than what I see in this emulation. All operating systems came a long way since. But hey, it is 20 years, is not it.

toasteros|3 years ago

Are there any decent implementations of this UI for Linux?

retrac|3 years ago

You could theme some window manager, but it's not the same. It'd be a tough project! The Mac UI was holistic. Early on, it didn't even make much of a distinction between application and operating system. Just getting the menu bar right (shared between OS and application) when every program has its own idea on how to present a menu would be a major challenge. Applications really do need to be designed for the classic Mac environment. Back in the day software was almost never ported directly, but had to be substantially redesigned for the Mac.

asveikau|3 years ago

It's not maintained, but a few years ago I was feeling nostalgic and playing with "mlvwm", the mac-like virtual window manager, a project from the late 90s.

At least a small amount of C knowledge is sometimes helpful for getting those old projects working. Sometimes a new compiler or new libc will expose old bugs.

My experience with old window managers is they need tweaks to work reasonably on modern high dpi displays.

Iirc mlvwm builds with imake, which is positively ancient. It's the build tool that X.org got rid of after taking over from XFree86.

WirelessGigabit|3 years ago

Except for the lack of a proper fullscreen function...

philistine|3 years ago

Believe it or not, full screen apps are a Windows thing. Apple has added full screen app support only recently, and any Windows convert who has switched to macOS and has problems adapting to its UI has one thing in common: they haven’t let go of the idea that all apps need to use the whole screen at all times.

musicale|3 years ago

> Except for the lack of a proper fullscreen function...

What do you mean by this?

How did screen savers and games work?

truetraveller|3 years ago

Mac UX is far worse compared to Windows, in my opinion. I feel very claustrophobic using it. How do you live without a simple maximize button? "Maximimze to contents" is ambiguous, and in practice, does not work at all for most apps. I find myself having to "manually" maximize windows. And now, I don't want a third party app.

To add to this, even after I "maximimze" windows, I have an ugly menu bar at the top, in addition to the windows own titlebar. Allow apps to have a menu in their own window, but don't force an ugly global menu. For the clock/systray, integrate it like windows in the bottom app bar.

I could keep listing frustrations. Many of these are objective.

Note: I'm not talking about app installation, or malware, or "polish". Mac is superior, will agree.

philwelch|3 years ago

> How do you live without a simple maximize button?

Classic Mac OS apps did not put the entire application UI in a single full screen window. Instead, it was typical for an application to contain multiple windows that could all be visible at once.

> To add to this, the "top" menu bar is lame.

This is related. In Windows, the entire UI of the app is contained in a single window, which you would typically maximize to fill the screen. In classic Mac OS, apps have multiple windows open at the same time, but the menu bar pertains to the application and not to the window.

matthewmacleod|3 years ago

If they’re anything like this, almost none of your frustrations are going to be objective - they are going to be things that grate on you because of the design and interaction models you are used to.

There’s nothing wrong with that! You’re allowed to prefer particular approaches. It’s like when I use Windows or Ubuntu, and get frustrated at how particular interactions work. It’s not because the Mac is objectively better, but because I’m used to it.

(Except for the keyboard shortcuts. Distinct control/option/command keys is objectively better and I will die on this hill.)

deergomoo|3 years ago

> How do you live without a simple maximize button?

Why would I want a webpage which stops showing additional content after ~1200 pixels wide to take up the entire of my 2560px wide monitor?

bodge5000|3 years ago

I only started using MacOS a few months ago. For the first ~2 weeks, I hated it. I actually remember thinking that it felt like a poorly implemented clone of MacOS ironically. But the truth is, whilst you can jump between Windows and most Linux distros (even Fedora) without much trouble, MacOS is an entirely different beast.

For example, I learnt that, completely different than Windows, on MacOS you're not really supposed to minimise windows, at least not as you would on Windows. Instead, you open the command centre or whatever its called and switch between them. Workspaces also arent an optional extra, they're pretty crucial to using the OS if you have multiple windows open. Its for these reasons I can see why people praise the trackpad so much, its actually preferable to use over a mouse because its so deeply embedded in the flow of the OS.

I'm not saying MacOS is objectively better in its workflow, for that I'm still not sure what I'll end up using as my main computer, just that its different and should be treated as such.

amelius|3 years ago

Apple isn't so great. For example why aren't Copy and Paste separate or specifically marked keys and do we have to use Cmd+C and Cmd+V? Same for Undo/Redo, etc. This is stuff any UX student can figure out.

acdha|3 years ago

Separate keys have challenges: in addition to the extra cost, you need to find physical space and train people to look for and use them. The original designers wanted to make it efficient for people who were already typing and as you might have noticed those keys are all close together and convenient for one-handed use:

> Why the Z X C V keys? — They were close on the keyboard. We did X because it was a cross out (CUT). We did V because it pointed down like this [he makes a ‘V’ shape with his hands], and you were inserting; it was like an upside-down caret (PASTE). And Z was the closest one, because we figured you’d UNDO a lot. And C for COPY — that was easy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW-atKrg0T4 via http://morrick.me/archives/8432