[felixding]

The UI looks so good. Why can’t we have good looking things anymore?

I spent hours each month looking for a way to bring back Aqua on Mac or Linux through theming or alternative DE but nothing comes close to the real thing.

If one day I have enough money I’ll just start work on a new DE to faithfully recreate Aqua. One can dream.

[jeroenhd]

Recreating Aqua is the easy part. Recreating all the applications you would use day-to-day to fit the design language specified by Aqua is another. Apple's visual OS design was never that far ahead of the curve, but they managed to convince developers for their platform to stick to their guidelines rather than reinvent the wheel, making the entire computer feel more like one integrated system than a toolbox filled with differently branded tools.

This is also why most "windows style" themes fall flat: you can copy the window decorations, button backgrounds, and icons, but unless your applications are designed to look and work like the OS your mimicking, it'll all just look weird and off.

At this point "operating systems" in a commercial sense are so large that only relatively new entries can afford to rebuild their stock applications to fit the current UI theme (ChromeOS comes pretty close but you'd need to appreciate Google's design to enjoy that). macOS, Windows, and even Linux to some extent all have decades of old software to support so they can't redesign their core GUI stack without breaking everything.

In the days that an internet browser wasn't considered a core part of the operating system, there just weren't as many places to get the design wrong or off-template without Q&A noticing.

[overfeed]

> they managed to convince developers for their platform to stick to their guidelines rather than reinvent the wheel, making the entire computer feel more like one integrated system than a toolbox filled with differently branded tools.

Browsing the web on non-Apple platforms was annoying for a few years, with web designers aping the skeuomorphic design-language of whatever the then-current MacOS X release was. Besides cargo-culting, there was no justifiable reason for brushed aluminum or linen web page backgrounds, though I'm sure it looked really great on the designers Apple computer. If you, dear reader, did this when you were younger, I hope you have grown as a person and a designer.

> [...] unless your applications are designed to look and work like the OS your mimicking, it'll all just look weird and off.

Exactly!

[alexpotato]

> but they managed to convince developers for their platform to stick to their guidelines rather than reinvent the wheel

This attention to detail and "one integrated system" leads me to my favorite MacOS story:

- Windows and Linux machines would always DHCP for IP addresses

- MacOS would see if you had connected to the network before and just reuse the old IP you had under the assumption that is was probably still valid

- This worked most of the time and if you turned on a Mac and Windows laptop at the same time, the Mac would have a working IP first

As someone pointed out, this was probably one of the reasons why MacOS users would often say it just "felt better" than Windows. The fact that Mac owned both hardware AND software and treated it as a holistic system led to an overall better user experience.

[Cthulhu_]

> Recreating all the applications you would use day-to-day to fit the design language specified by Aqua is another.

This is (maybe tangentially) something I don't understand about the software market today; how come only Microsoft and Apple seem to be in the market for building a suite of native deskop applications, while other companies make one-off applications? Why isn't there a successful company building and maintaining a suite of common alternative desktop applications?

I can make some guesses of course.

[xanderlewis]

> Apple's visual OS design was never that far ahead of the curve

That tends to happen when you're the one defining the curve.

[ErroneousBosh]

> but unless your applications are designed to look and work like the OS your mimicking, it'll all just look weird and off.

Actually worse than not looking like Windows, at that.

[pndy]

The UI was so attractive it was back then even "ported" into KDE, not mention the countless OSX-themed visual styles for XP and Dock-like applications (later Launchpads arrived as well). There were even theming packages which were patching everything from icons to bitmaps in Windows somewhere before Vista arrival.

Aqua "era" ended with 10.10 when Apple decided to join flatness craze.

[kccqzy]

The early flatness craze, Yosemite, still looked better than the current Liquid Glass appearance. The Yosemite app icons in particular looked even more refined than Mavericks, and much more sophisticated than Tahoe.

[paradox460]

I remember installing flyakite to get things looking good on Windows, and then growing tired of it all and just buying windowblinds and desktop x

[solstice]

Oh yeah I remember that. I use to hang around the customize.org forums a lot in 2003 trying out a lot of the visual styles for XP and winamp themes.

[jofzar]

https://youtu.be/ejPqAJ0dHwY

I saw this video recently, it's crazy how apple lost the tactility of its button.

[pwthornton]

The flat area and now liquid glass are all post-Jobs creations. Apple needs a true product person back in charge with taste to get this ship back into a better place.

Jobs acted as an editor and sounding board. You can't just let designers (or engineers) run wild.

[ksec]

Huge Huge Thank You for posting this video.

Literally word for word quote some of the thing I have been saying for years. Even the same quote on Craig Federighi and Jony Ive. Would have been better if there was another quote about Jony Ive fall out with Apple User Interface Head in 2015 and destroyed everything great about Apple Store. And again the Microsoft Video about Windows Metro and removing as much Chrome. ( There are still plenty of people on HN who will defend Windows 8 being peak UI and Metro was a right design choice )

And the quote about bringing order to Chaos. Along with Scott Forstall Video basically saying they destroyed everything Steve left behind.

With Jony Ive gone and most of the exec on their way out, may be it is time to think about bringing back Scott Forstall.

[eleveriven]

Modern UI trends seem to optimize for neutrality and content-first minimalism, which is nice in theory but often ends up feeling generic

[jagged-chisel]

“Content-first minimalism”

I disagree. Unless the ‘content’ is “corners are sooo round, and isn’t this glass-like distortion just so neat?”

[ZpJuUuNaQ5]

>The UI looks so good. Why can’t we have good looking things anymore?

Because "good looking UI" is a completely subjective metric.

[oneeyedpigeon]

True, but:

a) We can evaluate UIs on ('more') objective metrics too, like clarity, accessibility, etc. I think that, on most objective measures, the older UI would 'win' too.

b) Subjective doesn't mean 'useless'. If 99% of people prefer one thing over another, even for subjective reasons, it's probably a good idea.

[adolph]

> The UI looks so good. Why can’t we have good looking things anymore?

From the perspective of a Macintosh System 6 appreciator, OSX is kind of fussy with gratuitous details.

https://aaron.cc/opening-screenshots-from-a-vintage-macintos...

[ErroneousBosh]

There used to be a really nice Aqua theme for Gtk back in the day, but like everything else it's gone out of fashion and succumbed to bitrot.

I don't even know where you'd find a copy of it any more, even if it could be ported to modern toolkit libraries.

I wish freshmeat.net was still on the go, that was full of things like that.

[jama211]

Because your opinion is in the minority

[bromuro]

Please no, that Lucida font is unreadable and ugly. Let’s not talk about the childish “aqua” design.