Liquid Glass seems to hearken back to that era...
Before OSX was released, we were seeded prerelease copies, but with the original System 7 UI.
It was really fast.
When the first Aqua release came out, the performance dropped like a stone.
A mainstream Unix with all the usability for your grandmother supported by all big 3rd party apps as well. Home run.
Apple's current design language is sterile, but at least it's easy to read. The modern design trends are just a series of downgrades in usability, arguably continuing since System 7. Somehow, it looks like "overlapping low-contrast window content" has become the haute couture of UX, much to the dismay of grandmas everywhere.
In a certain sense, Platinum was an attempt to reinterpret what Mac OS could have looked like if it had always been designed for a color display. It didn't just add color, like System 7.0 had; it added depth and texture to the interface which wasn't practical to display before. It also added a ton of new controls to the toolkit which previously didn't have standardized implementations or appearances. (For instance, System 7.0 didn't have a standard progress bar control - every application which used one had to provide their own implementation.)
A downward trend since 1991?
It’s fair to say that design has moved on in the last 34 years. Totally subjective whether you think it’s all been for the better. But macOS is self-evidently more usable now than it was then; a lot more people are using it. I imagine fairly few of them would be happy if Apple decided to abandon this Liquid Glass idea and return to System 7 design instead.
There was even one Aqua scheme that through some feat of wizardry managed to give menus soft, 32-bit transparency drop shadows just like OS X had. I have no idea how that worked, classic Mac OS itself was only capable of 1-bit transparency as far as I'm aware.
So an extension could draw whatever fancy effect it wanted when the menu was down without worrying about a background application drawing over it (drawing over the transparency) as long you made sure to restore what was beneath when the menu was let go.
But those tended to have some pretty gnarly limitations (like I think in interrupts you can't allocate memory) so AFAIK they were only used for stuff like real-time audio, I dunno if anyone ever used those to do screen drawing, so in practice I can't think of anything that would interfere with menu drawing.
Indeed.
I figured this out on the day in 2003 when I first tried out OS X. I've been using Linux since 1995 and had tried every available desktop: CDE, KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment (The horror .. the horror ...), Window Maker/AfterStep, fvwm, and even older ones like Motif and twm. I'd used Mac OS 7 and 8 in college and hated it,[1] but OS X was a revelation.
I still use Linux as a server, but for a Unixlike desktop that actually works and runs a lot of applications, OS X is it. Period.
(I wrote the above on Slashdot in 2012 <https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2940345&cid=40457103>. I see no need for changes.)
[1] People who never used pre-Unix MacOS have no idea how unreliable it was. Windows 95 and 98 weren't great, but there was at least some hope of killing an errant application and continuing on. System 7? No hope whatsoever. It didn't help that Mosaic (and Netscape) wasn't very reliable regardless of platform, but the OS's own failings made things that much worse.
“ Every Linux WM had an aqua theme. Apple delivered an OS that the “year of the Linux desktop” folk had been (and still are) trying to deliver for years.”
It perfectly captures more than two decades of work in a couple sentences.
Steve Jobs
What all the copy cats missed (Windows Vista, Linux themes) is how consistent and usable everything was. It looked great, but better than that, it worked great.
Now I find myself frustrated with Mac OS quite often, but the competition is so bad that I'm just kind of stuck.
His fork is at https://github.com/mihaip/pearpc
I suppose it retains x86-64 support despite adding a webassembly target.
Edit: he also blogged about adding NextStep to Infinite Mac: https://blog.persistent.info/2024/03/infinite-mac-nextstep.h...
Well, until the original maintainer was hit by a train and killed. It lost most of its momentum after that.
I was an avid user and community member at the time. It still brings a tear to my eye thinking about it.
https://github.com/kwhr0/macemu/blob/master/SheepShaver/src/...
You see that kind of succinctness in 6502 emulators, not usually relatively modern architectures.
In my bitterness, it makes me think of someone in the Dark Ages, standing before a Classical sculpture: "how was it that humanity was once capable of such works?"
But tastes change. In the Dark Ages, what they actually thought was probably "what heathen decadence is this?", and today maybe they think "photo-realistic icons: cringe!"
We're in a second golden age of hardware, so I can dream that maybe one day soon Mac OS will be amazing again.
(Despite the new hardware golden age, the emulation performance here is pretty close to unusable on an M1 with Safari, unfortunately.)
I don't think it's even heading in that direction.
Competitive in price it was not, and osx wasn't as good as you think it was. Kernel panics were a daily thing, and segmentation faults of quicktime while watching videos.
Reproducing file formats like wmv or divx was a quest in finding and installing the correct codec.
Also overheating, because to make it pretty they didn't add vents for the air to flow.
To me, Mac OS X looks so much better than todays Mac OS. It looks clear and orderly and I feel like "Great in this environment I can get some work done!".
Current Mac OS feels like "Help, I fell into a sack of candies, how do I get out of here?" to me.
Does anybody else feel like that?
Honestly, no; the parts of the UI that I see and work with are limited to the menu bar (just flat text, no embellishments), three dots and sometimes the Spotlight bar but I don't actively look at it unless it's slow. Same thing with Windows. I never work with the OS and rarely with native apps, it's all browser based and/or crossplatform applications that use third party design systems.
Everything after is a bit boring.
treve•5h ago
https://infinitemac.org/
nickm12•2h ago
mattl•37m ago
davewongillies•27m ago