It’s amazing to me how much more usable those UIs are. Not to mention how much more performant they’d be than modern Electron garbage.
But forget about Mac OS 9, we don’t even have native OS X or Windows interfaces anymore. Doesn’t help that Apple dropped the ball on following their own UI guidelines.
This intense hatred for Electron has always baffled me. I thought the community in general was in favour of allowing people to create whatever they wanted, however they wanted. More people making software is good! And the community grows because of it, and everything is better. But every time an electron app gets promoted somewhere (HN/Reddit/Twitter/wherever) there is always _someone_ yelling at the developer because they decided to use Electron.
As a javascript developer, I'm sorry that I don't have the patience/smarts/skills/time to learn C++/Qt/GTK/WxWidgets/etc. HTML/CSS/Javascript is all I know and it's probably all I will reasonably stay with for a while because of various circumstances. And Electron lets me use the knowledge I already have to make things.
That's not to say that Electron doesn't have all these issues, of course. But I feel that this policing of how people write their own software (especially when it's something purely done as a hobby and/or just to share something with people) is getting somewhat out of hand.
Here's a hypotetical/philosophical question for the community in general. Given no other alternatives to do X, what is preferable? An Electron app that allows people to do X, or no app at all?
Native Windows - Win32 - still exists, but all the trendy "modern" stuff seems to be avoiding it, probably because the web stuff is easier to find developers for.
>we don’t even have native OS X or Windows interfaces anymore
Wait you can't just call the respective APIs anymore? I thought the reason people don't use them is not because they aren't available but that 2 different codebases would have to be maintained hence things like Electron.
Surprisingly I found myself not preferring the OS 9 versions nearly as much as I thought. I have always thought of the OS 9 UI and the late '90s to early 2000s as representing the peak of OS UI design before everything went skeuomorphic, but a lot of the general aesthetic of that time just doesn't seem to have aged that well. I still miss the crisp lines and clear affordances of actual buttons and other elements of that time, but there was also a LOT of visual clutter that we no longer need. There's much to say about modern design fads, but we have also come a long way.
The author has certainly done a great job of capturing the zeitgeist of the era (the garish bevels on the Spotify app are spot on!), but I would love to see how the OS 9 UI would hold up in modern times, on a retina screen with more than 256 colours, modern anti-aliased typography and much more screen real estate.
Yes, the resolution could be higher but for me almost all of the apps (except Zoom) looks great. I would love to have that option today. Old design is much thinner and clearer. Buttons are buttons, they're visible and easy to click, almost every decoration is minimal, they're not taking unnecessary space just for sake of it. This is why I didn't like anything after Windows 7, this is the reason why current Gnome is is just wasteful. I much prefer simplicity and "smallness" of Gnome 2 UI hence I'm using Mate as my daily driver
"I still miss the crisp lines and clear affordances of actual buttons and other elements of that time..."
If you go into System Preferences > Accessibility > Display and turn "Increase contrast" on, it adds clear lines around almost everything, which is the closest I've found to that. I tried it for a while, but I found it too harsh in the end. It would be nice to have a setting which was inbetween the two extremes.
There's a setting to "show shapes of toolbar buttons" or whatever it's called in English. It adds 1px faint grey lines around them. I turned it on the day I got my M1 mac. Doesn't help with the fact that the icons on these buttons are drawn as if there's no pixel grid and so are a blurry mess, but better than nothing still.
incredible work (really) but this is obviously not a realistic user experience: I can tell what's clickable on the screen easily and things are generally too consistent and simply make too much sense
I mean, neat concept, but really lacking in the user hostility that today's users demand
I don’t get the “I can’t tell what’s clickable” complaint. I just opened up spotify and it’s obvious what’s clickable and what isn’t. Same for gmail. I don’t remember having any issue learning how to use these either.
Stimulates a bit of an impulse I had as a teenager and wanting to experience that on my PC, or get into BeOS or QNX, based just on witnessing screenshots and something deeply striking my fancy. Before I got into Linux (which was before I got a Mac in 2006), I used WindowBlinds and LiteStep to do exactly that, and more. I used to really care more about certain trappings of my experience, and I didn't have any actual work to do. Now I settle for whatever in my 30s.
Let's see, what is my first extant contribution to the Internet… oh yeah, I thought this was handsome. It was a theme for an explorer.exe shell replacement.
I used BeOS as a daily driver for a few years back in the day. It was a great OS, wonderfully smooth and powerful. But I was forced off of it because of the lack of applications. Applications make or break an OS. Microsoft had to learn this lesson several times already (windows phone, windows rt).
Linux with the PREEMPT_RT patchset is pretty much a true RTOS nowadays. Though you still need to be careful in developing userspace to achieve true "hard" time bounds, and that's largely incompatible with a "desktop" workflow.
It's amazing how much more usable applications become when their UIs are consistent with the other UI of the platform. Unfortunately, marketing wants every product to "stand out" and thus (even before the Electron fad started) they develop custom controls and other annoying "uniqueness".
I definitely can’t help but wish a version of Slack that actually gave a passing concern for integration into a system UI exists. The “look we can do custom CSS everywhere and not look like ANY of our target platforms” garbage has the bane of my work day since it became popular.
The problem is, it doesn’t look anything like the system UI either. Just because it is using a native toolkit doesn’t mean it automatically looks good or integrates well.
Yeah, watching that video really reminds me how poor slack performance is.
It genuinely feels like it could fit into a couple of MB of RAM back in those days and been super snappy. I literally do not use slack for anything that IRC wouldn't do back in the late 90s, with the exception of threads, embedded images, and emojis.
It is crazy how close but how far IRC was. Session persistence, notification support even when offline, better admin UI was really all it needed. And probably be totally centralised.
You know whats crazy? A few years back I had this Core i3 Haswell system and I installed Windows 7 with Office 2003 on it. The PC shipped with Windows 8 but I decided to go backwards. My god the performance was out of this world. Everything was instant! It was such a pleasant experience I didn't feel again until I got my M1 mac. Even now the bloat is slowly beginning on even the m1 Mac. I think we need to find every developer/designer/project manager who introduces this software bloat and lock them on a remote island.
Yes. My main takeaway from this slideshow is that designers are control freaks that treat their applications like an art canvas instead of just letting the window manager manage the windows. In my opinion it is 100% better and I wish I could explode features out of various apps into separate windows all the time. Video conferencing is a really obvious one.
For what it's worth, Ripcord[1] can do that (okay, it can open channels in separate tabs that can be moved to separate windows). And it is a native (Qt) application.
The only problem is that it's not free (with unlimited trial, though) and the development seems to have stopped. Still works okay for text chat, though.
Page requires js to see images and I didn't feel like making a noscript exception just to read text and see images so I guess I'm moving on. Please, support raw html fallback web!
Readit News
Seeing this makes me think about how many modern applications could learn a few things from the old Mac OS 8/9 Human Interface Guidelines. [0]
[0] http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/doc...
But forget about Mac OS 9, we don’t even have native OS X or Windows interfaces anymore. Doesn’t help that Apple dropped the ball on following their own UI guidelines.
As a javascript developer, I'm sorry that I don't have the patience/smarts/skills/time to learn C++/Qt/GTK/WxWidgets/etc. HTML/CSS/Javascript is all I know and it's probably all I will reasonably stay with for a while because of various circumstances. And Electron lets me use the knowledge I already have to make things.
That's not to say that Electron doesn't have all these issues, of course. But I feel that this policing of how people write their own software (especially when it's something purely done as a hobby and/or just to share something with people) is getting somewhat out of hand.
Here's a hypotetical/philosophical question for the community in general. Given no other alternatives to do X, what is preferable? An Electron app that allows people to do X, or no app at all?
Wait you can't just call the respective APIs anymore? I thought the reason people don't use them is not because they aren't available but that 2 different codebases would have to be maintained hence things like Electron.
https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/developer/ux-guidelines.h...
The author has certainly done a great job of capturing the zeitgeist of the era (the garish bevels on the Spotify app are spot on!), but I would love to see how the OS 9 UI would hold up in modern times, on a retina screen with more than 256 colours, modern anti-aliased typography and much more screen real estate.
If you go into System Preferences > Accessibility > Display and turn "Increase contrast" on, it adds clear lines around almost everything, which is the closest I've found to that. I tried it for a while, but I found it too harsh in the end. It would be nice to have a setting which was inbetween the two extremes.
I mean, neat concept, but really lacking in the user hostility that today's users demand
Let's see, what is my first extant contribution to the Internet… oh yeah, I thought this was handsome. It was a theme for an explorer.exe shell replacement.
https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/litestep/154/
https://skins14.wincustomize.com/1/53/153855/6/154/preview-6...
In my defense, it was 2001-2002, I mostly had MS Paint at my disposal, and I was 14 (and not like a smart 14).
https://www.austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=1044
https://developer.blackberry.com/native/reference/core/com.q...
The Zoom one reminded me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU-SeeMe --- yes, videoconferencing was actually possible on the hardware of the time.
1: https://twitter.com/AppShrugs/status/1468576646856851460
It genuinely feels like it could fit into a couple of MB of RAM back in those days and been super snappy. I literally do not use slack for anything that IRC wouldn't do back in the late 90s, with the exception of threads, embedded images, and emojis.
It is crazy how close but how far IRC was. Session persistence, notification support even when offline, better admin UI was really all it needed. And probably be totally centralised.
You may enjoy this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21831951
The only problem is that it's not free (with unlimited trial, though) and the development seems to have stopped. Still works okay for text chat, though.
[1]: https://cancel.fm/ripcord/
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