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Comment by trm42 | Hacker News Reader

Based on the screenshots, it's amazing how little the Mac System UX has changed between 1.0 -> 6 -> 7.1 (and to some extend even the newer versions, the latter UX changes were mostly theme-remake + little usage helpers).

Now it's good time to go and check out screenshots of Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3 and 3.1 to see how "ready" System 1.0 was compared to the Windows.

Other good thing to note is that the window manager of System was really good getting lots of windows to fit the puny 512x324 resolution. Something the Mac OS X is really bad at even with the 5k resolutions =(

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I'm always impressed with how the Mac menu bar + Apple menu has remained in the same place since 1984 [1], performing pretty much the same functions for over 30 years!

Compare that to the lack of concrete UX decisions in the world's other major OS, unable to settle on a single menu style and so much flip-flopping on key features (cough-Start Menu-cough); removing them in one version and bringing them back in the next.

Is the Mac OS Menu a design that simply cannot be improved on, or are the users just not clamoring enough for a change?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_menu

I dunno. To me both the Apple bar and the MS bar do the same thing, offer a target in accordance to Fitts' Law.

While the layout of the menu itself changed some over the years, the base location in the bottom left has remained the same.

Even with Windows 8 you could get to the startscreen(?) by flicking the mouse to the bottom left corner. That would case a square to come into view holding a preview of said screen.

> both the Apple bar and the MS bar do the same thing, offer a target in accordance to Fitts' Law.

Not until Windows 2000. Prior to that, the Start button had a single "dead" pixel along the left and bottom sides of it in which clicking didn't open the Start menu. Microsoft design: it looks right, but it just doesn't quite work right.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2006/08/22/711808.as...

Been ages since i used the 9x series, so perhaps my hindsight is rose colored.

If it's not broken, don't muck around with it.

Though I think the Apple bar is starting to show its age with higher resolution screens becoming popular. With the latest macs, moving the cursor all the way across the screen is a bit tedious. Apple seemingly introduced wonky mouse acceleration to solve this, but it seems like they've introduced an extra problem.

I find it amazing that the bitmap fonts that shipped with Macintosh OS 1 (and System 0.85 for that matter: different 'Chicago' and the strange 'Swan Song') still work on OS X with only a trivial modification: Splice the NFNT from the resource fork into a FontForge-readable system (7 I think?) bitmap resource fork and you are left with something that is easily exportable into a modern datafork bitmap font. I've converted them all (Taliesin and Mobile were hardest to find in their original form. I still haven't found Toronto on an install disk anywhere) and they all work perfectly on 10.11.

Here's System 0.85 Chicago being used in emacs, for example. Looks great in acme as well.

http://i.imgur.com/EuO2bvF.png

If you have NFNT fonts, I don't think they shipped with Mac OS 1.0. NFNT stands for 'new font', the original OS used the more logical FONT as resource type for fonts.

I guess NFNT already is a conversion of an original FONT, but my memory is getting vague. I think I know there also were FOND resources at one time, but Google doesn't help much there (to complicate matters, https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-Manual/... talks about 'fond' and 'sfnt' resources. There clearly has been quite a bit of evolution in font formats over time)

Ah yes, you're right! I worked on this over the summer, so I must have gotten them a bit mixed up.

I copied the FONT info from each one into the NFNT portion of the resource fork in a newer file, then imported that file into FontForge for conversion to OS X-readable .dfont.

http://i.imgur.com/teGJ7qp.png

Ooh. Well... now I know what at least one rainy afternoon will be taken up with! That's awesome.

Actually, this reminds me of https://medium.com/designing-medium/system-shock-6b1dc6d6596... - Windows' font subsystem is super backward-compatible too. Sometimes too backward compatible. :P

Also, nice close/resize/FS buttons! :D (Also visible in the picture in OP's followup)

Thanks! Yeah it reminds me of this video I saw of some guy running super arcane Windows 3.1-era stuff on W8/10 or something with little modification. Btw, if you have rootless disabled, I have made that OS X 10.11 theme available for download. Simply move that GraphiteAppearance.car file to the alias marked '~ Car Resources' in the Aliases folder. Make sure to backup your original, if you do.

https://github.com/JohnDDuncanIII/Platinum

I'm not sure about 32-bit Windows 8+, but I remember the 32-bit version of Windows Vista still had the NTVDM, which is all you need for Win3.1-era apps to "just work" out-of-the-box.

With a little modification, you can run apps from Windows 1.01 and 2.03 on XP, probably Vista, and maybe even newer: http://toastytech.com/guis/misc.html

Also, I admittedly have no experience with OS X, but I was recently given an old G5 to play with that I hope to get up and running at some point. This theme file looks quite fun to play with - will it work on PowerPC?

Its easy to be good with "lots of windows" when you dont support multitasking.

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