An OS 9 odyssey: Why some Mac users won’t abandon 16-year-old software | Hacker News Reader

An OS 9 odyssey: Why some Mac users won’t abandon 16-year-old software

arstechnica.com

189 pointsshawndumas169 comments

They are 100% correct about the spatial Finder; 15 years later and what the current OS has is still laughable compared to some of the gems of the Classic Finder. A few years back Steve Jobs had the audacity to describe some Cocoa rewrite as a “whole new Finder” and I got excited only to realize it was still garbage. You sort of have to experience the Classic Finder to understand just how wrong the modern Finder really is. From small details (like EVERY window remembering exactly how you arranged it) to not having to wonder what will happen when you click something, not to mention the pop-up tab windows from 8.5+.

Also, to this day I don’t quite understand why Apple went so far away from Platinum. Today’s toolbar icons and buttons are downright ugly compared to the UI that was achieved with far fewer colors on Classic Macs. They “almost” had it when 10.5 Leopard managed to unify most of the OS and apps but then they started fiddling again.

While I do like the “vibrancy” effect in parts of the current OS, even that is overdone (scrolling under toolbars, really?). It would have been better to combine the vibrancy technology with more professional user interface elements reminiscent of Classic.

> From small details (like EVERY window remembering exactly how you arranged it)

This—along with the rest of the 2d layout—is my absolute least favorite aspect of the finder. If I could completely disable that (along with the .DS_store and __MACOSX absurdities) and force everything to use three-column layout, I would in a heartbeat. It's just a recipe to PREVENT easy access to your data—how can they allow dragging icons out of the view or overlapping each other? You can't even "reload" to reset their location, and people can even send you ZIPPED FILES where the locations are broken. Coverflow is even worse for usability. I have no idea how people can work with either icons or no ability to switch up the sorting on demand—I don't think I've used my desktop except as basically a "tmp" folder for screenshots in years. Why not just use launchpad as the desktop? Does anyone actually use their desktop to store often accessed files, or is it just a replacement for ~/Documents at this point?

I wish they would give ANY love to the finder at this point. I don't care how it's written; it's gotten steadily less usable with every iteration.

I agree with all of your points and would add:

1. Why is it so hard to keep track of recently recently touched files and folders in Finder?

2. Why does the save/open dialogue constantly forget where I was just saving/opening stuff?

3. Why doesn't opening a new tab open to your current location instead of ~/?

4. Why can't I completely customize the sidebar in a Finder window?

5. Why isn't there a native window switcher keyboard mapping?

6. Why do menubar items just vanish without a trace when menus need horizontal space?

I could go on but these things persist as problems for years while Apple focuses its efforts on superficial UI gimmicks.

> 1. Why is it so hard to keep track of recently recently touched files and folders in Finder?

This one's sort of on the user. Not sure how it could be simplified.

> 2. Why does the save/open dialogue constantly forget where I was just saving/opening stuff?

This is dependent on the application doing the saving, not on the Finder. Some applications are very good at remembering last-saved location. Photoshop and BBEdit are good examples of this, especially Photoshop which has per-menu-item preferences for things like Open, Save, and Export. However, many applications have developers not familiar with macOS conventions and so don't provide such affordances (I won't single out any applications because they really are too numerous to mention.)

> 3. Why doesn't opening a new tab open to your current location instead of ~/?

This is customizable in Finder > Preferences… I'm not sure what you mean by "current location". If you mean duplicate where you are now there are other ways to do it.

I personally have a AppleScript that copies my current POSIX path to my clipboard. I type Command T to open a new tab, Type Command-Shift G to "Go to Folder" and type Command V to paste what's on my clipboard.

But I'm not sure that's what you're looking for. You might head on over to http://discussions.apple.com and ask over there.

> 4. Why can't I completely customize the sidebar in a Finder window?

Yeah the customizability is restricted, mainly because letting it be too customizable means inexperienced users can get their sidebar where it's next to impossible to provide support. That said, advanced users usually know that the sidebar is only to store a few handy items. I mainly use it only for visual confirmation that my remote mounts and local disks are mounted.

I use keyboard shortcuts to navigate the file system in the Finder.

> 5. Why isn't there a native window switcher keyboard mapping?

I think you're looking for Command ` and Command-shift `. This works pretty much system wide (except for a few applications by software vendors that. Just. Refuse. Native. Keyboard shortcuts.)

> 6. Why do menubar items just vanish without a trace when menus need horizontal space?

Do you mean that your menubar is so crowded that you lose menu items? I think I recall this happening and, to be honest, I don't have any solutions here. You might head on over to http://discussions.apple.com. People can be really helpful there.

Good luck.

I started wondering if there is no solution to this, so I posted a question to AskDifferent. This is the solution that was suggested and it looks extremely promising: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4unOC5ZDT98

1. Go to All My Files and order by date in list view perhaps?

2. Dependent on the application. Eg. for wxWidgets (which wraps Cocoa) you have to supply the default directory when the dialog is created. If you are a poor coder, you'll put a dumb value in here instead of remembering the CWD or recently used dir, hence the dialog showing the wrong dir all the time. It's basically down to each app to tell the dialog where it should start.

3. Not sure on this one - I thought it was a preference.

4. You can remove and add stuff - what else did you want to do? You wouldn't want that horrible places/links area of Windows 10's Explorer would you? It's horrible.

5. cmd-' I think, to switch windows inside the current app. Alternatively I map my bottom right screen zone as "show all windows", and map ctrl-up to do the same.

6. Daft isn't it? The menu font should decrease perhaps. The difficulty is I have loads of stuff in the menubar top right (sort of like Windows taskbar) so what can the menu do if it runs out of space?

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

1. Works but no way to include recent directories. I've tried smart search queries for this but it doesn't work. I usually need to recall locations of groups of files more so than a stream of touched files. Also, what if I want to create multiple versions of this with various filters. Again, saved searches don't work (or at least didn't when I tried it).

2. This is true, but obviously leaving it up to devs is a failed strategy that Apple should take control of.

3. There's a silly option to right click on the path at the bottom to open current location in a new tab but no global pref that I'm aware of. It seems like an easy one to implement!

4. I want that list of recently-touched folders in the sidebar.

5. It works but only within the current app, so you need to alternate between cmd-' and cmd-tab. I want something like witch. It's one thing windows does better.

6. They should collapse into a menu, similar to bartender.

Point 1 - what a pity! On Windows we can use Everything which uses the NTFS index to do really fast searches; it is a pity there isn't the same function on Mac OS filesystem (as far as I know).

Note that point 2 is the same problem on any OS - if you open a file dialog, you have to supply the working directory for the dialog so it affects Mac OS, Windows, Linux etc.

It isn't a problem that Apple should take care of - who says the dialog box should always go back to the same directory? In some cases it might not be required, which is why they leave it up to the application devs. Tell your app devs to stop being so lazy.

For point 5, it is debatable. On Windows if you have multiple non-modal (or even modal) dialogs open as children of an application, Windows can sometimes get the Z order wrong and there is no way to alt-tab to that window, as alt-tabbing shows the parent window. So having a window switch option would be great (actually Windows 10 fixes this a bit with its Windows-tab overview system).

You dislike the particular compromises made to implement a bad version of the ideal. That does not mean the ideal is to be avoided, just that it is more complicated to achieve than the OSX team was willing to implement.

I'm not sure how you're meaning "ideal". The point of my post was to illustrate that while some may prefer the "spatial" finder, others (such as my self) view that as the absolute worst behavior of the finder. So there are clearly two distinct ideals at play here, and the compromise sucks for both parties.

And you can't even snap windows left-and-right like in other OS's. Apple is too caught up on trying to be that anti-establishment-use-different-key-combos-than-the-standard-and-forget-about-standardized-ports sort of workshop. They'd rather do it different than do it practical as it's done in Windows and Linux (well, depending on the Window manager). :)

Since the Macintosh predates Windows and Linux, it's arguably the Macintosh that set the standard and the others that are anti-establishment. :-)

Seriously, Apple is very unlikely to change the keyboard defaults to match Windows, since (among other reasons) it would unnecessarily aggravate long-time Mac users.

Edit: Long-pressing the green zoom button in El Capitan lets you move the window left or right to a half-full-screen view -- not exactly what you probably have in mind, but a reasonable approximation.

> since (among other reasons) it would unnecessarily aggravate long-time Mac users.

As if that has ever stopped them (see: Final Cut "Pro" X)

I assume that that doesn't take up a half-hour animation like going full-screen does?

I'm on 10.10 Yosemite, and have no desire to upgrade, since I'm sure that the annoying full-screen functionality is now slightly different and I'll have to spend a few minutes trying to figure out how to un-fuck it again.

I've been pretty happy with this app for snapping windows: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/magnet/id441258766?mt=12

I like Spectacle, which looks like it has similar functionality to Magnet but is free and open source on GitHub:

https://www.spectacleapp.com/

https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle

> use-different-key-combos-than-the-standard

As someone who lives in the command line, the fact that they use the standard readline/emacs key combos is one of the few things I really appreciate about OSX.

For sure. And you can actually copy/paste normally in the command line without the use of the shift key.

Apple is different from the standard because the standard sucks. With macOS you get: CLI bindings on control, GUI bindings with command, and text entry with option and shift. The Windows equivalent is just a mess, even with an extra Windows™ key that ends up being mostly useless. And don't get me started on Ubuntu.

It's not just Emacs bindings, you can customize system-wide text area navigation (including any well-behaved apps)[1]. It's one of many things I appreciate about OSX.

[1]: http://xahlee.info/kbd/osx_keybinding.html

> And you can't even snap windows left-and-right like in other OS's.

For apps that support split-view, you can do that in one of the following ways:

• The easiest is to just press and hold on a window's Green/Fullscreen button.

• Activate Mission Control, then drag a normal window to the desktop space of an existing fullscreen window.

• Activate Mission Control, then drag a window into a blank space at the top to make it fullscreen, then drag another window to that newly created desktop space to make them share it in split-view.

Mission Control can be activated by:

• Hard-dragging a window by its titlebar to outside the top of the screen to activate Mission Control.

* Pressing F3.

* Throwing the mouse cursor to a preset Hot Corner.

I think these boil down to personal preferences. My home/preferred OS is Mac, my work OS is Windows, and I find myself just preferring how macOS handles things just because it is more hands off in my opinion.

I disabled window snapping because I don't like the OS meddling with where I put windows - I dislike having hot-corners that activate when I don't intend them to, and it's frustrating to have things resize on me when I'm arranging windows for my viewing needs.

I also dislike having so much functionality on CTRL in windows since I find I get a lot of annoying unexpected behavior due to my own laziness. On OS X, typing short cuts are tied to CMD, but a few crucial editing shortcuts are tied to option, such as deleting the entire preceding word. On Windows, this is on CTRL and sometimes I screw up and don't release ctrl fast enough so it catches my next keystroke with CTRL and tries to perform a command. I grant this is my problem since I'm either too slow or fast and my hands are trained for an OS X keyboard, but it just makes more sense to my mind.

I don't think this is so much "anti-establishment" as much as just a different way of doing things, and I like the idea of keeping the commands separated a little. It's the same with alt-tabbing/cmd-tabbing - I understand the way Windows does it, but I like the way OS X does it better. CMD+Tab for apps, CMD+~ for windows within an app instead of all windows on the same...um...chain I guess.

It's not that I can't use Windows (quite the opposite), I just dislike it's attempts at convenience. I'm glad it's a setting, so I have no ill-will really, but I think it's just preference.

I install ShiftIt and use the keyboard to do that, just like Windows+left/right/up/down in Windows 7+.

As you may know, the presentation mode for macOS Finder windows and tabs can rapidly be changed. Command 1 for icon view, Command 2 for list view, Command 3 for column view, and Command 4 Cover Flow. Each has its uses, including Cover Flow.

The ability to rapidly switch modes means I can, for example, use column view to drill down into deeply nested directories that contain thousands of automatically generated screenshots. When I'm in the directory I want, I then can choose Cover Flow view and use it to navigate a directory containing thousands of images to find the image that I want.

That is, if the images are very similar with subtle differences, I can relatively quickly find the state I'm looking for by scanning for changes using Cover Flow and scrolling left or right.

If I need to sort on demand, I can simply type Command 2 to access list view and then click on the column by which I'd like to sort. I can type Command-J and add additional columns if the one I need is not already visible.

Basically, the different Finder view modes are not one-size-fits-every-task. Many people never have an opportunity or take the time to understand how the different presentations of the file hierarchy can provide different features. Some users swear allegiance to the CLI (technically not a GUI). Others insist on list view. Still others insist that column view is the best way.

But there are some people who use different GUI modes depending on their purpose. I know I do. Personally, I'm grateful that the macOS Finder has several modes for presenting the same data because each mode provides a different set of features and I depend on these features in different ways at different times.

EDIT: grammar, clarity

> You can't even "reload" to reset their location

You can.

Right-Click/Cmd-Click > Arrange By... or Clean Up By...

I hate Launchpad. You can organise any of the icons by name or date etc., just manually. Clicking around a grid of many icons is no fun (I am sure it is easy on a fresh empty Mac). I use my Desktop for putting files I am working on before I have truly finished with them (sort of a TODO area). If they are out of sight, they go out of mind and I forget to deal with them.

> They are 100% correct about the spatial Finder; 15 years later and what the current OS has is still laughable compared to some of the gems of the Classic Finder.

And every version that comes out, the Finder moves further away from spacial and towards a disk browser. I hate it so much.

> I don’t quite understand why Apple went so far away from Platinum.

For the purpose of looking cool in a demo. OS9 had Platinum, and it was the standard, and third party apps that didn't fall in line, really stuck out in an uncomplimentary way and collected a lot of flack.

Since then, OSX has gone through... how many re-skinnings? How many optional app UI kits? Do you remember the brushed aluminium one that was popular for a minute? Remember all of their one-off, over the top, skeuomorphic apps? Now Chrome can get all fucky with the title bar and no one even notices. And one of Apple's own flagship apps, iTunes, is such a user-surly, confused mess of UI mistakes it's hardly usable.

> not to mention the pop-up tab windows from 8.5+.

Finder Drawers! I miss them too. I especially miss the huge contextual menu ecosystem that OS9 had. Anyone else miss WindowShade?

Compared to the UI used between 1984 and the launch of Mac OS 8 in 1997, Platinum itself was a short-lived re-skinning. The 1984 UI was colorized in 1991 with System 7 and only fully reskinned in 1997, a 13 year span. Mac OS X is 15 years old now, for contrast--plenty of time to fit in a few reskins.

Not really sure the numbers make the point you're suggesting they do.

The "Classic" Mac OS UI developed incrementally over about 15 years, in a mostly evolutionary process. Even Platinum wasn't an especially dramatic change except in the context of that conservatism. But over the product's lifespan, it represented significant improvements.

Over about the same amount of time, OS X has ping-ponged around, undergoing a series of major reskins, without much in the way of consistent direction. It seems to be a lot of change-for-change's-sake, and it's not clear to me as a user throughout the entire period that the end result now, in 2016, is all that much better than where we started out back in 2000.

Apple's had nearly as much time with OS X's Aqua UI as they had to take the Classic interface from its start (512x342 1-bit pixels on the 128k) all the way to Platinum, and the results are not exactly impressive.

Platinum was a very dramatic reskin at the time. It was originally designed to set Copland apart from System 7, but after Copland failed they just rolled it out in Mac OS 8. Aqua was then designed to set Mac OS X apart from Mac OS 8/9.

Overall Platinum lasted four years, which was just as long as the brushed metal phase between Panther and Leopard (2003-2007). Leopard was the next major revamp, which lasted until Yosemite (2007-2014).

So, if you wanted to be generous, you could divide the Mac UI eras like so:

1984-1991: Monochrome Classic

1991-1997: System 7 (colorized)

1997-2001: Platinum

2001-2003: Aqua

2003-2007: Aqua (Brushed Metal Remix)

2007-2014: Aqua 3.0

2014-pres: Flat Aqua

Don't forget that Platinum was unveiled years before OS 8 was actually released, and one of the most popular System 7 extensions was Aaron, which provided the Platinum theme, and as such a large contingent of Mac users were using Platinum long before OS 8 came out.

I remember installing Aaron when it first came out, and I don't think I ever uninstalled it (though I remember playing around with the Hi-Tech version that Apple's lawyers killed).

That's right! In fact, Aaron was used to provide the Platinum theme on Jeff Goldblum's character's PowerBook in Independence Day.

Oh hell yes! I loved Aaron too.

As someone who grew up with Mac OS 7.5.2, 8.5 and 9.1, then 10.3, 10.4, 10.5.8 then 10.6 and the upgrade train ever since... I honestly can't remember Finder being much different to how it is now except the obvious added features. I certainly can't remember it having lost features in the last >20 years.

Can you give details?

Read John Siracusa's Spatial Finder rants in his OS X reviews for Ars Technica for more details than you could ever want

http://archive.arstechnica.com/paedia/f/finder/finder-1.htm ???

If you read this, note that although the main page displays, their section links are broken (they all use ".html" instead of ".htm"; after you click one, you can edit it in your URL bar to use ".htm" and then it will display).

Try this link: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2003/04/finder/

I'm not an Apple user. One day I had to install or upgrade some software (I don't remember exactly), on a Mac. The instructions said that I had to first start iTunes. That's a program for playing music, right? You can imagine how underwhelmed I was by the UX on this so-called user-friendly platform. Since then, I never felt any urge to switch to or even try out an Apple product.

That's pretty laughable, yes. They also needed Itunes to factory reset an Ipad.

> That's a program for playing music, right?

I wish. That feature is practically abandoned. I use WinAmp to play music. I so wish I was kidding. The iTunes app is horrendous.

> Remember all of their one-off, over the top, skeuomorphic apps?

I actually liked those a lot. They were the only things I've seen in my adult life that brought back the sense of fun and whimsy I had when I first used a Mac as a little kid.

Even though I never actually bought one (because I don't like walled gardens), I used to go into the Apple Store often just to play with the skeumorphic apps on the iPad. If iOS wasn't such a walled garden, I probably would have bought an original iPad just to play with those apps at home.

> Anyone else miss WindowShade?

Oddly enough, I've seen it pop up on Linux desktops for ages. It's still part of KDE, and even in 2016 I can shade my windows by double-clicking on the titlebars like God intended.

> > Remember all of their one-off, over the top, skeuomorphic apps?

> I actually liked those a lot.

I also liked them, and I think skeuomorphism is a good idea, generally. And I think iOS's completely anti-skeuomorphic abstraction is a bad idea, generally. And I get why Chrome ate my title bar. But is it a good idea for users to have to learn different UI metaphors for every app? I feel like one of classic MacOS's real strengths was that there was ONE UI and users were really skeptical of any app that broke the rules.

> > Anyone else miss WindowShade?

> Oddly enough, I've seen it pop up on Linux desktops for ages.

If memory serves, that feature originally came from Linux/X-Windows, was added to MacOS as an extension first, and then incorporated in the official OS. (And then discarded)

Amen.

I get exasperated that you still can't properly disable browser-type windows in the OS X Finder. Yes, you can press cmd-option-T to "Hide Toolbar", but 1 in 10 new windows still appears with the browser appearance - network drives, USB sticks, something you've unzipped, or just randomly because Finder feels like it.

I miss the whole spatial Finder, but if Apple could just give me an option for "no browser windows, ever", that would solve 80% of my angst. (Well, Finder-related angst, at any rate.)

And in recent versions, the zombie Preview pane. Still haven't figured out how to obliterate that thing for good.

I stop using Macs around 1994, so I remember the spatial finder existing but not how useful it was. I didn't come back to the Mac untill 10.4 was out and obviously by then it was gone.

I know John Siracusa really wants it back, but I couldn't remember how great it was.

Recently it hit me that iOS is completely spatial. I don't know where any of my apps are, except that they are on this location on the screen on this page of apps. The only way I can find them is by their spatial location. I'm not looking for Overcast, I'm looking for the thing that second from the bottom of the second page on the left-hand side. More than once I've opened an app and forgot what I was looking for until I opened it because I was only thinking about where it was in the interface.

Oh well. We'll probably never get it back.

One of the most annoying things to me about the Apple Watch is the fact that the icons tend to move around to random locations whenever an update is done. My eyesight is not up to par any more, and I rely on the app I need being in a particular spot on the cluster of tiny icons on my wrist, and when it moves, it is nigh on impossible to find quickly.

I appreciate the irony that the company touted for reinventing and improving UX is now setting fire to that legacy.

The bubble screen is terrible, but at least in watchOS 3 you're supposed to almost never have to use it.

It's one of those interfaces that looks great in the video and it's horrible to use in real life.

I dread the bubble screen. Having used watchOS 3 for months, I cannot remember having used it for months. It's just not how you do it anymore. You either pin apps in the dock, which is awesome, or as a complication on one of your watch faces. I currently have 5 watch faces I all use for different scenarios.

It's awesome compared to watchOS 2!

I'm VERY excited for today's upgrade.

I'll take Classic Mac OS Finder, BeOS FS UI, and NeXTSTEP UI over OS X Finder any day.

The problem is that OS X Finder tries to support both Spatial and Browser modes. It has never separated the two modes properly, going all the way back to OS X 10.0, and as a result both Spatial mode and Browser mode are worse for it.

> From small details (like EVERY window remembering exactly how you arranged it) to not having to wonder what will happen when you click something

The problem is that Finder tries too hard to remember window sizes and positions when in Browser mode. Finder doesn't have a configurable browser window size. Instead, it stores the window size and position in each folder. So when you browse around to different folders you clobber any existing settings those folders may have had.

Try this: create a new folder on the Desktop and open it. It will be the non-configurable default Finder browser size that is way too small. Now use that browser to navigate to your home folder, etc. You've just clobbered your home folder window settings.

As a result, you never really know what size the Finder window is going to be when you open a folder.

OS X Finder needs to do the following:

- Embrace the differences between Spatial Mode and Browser Mode. Allow the user to choose whether they prefer Browser Mode or Spatial Mode. Command+N always opens a new Browser Window.

- Completely separate Spatial view settings and Browser view settings.

- A Browser window shall never affect the Spatial view settings for a folder.

- The default size of a Browser window needs to be user-customizable, and it must use the user's preferred size for every new Browser window. The size of the Browser window should never be dictated by a folder's Spatial window size or position.

- Provide menu items and keyboard shortcuts for the "Use as Defaults" command for setting the default view settings, as well as for reverting a folder's custom settings to the default view settings. If I enter a folder that has some goofy custom font sizes or column widths, I want to be able to hit a key and have it snap to my preferred layout.

Two words: Path Finder.

Its focus is still on being a file browser though, right? Last time I used it was even less about spatial features than the Finder, and more about cramming every possible gizmo into a single-window browser.

What you describe about Finder is sadly similar with Windows Explorer. The tipping point was Explorer/Shell32 that came with Windows 2000. It remembered what you personalised for every folder, it had HTML support, it could be customised including the toolbar and the sidebar(s). If you entered a URL it transformed to Internet Explorer. It worked like that from Windows 95 (with ShellUpdate that came for free with IE4, and already integrated known as Win98) and lasted until Windows ME and 2000. WinXP wasn't bad, but several UI decision were bad. And the trend continued with Vista that had a stupid bare bone Explorer that forgot too many settings all the time (lack of love, and the halted complete rewrite in C# that had to be scrapped, and the missing WinFS were probably the reason). Win7 is like Vista but misses the advanced search menu, making the local search even more useless, and WinFS was declared dead. The UI of Win8/10 sucks, though some former undocumented hidden features of Explorer/shell were integrated to the Ribbon-bar.

The good thing about pre-Win10 you can replace Explorer.exe with your own favorite shell (file manager plus desktop in one exe).

The cool thing about Win32 UI is that it has very good optimisation for low latency, as it had to run on very low spec 1980s PCs. You can interact with the UI even before the UI is rendered on screen. So you can open a menu and navigate around and do some action, all with the keyboard as fast as you want even if the UI is slower on your system. MS got it completely backwards with WinRuntime aka UniversalApp. Opening the start menu in Win10 takes 500ms or so and the lag is very annoying, and opening most apps shows even a opening animation to hide that it takes way to long to get a useable app - open the calc.exe in Win7 and compare it to opening the calc app in Win10 - what a vast difference, what a complete failure and a huge step backward.

The best would be if a new MS manager would scrap the Win10 UI development incl UniversalAppFail (starting such an app takes more than 500ms wtf and shows a loading picture), and take the Win10 kernel and start development again taking the Windows 7 Shell/UI and for the Explorer take the Win 2000 or WinXP Explorer as base and start from there.

I thought XP's Explorer was the best, and it went downhill from there. I would have to agree with your appraisal of Windows 10's Explorer, which puts those stupid Action directory shortcuts back after every update, which I then to remove by forcing a registry key. I do not understand why you try and give users access to Documents and Downloads in 20 places and then hide the actual drives and directories, instead of educating users. Nobody struggled using Win 3.11 File Manager.

Calculator and Pictures are the big UniversalApp failures. Thank goodness you can use the bundled older Photo Viewer as it doesn't take minutes to start. Weirdly, UWP apps are just COM apps like everything else so why are they so slow????

"They are 100% correct about the spatial Finder"

I never used OS9, so I don't know about this ...

Was the "spatial finder" still a hierarchical viewing of the underlying filesystem, just presented in a better fashion ?

Or was it non-hierarchical ?

Did OS9 even have a filesystem as I, a UNIX user, think of ? Or was that completely hidden with abstraction ?

OS9's file system was actually very similar to modern OS X (earlier incarnations of HFS). So it's an abstraction of a standard directory hierarchy, albeit a very elegant and disciplined one. The major difference under the hood was the presence of resource forks for various kinds of metadata and UI (icons, for example).

"Spatial Finder" was still a hierarchical viewing of the filesystem, yes.

There are many articles on the subject, but the "spatial" was about the idea that files and folders "remembered" where you put them, so that the same file was always in the same (pixel-exact) space you chose to place it and folder windows remembered their exact same size, shape, and location on the screen. Regardless to how you navigated to them, but since on the Mac Classic OS the Desktop was the "root" folder, you typically navigated to your folders in the same physical way every time (to the point where you might muscle memorize where your files and folders "are" in the space layout of your screen).

As a Unix user it used to be you could get a basic spatial mode from Gnome's Nautilus, if you wanted to play with it, but it looks like Gnome File Manager dropped that feature somewhat recently.

Yeah, it's really weird how Windows and OS X have a 'loop' where the Desktop is a directory inside of your home directory.

Personal reason: in many ways, the old versions are much purer expressions of the timeless concepts of software usability. It is becoming much more difficult now to separate platform convention from actual user tested, researched UX. In the old Apple machines they used to be one in the same, so I find it very useful to often compare old design to new (where applicable) in order to suss out any differences and investigate them. Many times we've simply gotten used to less usable interfaces because we upgraded and didn't think twice, and the old machines can be a useful sanity check.

Edit: when I mean separating platform convention from user-tested UX, I mean that there are some pretty obvious times when platform UX conventions haven't been user tested (or were implemented despite negative user testing results). The most obvious one to me is iOS's flat buttons. I write iOS apps and try to do as much user testing on them as possible, and I've found this to be by far the most frequent struggle for users - discerning which things are pressable and which aren't.

> in many ways, the old versions are much purer expressions of the timeless concepts of software usability.

Maybe you are right on this. Maybe this is why I feel nostalgic of pixelartish BeOS, QNX Neutrino, maybe MacOS9 / *Step and even plan9 rio/acme or IRIX.

My UX in terms of usability and style seem to cycle: 0. get inspiration, 1. comfort, 2. fatigue, 3. back to 0 and realize the previously inspiring thing is now obsolete.

Sad thing, in 30 years, I have cycled a lot more with "computer interface" domain than I have with congas and cameras, some of my favourites having been produced in the late 80s / early 90s.

Software do not age well, yet, and there isn't much chance to keep them running, even if their features, concepts and styles are still relevant to a significant user base. That being said, I use OS, terminals and text editors whose concepts take roots in the 60s :)

As the discussion above focused on macos Finder, I miss the now unmaintained Rox Filer the same way.

After using MacOSX for a decade, I've been using Linux exclusively for 3 weeks now... after my rMBP was stolen and I can't afford a new Mac right now.

Of all the software that I used on a Mac, I have to say that I miss the Finder the most. I've tried every file manager available on Linux (you name it, I've probably tried it) and I can't find anything that's even close to Finder. Nautilus and Nemo are the closest but they are both buggy and are missing a ton of features that I loved in Finder. Everything else just doesn't have the polish or is just missing features that make using Finder such a joy.

I remember when I complained about "Classic Finder" and then about missing features in "Cocoa Finder" after the massive rewrite. Looking back, those small issues and warts are nothing when you compare it to what's available on other OSes.

Anyway, to appreciate the genius and polish of using Finder, just spend few weeks with other OSes and see how much you'll miss it :)

I am using OS X and the only time I ever fire Finder is when I want to view a bunch of pictures. I never understood how exactly file managers are supposed to help somebody. I never feel the need for a file manager.

Funny that. I use OSX, Windows and Linux daily. Most of my time is spent on OSX, then Windows, then Linux (not daily linux though, I lied - every few days).

I like preview feature in Finder. It's awesome and I wish every OS had that. Apart from that, Finder must be the only thing that really bothers me on OSX. That and whatever equivalent comes with Fedora/XFCE and Windows Explorer. They are all complete garbage compared to Total Commander. It might be my early exposure to NC and DirOpus, back in the day, but everything else is just magnitudes slower to use.

I understand for 'normal' users, something like TC would be hard to use compared to finder/explorer, but for the rest of us I can't understand why would you use anything else.

"I like preview feature in Finder. It's awesome and I wish every OS had that."

Agreed - the space-bar convention for quick preview and browsing through files is really, really useful. In fact, it's so nice that I can't believe it's still there in a not-yet-wrecked form.

Give it some time.

I like the Pantheon file browser from Elementary OS. But it also doesn't have the "file preview" that Finder does, and I haven't had any luck trying to get Gloobus Preview working with it.

I noticed that the new ElementaryOS came out just a few days ago. Always wanted to give it a go but haven't had the time. I'll try it in a VM one of these days. Thanks for pointing me ta their file browser... had no idea they put so much work into it.

Agreed.

The ability to drag and drop a file or folder into a file dialog is absolutely brilliant, and one of the things I miss the most when I'm on Windows or Linux.

I have no idea why other systems haven't adopted that. Do they really expect us to awkwardly navigate the filesystem every time we open or save a file?

I thought you could get a similar behavior in Windows by dragging a folder into the path bar at the top of the 'Save' modal window. (I don't have a Windows machine or VM handy at the moment to test it, though.) You can definitely achieve a similar behavior by Ctrl-C'ing a directory and then Ctrl-V'ing into the File Name text box; the result populates the File Name with the copied directory's path. (Being able to get a folder's full path by copying it and pasting into a textarea is actually pretty nice, and arguably more useful than the Mac convention of grabbing the basename.)

Since Apple screwed up the Open/Save dialogs a couple of updates back, I've actually come to appreciate the Windows open/save browser more by comparison. Being able to manipulate files from within Open/Save is a fairly neat trick, as is the ability to pull in remote files from within Open by pointing to a URI. I still can't exactly love Windows as an OS taken as a whole, but Apple's changes haven't improved things.

> Since Apple screwed up the Open/Save dialogs a couple of updates back, I've actually come to appreciate the Windows open/save browser more by comparison. Being able to manipulate files from within Open/Save is a fairly neat trick, as is the ability to pull in remote files from within Open by pointing to a URI. I still can't exactly love Windows as an OS taken as a whole, but Apple's changes haven't improved things.

Mac OS 10.11 (El Capitan) allows users to manipulate the file system from Open/Save dialogs. Right/ctrl-clicking a file will reveal additional options.

I don't think it's possible to put in an arbitrary URI, but if you have a remotely mounted volume you can navigate to those files.

From my limited understanding, being able to download a file from an arbitrary URI by invoking an Open/Save dialog seems potentially troublesome, but does seem kinda neat in principle.

Works in KDE. They love their drag-and-drops, so I'm not surprised at all.

Apple has probably solved this in a more elegant way (in one sense of the word anyways), but the way it works under KDE is that you drag the file into the Name-field and then it inserts the corresponding file://-URI.

I also love right-clicking on a titlebar to see where the file is - it gives you a popup menu of the path. Really useful.

"Of all the software that I used on a Mac, I have to say that I miss the Finder the most. I've tried every file manager available on Linux (you name it, I've probably tried it) and I can't find anything that's even close to Finder. Nautilus and Nemo are the closest but they are both buggy and are missing a ton of features that I loved in Finder. Everything else just doesn't have the polish or is just missing features that make using Finder such a joy."

Whatever happened to Konqueror ?

I remember many (12 ? 10 ?) years ago installing Konqueror as a standalone, non-browser application in a non-KDE Window system and I liked it for the limited time that I used it ...

Is that even a thing now or is Konqueror some weird piece of KDE which is itself a weird thing that I don't even try to understand ... ?

I remember under 3.5.10 it was brilliant and had loads of handlers for different protocols, was a fairly decent web browser, had useful plugins for generating thumbnails, web pages, was a great file manager for me.

But with 4 they ditched it and started Dolphin. I stopped using it about this time. Sad.

Also worth mentioning is the fact that, IIRC, Konqueror had equivalent functions to sshFS built in ... I remember specifying fish:// paths in the path-bar and instantly browsing remote SSH filesystems.

This was back in 2004, so I don't believe this was using FUSE...

Yes indeed it did. I used to use this - really really useful. Does it still do this?

Not sure about Konqueror, but Dolphin still supports "fish://"

Nautilus did a good job of mimicking Finder last time I used it. Same keyboard shortcuts too. Mind you, last time I used it was GNOME2.

Interesting I found Finder the worst part of moving to macs I have now moved back to a windows 8 machine (for full fat Excel and better access to VM's).

Even windows 3.1's file explorer was more usfull

I know I will be in the minority and say that I hated Macs before OSX. Good riddance.

Most importantly the lack of true multi-tasking as highlighted in the article. Even Windows 95 performed before. Doing software development was a chore. Never liked the Mac UI, even in OSX. The lack of focus-on-hover is still today a major pain for me. Even Windows has focus-on-hover. Hate the single menu bar on top. Yes, even after all these years using Macs, I still do not like it.

However, I just love the hardware and the fact that you can get closer to Linux (important as a dev) than you can on Windows.

Have to agree: I've used Macs sporadically for over 20 years (never by choice), and I've never liked the UI. I too hate the single menu bar, and I've also discovered that many recent converts to Mac actually don't understand its behaviour, that the single menu bar metamorphoses between system - app1 - app2 - system dropdowns, depending on the active window. That, and the fact that pushing the red 'x' button in the corner doesn't close an app (just hides it, only file - quit actually closes it), is exactly the same on OS9 and OSX, and it irks me the same.

Agreed.

OSX: I love the OS, I hate the UI.

My friend, San Francisco photographer Adrian Mendoza[1], keeps a couple PowerMacs around to run graphics software that never made the OS X transition[2]. It's interesting that certain kinds of art production[3] is becoming harder and harder because the tools are obsolete.

[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/amenfoto/

[2] Predominantly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai%27s_Power_Tools

[3] https://twitter.com/Amenfoto/status/765045151852924928

I remember having a Kai's Power Tools CD in my 386/486 days. Don't remember if it came bundled with my SB16 multimedia kit or with something else.

I have classic Mac OS running in emulators (BasiliskII and SheepShaver) because:

a) I enjoy the nostalgia (I grew up with Macs as a kid and didn't get a PC until I was 12-13)

b) I find the underlying technology extremely fascinating (resource forks especially)

c) there are a lot of old Mac-only games that are a lot of fun (Power Pete! Spin Doctor! Slick Willie... though my emulator doesn't like that one. Plus a bunch of random games from the sampler CDs I used to collect as a kid.)

I'd never, ever use classic Mac OS as a daily driver again, but it's a lot of fun for me to play with it every once in a while.

I miss After Dark. A handful of the screensavers (four, I think?) are available for OSX, but only through some Japanese site with a distribution and payment system that's not immediately confidence-building compared to other solutions on the modern web. It's reminiscent of shareware, which I guess is kind of appropriate but doesn't make me more likely to hand them my CC number.

I miss the flying toasters.

xscreensaver will always be there for you.

Ditto, I loved that screensaver. jwz at least made a Flying Toasters module for xscreensaver, but there were so many great ones. I especially miss Starry Night, which seems like it ought to be trivial to recreate.

The things I'd do for a Power Pete remake... iOS seems like a pretty good platform for it all told. I tried the emulator and managed to get it to run but everything was sped up 4x or so...

It's unfortunate that Ambrosia, who released Mac games like Cythera, Escape Velocity, Asteroid, Harry the Handsome Executive, etc. apparently can never port them because they didn't negotiate remake or source code rights from the original developers. And they're still around, just enough to keep selling the old MacOS games at the original prices…

I might still have somewhere an archive of issues of "The Ambrosia Times"; before my family had a connection to the Internet, reading and rereading the Bitwise Operator column of The Ambrosia Times was my window into programming which went beyond what was taught in Dave Mark's "Learn C on the Mac" (although most of the content in those columns went way over my head, and I never programmed a game for the classic Mac OS which wasn't programmed either in Klik & Play or, later, in METAL BASIC).

> Escape Velocity

A game I recently described as "Poor Man's Sky" ; )

"Escape Velocity Override" is the only game in its series that I never completed, because of the registration "incentive" – "register or Captain Hector will steal X% of your credits (even before the thirty day trial period has elapsed)" was a surprise that left a nasty taste in my mouth, and I never went back to the game after that.

I still have a pilot file from an early (I think the first) version of "Escape Velocity Nova" which featured a "bug" which enabled me to play multiple contradictory plot lines to completion...

> Asteroid

Don't you mean "Maelstrom"?

And don't forget "Barrack"! Or "Apeiron"!

> "Escape Velocity Override" is the only game in its series that I never completed, because of the registration "incentive"

Really? You should try it if you can, it's great. There were also a lot of great mods, like one total conversion called Frozen Heart. Of course they'd make the game crash all the time.

Now, the third one had problems. They added all this… story… but the story lines liked to start with you getting kidnapped and drafted into a space army, so you pretty much couldn't do anything fun for most of the game. It's still available for Windows though.

> A game I recently described as "Poor Man's Sky" ; )

Elite Dangerous is pretty much exactly EV but with modern graphics and VR, so that's nice.

> Don't you mean "Maelstrom"?

Yeah, that one!

Also want to mention Realmz which some people are trying to clone, and TaskMaker which nobody is.

> Really? You should try it if you can, it's great.

'Override is on the list of classic Mac OS games I intend to play or replay, just behind an awful lot of others.

> Now, the third one had problems.

I liked 'Nova a lot – I liked that the world felt (ever so slightly) more alive, I liked the scope of the world, I liked the number and variety of the craft and outfits, I even liked various outfits requiring government approval to purchase and government craft opening fire on your craft if they detected that you were using unauthorised or illegal outfits...

...but I agree that the Vell-os plot line was an awful idea, and I wonder how many players abandoned 'Nova – and how many registrations Ambrosia lost – because of players thinking that the Vell-os plot line was all the game had to offer. The only time 'Nova "offered" the Vell-os plot line to me, I fled to Aurora space and didn't look back...

> Also want to mention Realmz [...]

I never liked Realmz – I think either I was too young to understand it or its gameplay was incompatible with my tastes – but I completed a lot of scenarios for Spiderweb's "Blades of Exile", and was pleasantly surprised to learn that the original "Exile" quadrilogy is now freeware.

Spiderweb /does/ keep their games up to date, and remakes them all every so often. They get bigger every time, which is kind of a problem actually.

Exile/Avernum is on its second generation of remakes, and the first two games are out on Mac/Windows through Steam, plus iPad.

That was a nice trip down memory lane. I still have fond memories of zipping through the MacAddict magazine forums on Camino. And downloading a dozen freeware apps I didn't need through VersionTracker. Nowadays, I avoid the App Store as much as possible, it gives me so much eye strain.

Do you remember the sampler CDs that used to come with CD-ROM Today magazine in the mid 90s? They had all sorts of random games and other stuff that I had so much fun with as a kid. One of the first things I did once I got my emulators set up was to hunt down those CDs again...

Yep, I used to get CDs with my monthly issue of MacAddict. Those were a highlight for me. I still remember when I discovered Glenn's Games. I felt like I'd hit the jackpot.

The AppStore is sluggish for me. I don't understand why installing xcode updates shows zero progress in the AppStore other than a tiny rotating wheel - I have to open Activity Monitor and see how busy installd and downloadd (or whatever it is called) are to try and guess how far along the installation I am.

I can't stand the App Store. I have to strain my eyes to read the categories, then strain them again to read the price, and again to read the reviews. I miss the old way of doing everything within a browser (albeit not one that knows everything about me, lol).

Yeah I have Basilisk II running MacOS 8.1 that a friend of mine had to recompile because the libraries they used for it are out of date. It has IE 4.0 but the certificates have expired so it won't load most websites. Nobody seems to be targeting the older PowerMacs for Web Browsers and other Internet apps.

I used to use it for safe web browsing because Windows viruses don't infect it and the web browser is so old it won't run the new stuff for the latest version of IE.

This is kind of a harebrained theory of mine that I'm not sure it's possible to test: are you more safe on very, very obsolete platforms because the chances of stumbling onto malware that'll target you is almost nonexistent?

If so, there's an argument for doing your day to day web browsing in SheepShaver running Classilla.. if not for the dealbreaking lack of support for any security better than SSLv3 (hopelessly broken).

I think fringe is probably more important than obsolete (though both together could be powerful). The problem being, obsolete software is trivial by modern standards to exploit, so it seems it would be like wandering a minefield. Stumble on some dusty old exploit, and it's over.

Just like there are clients running old code, there are old viruses around. I doubt it is safer than running up-to-date software, though it might be safer than being just a couple of versions behind.

I remember hearing that, at one point, there were some secure government sites that ran everything on classic Mac OS because it was one of the only operating systems that had no CLI and as such weren't vulnerable to someone getting console access and going to town.

Never verified that story, though.

I'm not sure if its the same story but the US Army once used Mac OS for some of its web servers because they were judged the most secure. I cannot remember what third party web server they were using.

I used to work as a federal contractor in 1996-1997. The Army did switch to MacOS for web servers. I'm not sure what Mac web server they used. They tried Windows that got hacked, and they ran Linux but didn't always update it and it got hacked as well. I think they ran some stuff as Root in Linux. The MacOS security model was different from Linux or Windows and supposed to be more secure.

Of course social engineering meant that people can call their help desk and pretend to be someone working on the server to get the password reset. No security software is going to stop a social engineering attack. Also after people get their password reset they forget to change it and leave it "password" and other easy to remember passwords. So weak passwords mean someone can get in without using an exploit but a password dictionary attack.

And here's the article https://tidbits.com/article/5552

"The compelling aspect of this story is that as a result of the break-in, the U.S. Army has switched the machines that serve the Army's home page from Windows NT-based PCs to Power Macintosh G3s running WebSTAR from StarNine Technologies."

[edit:] I do love the speculation at the end on if Mac OS X Server will be as good security-wise as Mac OS.

That's probably true to some extent. The security of these older systems also undoubtedly benefits from the much smaller attack surface. They typically have far fewer services (network or otherwise) and simpler interfaces between components.

If known vulnerabilities were patched, I can see how it would be easy to trust a simpler, legacy platform over a modern platform. Very few experienced professionals I've worked with (myself included) posses a working knowledge of a modern OS's services and persistent processes - that's a lot of trust to place in the platform. There's something to be said for the time when you could have an inside out understanding an OS, its libraries and its binaries.

I thought vanilla Android was overly complex, but one look at the running processes on a Samsung S7 and I was horrified. The same can be said of OSX or a recent mainstream Linux distribution.

I'd happily take a less flexible but much simpler OS over what we have now. Removing all those layers of services and indirection might increase short term development costs, but I think it would be worth it.

Modern computing has me feeling more and more like a grump old man. I'm only 30.

Classilla do better than SSLv3 these days. It even supports SHA2 certificates now.

You're less likely to pick up a widely targeted virus, and more likely to be pwned if anyone attempts to target you personally.

If you want to run obsolete platforms with built in modern security protections, why don't you just use OpenBSD?

/rimshot

I love you OpenBSD

A lot of Finder hate here, and I agree, it's a piece of shit. Forget about it.

Get Path Finder[1], you won't regret it. I have no affiliations, I'm just an over zealot fan.

1. http://www.cocoatech.com/pathfinder/

Edit: fixed a word

Thanks for the heads up on this. Looks like a neat replacement. I like that it has Git integration etc. all built in. The "Drop Stack" feature seems like a killer one (for me). I've lost count of the number of times I have copied image or icon files from several subfolders into one destination project folder. Drop Stack may mean the end of having multiple Finder windows or tabs open...

Even the 1984 Macintosh was snappy in its user interface: when you clicked a menu it opened instantly, when you dragged a window it always moved instantaneously.

Working with Windows even 20 years later was disappointing. You click the Start menu, and waited. Finally it appeared. You hovered over a menu item and waited. Finally its submenu appeared.

There was a hover delay built into WinXP which I also found annoying, but you could disable it (for free) using Powertoys for XP from Microsoft. It wasn't the computer that was too slow but a stupid UI decision by Microsoft. That was easy to fix though.

I think you are being far too nostalgic about the experience using old computers. It was shit. It was much harder to do anything useful. Try editing a video for instance. Or even just emailing a photo. Or loading a file from a floppy which took tens of seconds. Some people remember the experience of using an old PC as being better because it was simpler because they didn't even attempt to do anything more complex than very basic tasks like word processing.

I remember launching an application on a 1989 Mac SE30 took (I'm guessing) about 10 seconds. You heard the HD thrashing around long before the application was visible. Most programs launch in less than two seconds on my >5yr old i5-2500 with an SSD (Windows 7). The machine has started up and is ready to use in less than a minute. I have over 300 tabs in Firefox and it is still responsive (admittedly after a significant launch delay, but after that it's fast).

You could run notepad/Word and nothing else if you want on a modern PC and it will run lightning fast, and the menus are quick.

If you enjoy the old PC experience so much, there's no reason you can't continue to use one.

   > There was a hover delay built into WinXP

No, this was longer and inconsistent. The more I used the menu, the faster it got, until finally the built-in delay was the only delay.

   > I think you are being far too nostalgic about the experience using old computers.

No, I'm just saying that there were some nice things about old Macs that took Windows decades to match. And I'm agreeing with the article that there are some subtleties that are still hard to beat, despite many other things that are of course many times worse. The article wasn't about how an old Mac is better in every way and we should all dump our modern computers and go back. It was pondering the irony: "Hey, isn't it ironic that this computer can't open Facebook, but it has a spatially oriented file browser the remembers the spots for all your icons in every folder." To this day, Windows cannot keep the Recycle Bin in the bottom-right corner across screen resizes. It is obviously recording the coordinate from the screen's top left. That always bugged me too (I know, it's the small things).

I recently switched back to Windows after using OS X exclusively for about five years. Windows has the ergonomics and aesthetics of a U-Haul. :)

I don't know how regular people can use Windows productively without breaking everything. All the controls and settings are so persnickety and janky, built upon strata of earlier generations that are still in the way. There are so many little things Microsoft could do to streamline the user experience and make it feel solid without alienating existing users, but they just keep adding more to the stew or throwing curve balls like Metro.

> I don't know how regular people can use Windows productively without breaking everything.

With the keyboard. The UI changes, and the mouse handles move around, but the keyboard shortcuts still work (mostly). After using a Mac for work for almost 5 years, it still annoys me the amount of things you can't easily do without the mouse.

That's a good point. I worked at Microsoft, back during Windows 2000, and engineering management would encourage "no mouse" days to identify UI that was not keyboard friendly.

I don't understand why they haven't updated shell32.dll with new icons in Windows 10, instead of the 50 different icon sets available. Open MMC, put in a snap in, open Explorer, open Control Panel, open Settings and observe the plethora of conflicting icons. It's horrible.

Because new icons take artists' time and effort? Windows 10 is slowly converging icon sets, it just clearly takes time.

Additionally, as you point out, many of the classic icons are embedded into system DLLs and EXEs. Servicing some of those files is a potential backwards compatibility nightmare and as a programmer I can understand not taking that lightly. (Not to mention, as much as people complain about "unnecessary" restarts from Windows updates, how many people would complain about a restart just to change icons in a system DLL?)

But if they're writing a new system and hailing it as a fresh start, why drag along all the old icons? They could replace those old icons in the same indexes in those DLLs with new flatter icons so it doesn't feel like you're using a horrible mess.

It would be a case of opening the RC files and going through the source images, surely? As for it being a nightmare, it is their operating system so they should be able to maintain it... (I think they have sufficient resources to draw icons - after all, they have drawn a new set of flat icons for half of the system).

As for the restart for new icons - I would have thought they would have done this before releasing the OS so that it didn't feel like a hodgepodge of different eras.

Other inconsistencies include the 3 new menus: the right-click menu on the Start menu, the right-click menu or normal menu within Edge and the right-click menu in Explorer or anywhere else. Apparently it is the same system (and these 3 things were released concurrently, remember) yet they are different.

It hardly encourages developers to be consistent if the OS vendor can't be bothered.

As a whole Windows is not a new system nor hailed as a fresh start. Yes, there are new systems in Windows and the Universal Windows Platform is sort of a fresh start (but even then the UWP is certainly more evolutionary than revolutionary in a practical sense, ultimately still having roots way back in COM, early .NET history, and Longhorn ideals that didn't get finished in time for Vista).

At the end of the day, even Microsoft's resources aren't infinite: they can prioritize new features and tech or they can prioritize cleaning up old stuff that still works and isn't broken, and unsurprisingly many times they can't prioritize both.

I get that the little inconsistencies bug a lot of people, but it's a complex ecology of systems and they all evolve at their own rates. A truly fresh start for Windows would probably have been shutting down the Win32 subsystem altogether and they experimented with that on ARM tablets and people lost their minds; Windows' backwards compatibility swamp means that it will always be a somewhat inconsistent ecology. (Windows is much more consistent on mobile and Xbox and presumably the HoloLens where Windows 10 is less constrained by backwards compatibility ghosts.)

To bring it back on topic: complaining about where Windows 10 is now, consistency-wise, is much like the complaints when OS X released and the way Cocoa apps and Carbon apps lived side-by-side. Eventually it will be great when the Windows equivalent to Carbon apps are all gone, but with the long, long tail of Windows apps in the world and even inside Windows itself, that's going to take a while and Microsoft has much less of an ability than Apple to just fiat mandate that Win32 will end of life any time soon (at least not without angering a vast number of developers and users).

The replacement of icons is a smaller challenge than eliminating Win32 though. Perhaps such a small start would be beneficial to exude a feeling of quality and not "more stuff has been taped on!".

As it turns out, I don't think they will ever do away with Win32 as UWP uptake is very small (it's just a COM subset after all, just not IUnknown), and 90% of all other apps use Win32 (including every single "desktop" Windows app like Explorer, Notepad etc. etc...)

Smaller challenge, perhaps, but still a challenge and returning to my original point: these are icons in Win32 DLLs that they may have no other reason to touch. If their goal is to leave them alone until such time as they can remove them, them why spend time updating icon resources they can better use elsewhere?

Supposedly any touch to Win32 requires testing multiple decades worth of software for backward compatibility breaks. Even something as seemingly innocuous as updating icon resources could break things. (Don't believe me? Spend some time reading the archives of Raymond Chen's Old New Thing blog and see some of how crazy backward compatibility in Win32 gets...)

I don't expect we'll see the end of Win32 anytime soon, but I'm willing to bet we might see it shuffled into a virtual machine/container eventually. UWP uptake is not as small as you imagine, it's more like a COM superset, and many "built-in" Windows "desktop" apps have converted to UWP already (Edge and Calculator for two examples) or seem to be well along in the process (Settings has replaced a majority of the Control Panel now and on track to replace all of it, except for backward compatibility with million year old plugins). (Explorer might never, again for backward compatibility reasons, but it's already a hybrid and likely to continue to be hybridized or it may even be replaced instead, like Edge replaced IE.)

Again, the Carbon/Cocoa analogy seems the most apt one I can make here. It's a process that will take time, and even Apple didn't do the equivalent changes overnight.

I am aware of Calculator and Edge being UWP, which explains Calculator's poor startup time and needless splash icon on loading.

Settings really hasn't replaced Control Panel in the slightest - each item you open in Settings typically opens the items from Control Panel if you go beyond the entry level stuff (all just COM components anyway). Settings happens to be a needless frontend to the same items, but with reduced functionality and a titlebar that ignores the system colour settings (it's always grey despite your settings). For example, try this:

1. Settings let you choose desktop colours. It does not let you choose a custom colour. Open Settings > Personalisation > Background and choose "Solid Color". You have a limited choice of a few colours.

2. Open Control Panel > Personalisation > Desktop Background. This now opens the Settings app, annoyingly.

3. Run control.exe /name Microsoft.Personalization /page pageWallpaper

This will bring up the magical missing dialog (not accessible from any GUI) where you can actually set a custom colour by clicking the "More..." button at the bottom. Setting a custom colour makes the Settings window show the wrong colour for your desktop background, as it isn't in its feebly small selection of colours. So the settings app has reduced functionality that the other existing items in the system that they haven't properly removed or tidied up.

Why add another settings app that has less functionality? Is this the future?

I would stand by my original point that instead of writing new things, why not make the existing items consistent? Icons would be a good start, let alone behaviour like I have detailed above. Why not make the Start menu search use the NTFS index instead of being dog-slow etc? Why do we have 3 different right-click menus? Did we need 2 new ones in Edge and on the Start menu? They can write 2 new menus and an entire Settings frontend but not new icons?

Also, they can successfully change icons in DLLs with no side effects - look at Shell32.dll and observe the new jaunty angled "My Computer" / "PC" icon compared to Windows 7, and stuff didn't break when they changed it. See also the new Recycle Bin (whilst they have also kept the old Recycle Bin icon which isn't used anywhere). It's a mess.

EDIT: BTW, the Cocoa analogy is a good one. It will take time for these things to change in Windows, if they actually bother making the changes. I am not convinced they will. I wonder if they'll just leave it all as it is (like they have done) whilst adding new stuff to duplicate the existing functionality of old stuff.

And what are we meant to do with this 2 million+ lines of MFC codebase we have? What future does MFC have? There is silence on the matter. All in all it doesn't instill confidence at all.

I feel that that small simple changes (like icons) would lead to a better feel of the OS, particularly to the non-techy user who doesn't care about Win32/UWP. And to us end-users who are more techy, it would feel less like a giant rolling ball of 25 years of different technologies, covered in mud.

«And what are we meant to do with this 2 million+ lines of MFC codebase we have? What future does MFC have? There is silence on the matter. All in all it doesn't instill confidence at all.»

Wasn't MFC deprecated in favor of ATL a long time ago, and that in turn deprecated in favor of WTL? All three of which now seem deprecated in favor of C++/Cx. I haven't kept up with C++ that well, but I don't think MFC has had a future for a long time. I don't think Microsoft has been that silent on it either, albeit the communication has shifted and evolved over the years as Microsoft settled their COM/.NET/UWP approaches...

What you could do with that codebase today is use the Desktop App Converter to wrap it in a UWP package (.appx). Once converted you could also slowly start to migrate to C++/Cx and UWP APIs and XAML screens. There are a bunch of Microsoft blogs about that if you wanted to read more.

As it turns out, this problem is really my employer's problem. I suspect many other software vendors have the same problem with these festering codebases.

Hopefully my employer will being making moves to other frameworks some time soon (and first things first off C++2003)...

Just replying to myself to say that this is all obviously a bit of a "first world" problem, and these annoyances are small problems in the grand scheme of things. I realise I appear to come across as frothing at the mouth regarding the state of these issues as they are irritating, but they aren't the biggest problems in my life, or anyone's lives for that matter, nor should they be!

Woz mentioned something some time ago about how before OSX a whole lot of the Mac OS was housed in ROM.

His claim was that this contributed to the security of the platform, and i suspect it may also have contributed to the snappiness you refer to.

Frankly, the statement makes me think that pre-OSX Macintosh was the last holdout of the microcomputer era.

The look and feel of OS 9 is still working today. And I wasn't a Mac user so no hard nostalgia feeling (compared to a Wintel box). Ironic that I was so into hyper fluid dynamic UI (css3 or other stacks) now I'm finding myself missing Win 3 / OS 9 "fixed function pipeline".

BeOS and OS 9 were well designed. I feel like we've sort of lost our way about what made those OSes good, replaced it with very “showy” graphic design. Operating systems should be a tool for information and communication, not a modern art exhibit.

I'm surprised that they didn't talk to writers that just want to write a novel without all the distractions of a modern MacOs experience.

I don't use a word processing program much anymore. I just haven't taken the time to learn all the features, or care to.

What I have been using instead is Sublime text. I didn't plan on it, but just found myself using it to write. I know they have writing plug-ins, but haven't had the need to even seek those out. It probally seems crazy, but it just works for me now. Plus, most of my writing these days goes right into HTML markdown?

I do this too! I write most prose in sublime. It gives me spell check, word count, handy text folding features, and tons of other useful features without the distractions of thinking about styling. If necessary, I paste dump it into Pages/gdocs as a last step, but usually I just write markdown.

Not crazy at all. I used to use Notepad with the font set to something proportional. "Word processing" programs have blurred the line between writing and editing, but in a professional publishing pipeline they've always been best done with separate tools. And the tool for writing, should be a tool that offers as few distractions to writing as possible. Definitely no editing or layout tools.

I am of another school of thought. The layouts of my documents are there to make them easier to understand, and I benefit from them while I am writing. So I personally do not like writing in a text editor, even though I spend a lot of time in one when I am completing other tasks. At the same time, I simply create or import styles at the beginning of a project, so I am virtually never doing layout while I am writing.

Even MacOS is a distraction.

-- George R.R. Martin

Sent from WordStar 5

At the pace he writes, he could live in the pre-Gutenberg era and word processing wouldn't be the limiting factor...

I disabled all notifications (except calendar) and am using the pomodoro technique to focus - works for me, with no need to downgrade to OS 9. :-)

Okay, but using an OS without memory protection to achieve this seems dangerous. What if a buggy program accidentally blows up their work? (do they somehow install version control?)

You restore it from a backup.

You became conditioned to the state of the system. You would save before known problematic operations; you would have comprehensive backups. You adapted to the misfeatures of the underlying software. It's not much different, from a UX perspective, than when I was learning Unix and "rm -rf . [A-Z]*" was infuriatingly chalked up as "a learning experience".

MacWrite Pro crashed every single time I opened Tetris. It was a great way of conditioning me out of time-wasting when I was supposed to be writing an article.

> using an OS without memory protection to achieve this seems dangerous

Not more dangerous than back in the day when the old was the new.

What we have now is better, sure, but people back then still wrote books and did good work.

Easy, just dust of the floppy with a recent backup.

Memory protection won't stop corrupted saves. You'd just have to reboot sometimes after programs crash.

I have a Powerbook G3, running Word 5.1 on OS 9. The sole function is "writing machine." It's around 20 years old, and still runs just fine. It's a lot more convenient than an IBM Selectric, although not quite as fast. The Selectric never lagged.

Good riddance. These nostalgia pieces forget what flaky pieces of junk OS 8 and 9 actually were. Even Apple knew that they were stop-gaps, papering over the cracks until they could get a new system out the door.

7.5.5 was pretty solid though - it ran happily on our Mac Plus from nearly a decade earlier. However I've still got a Bondi iMac running 9.2 and every time I start it up I'm glad those days are long gone.

Remember extension conflicts? I do. Having to manually remove all the extensions and put them back one-by-one, rebooting each time, to find the two (or more) which didn't like each other was a total pain.

Have you zapped the P-RAM? Did you re-bless the system folder? Cargo cult computer maintenance.

Getting a reliable TCP IP stack working? Good luck with that.

The fear of an application crash (I'm looking at you IE 5) taking down the whole system and losing work. Cross your fingers and hope you can still save after a force quit.

The ability for users to move or delete key files in the System folder. What fun.

I run the DSP plugin company airwindows.com and have continued to support PPC machines, though I don't think it extends back to OS 9. Recently added Mac and PC VST (I'm told the backward compatibility on Windows tends to reach back farther: from my experiences in XCode I can believe it).

I'm understandably very curious whether there even is any DAW that can use the PPC Mac VST support I've been including in the new plugins :)

My friend got an Apple IIGS in 1986 and kept it going almost this long (until about 2000 if I recall). He had it upgraded to the gills with 8MB RAM, and the TransWarp GS accelerator card. It definitely was a parallel universe from Mac OS where there were amazing graphics and sound capabilities that didn't start to land on Mac OS until the mid-90s.

While we're all on the nostalgia kick - I only recently learned that parts of the System 7.1.1 source code had leaked a few years ago (notably the Toolbox stuff that went in ROM). That stuff was a fascinating read. Seeing source comments signed by Andy Herzfeld, Steve Capps, Bruce Horn and Larry Kenyon and dating back to before the Mac was even released (and lining them up with folklore.org stories) was amazingly nostalgic.

Here's a changelog line from the SystemSounds.r Rez resource file many of you might recognize the story behind...

    <3>	 3/28/91	DTY	Change the name of “Xylophone” to “Sosumi”.

It is basically the source of the SuperMario ROM from the first PowerPC Macs I think.

It is funny that they love the spatial finder so much. Remember when Gnome did this with Nautilus? It was not a popular decision at the time.

Although it obviously did have a few very vocal proponents.

I seem to recall that Windows File Explorer could do spacial as well. The concept only really work when you have a folder depth of 2-3 nested folders tops. After that you start getting so many windows on the screen it becomes like a dropped deck of cards.

It might have had that, although I seem to remember it not remembering window placement correctly. That was a long time ago, though, so I could have the details wrong.

So far as I recall Windows 3 was the only one that actually tried to be spatial. Windows 1 and 2 were essentially tiling window managers on the opposite side of the spectrum, and Windows 95's Explorer intentionally was not spatial. There was the brief period 98 to ME that Explorer was sometimes spatial, but that seemed more an accident of Explorer's "Active" phase than intentional.

    > He couldn't log in to his Ars e-mail

That's unfortunate! (For British [Commonwealth?] readers, at least.)

Hardware support is also one of the reasons to keep using OS9. I still use it on a 1998 Powermac almost every week as my drum scanner requires a custom PCI card and an app that ties everything together. Its vendor went under long ago and so no one to port their app to OSX. Works like a charm, with original keyboard and mouse.

I'm downgrading to iTunes 10.6.3 on Mac OS 10.5.8, the last version to work on PPC. Unfortunately I have to reimport all my music since 2012.

I held out at iTunes 10.7 for a long time because I don't want to lose USB sync of contacts and calendars.

My dad recently offered me an old PPC Mac Mini, and I hope I can get it to sync my iPhone 4S with iOS 6.1.3. It is possible to downgrade iOS using Odysseus, and I expect to keep this obsolete system for a while.

Apple had an ecosystem from 2001 (Quicksilver G4 running 10.5.8) to 2014 (iPhone 4S). That's 13 years, half my lifetime. iSync would "just work". Internet access is not always reliable enough for me to trust the cloud, and I prefer to manage my own Digital Hub.

I used some Platinum themes for about a year. It looks beautiful on Retina; there's so much space. Eventually I realised that my icon cache had grown to over 3GB though, so I removed them. I'm keeping an eye on the old versions though, just in case I get the urge to downgrade further at a later date.

Why do you want PPC? I'm thinking 10.6.x on the last Intel mac with Snowleopard support would be an 'upgrade' to your usecase.

Btw. what I miss most is the glory days of OSX Preview. This thing, I could just throw at it whatever I wanted and it would handle it without choking. Nowadays I have to force quit that damn thing more than I use it, just because I load some largish PNG. As a student this thing was the absolute killer feature for my mac, because I could put together conclusion papers way faster and in much higher quality than anything possible on Windows. Rectangular Text snippets being vector scalable after pasting into Pages and images keeping their original quality was just a godsend [1].

[1] http://imgur.com/a/slstJ

Preview shouldn't be falling over ever, even if PNG is a fairly inefficient format for partial loading. File a bug at https://bugreporter.apple.com or with Feedback Assistant.

Well.. is bug reporting at Apple less of a black hole nowadays?

I mean, being able to read the bug tracker for an open-source project has never made my life any better.

Recording studios with Harrison Series 12s are still stuck on very old 030s for their automation...

I still do my writing in the OpenDoc word processor WAV.

in an emulator?

Oh my God, I remember that term. I used to do all my web browsing in Cyberdog. Working in OpenDoc I got used to nothing having splash screens, and it was like a glimpse of a future that never happened…

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