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Comment by tambourine_man | Hacker News Reader

I've never been a fan of the Next aesthetics, hardware or software, and was afraid of what the Mac would become after the merger. I actually rooted for Be, which had Mac OS written all over it and great taste overall. Till this day I miss BeOS.

But the tech on Next was way more mature. And there was this guy named Steve.

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I was a big BeOS fan too back in the day. But in retrospect I’ve realized NeXT was simply much better technology. Unlike BeOS they had vector based UI. Objective-C was a better language for GUI apps. Pervasive mulithreading that BeOS went for was a mistake

Yes, NeXT's tech was better aaaand[1] it came with Steve Jobs.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16788883

But Be's taste and priorities (the most responsive UI I've ever used until the iPhone), were more aligned with mine.

Was there much software released for BeOS?

No much unfortunately.

I absolutely love the Next aesthetics and its hardware. Everything from the Logo (Paul Rand) to the industrial design of Next machines was top. I can't say much about the software since I have never used it.

I know it's not a popular opinion, but I find the icons hideous and all over the place (lacking a standard cohesive vision). The window elements layout, a menu that disregards Fitts's law completely, that heavy grey… just poor taste all in all. I'm amazed it was Steve's creation.

Thankfully they took another route designing OS X.

That logo is great though.

AIUI the menu appears under the mouse when you right (or middle?) click.

> The NEXTSTEP operating system further developed the idea, incorporating a feature whereby the right or middle mouse button brought the main menu (which was vertical and automatically changed depending on context) to the location of the mouse, thereby eliminating the need to move the mouse pointer all the way across the large (for the time) NextStep screen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_menu

I just edited that Wikipedia article. Interlisp on Xerox Daybreaks (and maybe Viewpoint; I've only used Interlisp) had left/middle-click context menus under cursor in the mid-1980s, so I imagine it was present on the earlier D* Xerox systems and maybe the Star. Definitely predates Nextstep though.

Ah, that makes sense, didn’t know it, thanks.

Always saw people moving the menus around as the big differentiating factor. Never thought it would first pop under the cursor.

I agree, software is pretty ugly with skeuomorphism in full effect just short of actually using pictures of stuff as icons.

OS X went the skeuomorphic route as well for many icons, but by then we could accurately represent objects on screen, at least.

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