NeXTSpirit: high-res NeXTSTEP Icons for macOS | Hacker News Reader

NeXTSpirit: high-res NeXTSTEP Icons for macOS

galgot.free.fr

171 pointsgalgot52 comments

Given it's a NeXTStep day today :) Part 1: http://galgot.free.fr/wordpress/?p=1380 Part 2: http://galgot.free.fr/wordpress/?p=1410

These are so cool. Thank you!

I haven't seen a .sit file in the wild for a long time, nice. And thank you.

Well, here's another one, a Kaleidoscope scheme from 2005, MacStep (includes lot's of Mac icns icons) :-)

> "NeXt's OPENSTEP refined for Mac – "macStep" is a derivative scheme based on the OPENSTEP 4 scheme by Scott Naness, specially adjusted for Mac usability"

https://www.masswerk.at/schemes/macstep.sit

> Given it's a NeXTStep day today :)

You noticed that too? I wonder what karmic factors are in play here.

I have been wondering if it's in any way related to me mentioning GNUstep and Étoilé in the Register recently...

https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/26/linux_software_instal...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Absolutely amazing. Will this ever be part of an Xfce theme? Can't wait to use this on my FreeBSD.

This is what I wish we were doing with Retina displays and such: making truly nice artwork instead of whatever single-colored squares and circles pass for icons these days. :/

Yes, it takes tremendously more work and is difficult to get right on a variety of screen sizes but there are also multi-billion-dollar companies that are in charge of this and I think it’s time they hired some more artists.

Photorealistic icons [1] are much harder to parse, visually, than very simple ones [2]. In general, graphical UIs have gotten far more visually noisy in the past few decades. This has made computers much harder and more fatiguing to use. So often we seem to have “UX” designers changing things for the sake of change rather than undertaking the legitimately hard effort (UI studies) of trying to determine what will make the interface easier to use.

[1] https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cTU5hVb22k0/R6u0lS9EFuI/AAAAAAAAB...

[2] http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Susan_Ka...

You are showing consumer electronics in the first one, and attempting to argue that this is how icons on the MacOS and iOS looked during skeumorphism.

The whole trend to do away with Skeumorphism led to things like Google’s Chrome browser having an empty white area where you apparently have to know you should tap to type the URL. It is still there on iOS.

Because showing browser chrome as slightly 3D is apparently “too skeumorphic” and distracting — better not to know where the website begins and ends lol

macOS and iOS for one are far more consistent and un-busy than they were from 2000—2014 or so. Apple had poor visual design discipline and deployed multiple styles across their apps and OS, many of them garish and cluttered. Also, you replied to a post yearning for skeuomorphic icons and bemoaning the clean shapes of today, which contradicts your point 2.

Please, have a look on Haiku OS' icons.

They are not photorealistic? But also not necessarily very good icons, to me (not quite representative, at least in some cases), so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make...

https://github.com/darealshinji/haiku-icons/blob/master/png/...

Color and shape (outline, at least) differentiation making it easy to identify icons in one's peripheral vision is a really nice property for icons, and BeOS is pretty good on those fronts. The main sin of the "photoreal" icon set a couple posts up was that it leaned too heavily on two colors (black and silvery-grey), not that it was photoreal.

So you LIKE Skeumorphism, you say? SHOCKING. Many people do, like Steve Jobs did:

https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234

It is so so rare to read a blog that shares the many of the non-mainstream views. Especially for naming Forstall. Firing him was a power play. And the quoting that iOS 7 design decision from Ive.

>“When we sat down last November (to work on iOS 7), we understood that people had already become comfortable with touching glass, they didn’t need physical buttons, they understood the benefits,” says Ive

Along with Federighi's comments. I still remember reading it at the time saddens me. They then spend the next three version of iOS trying to walk back all these flat, glass, no button decisions. Another 6 years before they rework all icons to the old circular proportion.

One thing to nitpick though was that Steve was well aware of the iPhone Plus or iPhone Phablet market condition. As it was in shown in the one of the court case email. And he was willing to go with it so he is not too stubborn about the size. / width.

I also think it was the turning point of his philosophy. Steve always wanted the iPhone to be an "smart" appliance. Hence it could be small, and used one handed. It was first and foremost an appliance, easy to use devices, Apps on top are something extra. Except the model has shifted to your Phone being the computer. And Apple no longer has his intuition to guide them.

Thank you. It means so much to me that someone smart on the Internet read what I have to say and finally found someone expressing similar non-mainstream views. I put a lot of thought into what I produce and write, but rarely have I had people discover or read it! So when someone reads it and likes it, it’s a pleasure.

I think it was particularly egregious when macOS Big Sur came out. It was abundantly clear that they no longer cared enough to even apply a basic sense of unified style in their artwork, with a weird mix of 2D-ish and 3D-ish icons, every color combination imaginable, etc. And on top of it, so many of the “new” icons were just plain ugly and some were outright weird, and many had really basic problems like improper shadow effects. Frankly they should have delayed the entire OS release by two months just to fix the icons, and it’s still in that bad a state.

It is even more frustrating that the OS is slowly being locked down so much that you basically can’t “fix” UI annoyances anymore, not without rebooting into Void My Warranty mode. You can’t fix bits and pieces of apps because they’ll no longer pass code-signing and fail to launch. In the old days you could pretty much hack any cool icons you wanted into any part of the system, and it was really amazing what people came up with.

Most of preinstalled app on macOS are still like that.

A clock icon showing the time and a calendar icon showing the date is two small details which make me (Android user) immediately happy to use iOS (macOS Calendar.app also shows the date). The clock even shows the seconds!

In that case, I have to share this icon set I made ca. 2001 based on Keith Ohlfs’ frankly brilliant work:

https://interfacelift.com/icons/artist/32/itomato/index1.htm...

Unrelated, but what the heck happened to Interfacelift? The site still runs, somebody is still paying for the hosting obviously, but I feel like it hasn't been updated since ~2018.

I'm probably in the minority that always hated the NeXT aesthetics. I was very worried when Apple bought them and was rooting for BeOS at the time. Thankfully they eventually went on very different direction with Aqua.

The HighRes versions on this site, however, are exquisite

If they bought Be they could not have bought NeXT since Gassée and Jobs were mortal enemies.

Sure, it was undoubtably a much better choice all in all. Even Gassée would admit it himself.

He's been pretty kind on Steve, on written word at least, over the last couple of decades.

Right, I should have said that Jobs had extreme contempt toward Gassée.

And Gassée was hardly alone on being a target of Jobs's contempt :)

I don’t know to what extent that is true but I do know that Jobs contempt of Gassée was not irrational, that is it was reasonably expected given Gassée’s actions toward him.

Oh really? I'd like to know more about that soup opera if you have links handy.

Gassée testified to Scully and the board against Jobs, betraying Jobs’ trust and accusing him of planning a coup in the company. This is what got him ejected from Apple. Shortly after Gassée took over Jobs’s role as head of the Macintosh project. Jobs considered Gassée “evil” at least in 97 and probably until his death: https://allaboutstevejobs.com/bio/key_people/jean-louis_gass...

Nice, thanks

Technologically speaking, I feel that OS X was a better choice (a more robust and developed platform). Qualitatively speaking, I loved everything about using BeOS—how snappy it was and the way applications felt like they could be thin extensions to the filesystem.

However, as someone whose youth involved waaaay too many hours tweaking files called .fvwmrc, I knew that looks are important, but skin deep. Hard to say which aesthetic I preferred. BeOS’s stock blue background, golden yellow tabs, and simple icons always made me feel “happy” even if they didn’t feel as staid and sophisticated as NeXT.

Yeah, NeXT was way more mature. Based on BSD, after all, what else can you say. And the GUI dev tools were second to none.

But to the end user, the look and feel of BeOS hasn't been matched still.

I had 3 simultaneously rotating 3d teapots on an early pentium.. Man I thought we had peaked as a society when I saw that, on my own machine!

Ah, these are "high-res" icons; this isn't a link about anyone being hired.

:D Corrected

Is there a NeXT Linux theme?

EDIT: 5 mins later I found this submission to the homepage https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace

It's a shame you can't easily change the icons for dock icons without disabling SIP on modern Mac OS X.

Not sure if that's totally true. I've changed a bunch of icons w/o disabling SIP and I'm on the latest OS.

I think he’s talking about Apple owned applications. You can change the icon for any user installed program ( chrome, vsCode, iTerm) but cannot for things like Safari, Finder and Mail. Unless you disable SIP

Yeah, I can't change the icon for Finder to be the NeXT logo without disabling SIP. Kinda lame. Should be able to make an alias to it and change the icon on that at least.

I never liked those folder icons. They are shown in a isometric view while most others are orthographic view.

Noticed there is a "Better with Firefox or Safari" message on the site. I'm a little saddened to see this just as I would be to see a "Better with Chrome" or the old "Better with Internet Explorer".

Google turned the Browser Wars into a permanent state of Browser Low-Intensity Conflict. I'm not sad that someone is finally stepping up.

Now if only someone did HQ Platinum style icons...

check :https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29545340

Now if only someone could get the swirling black hole for a trash can replacement.

Notice the Easter egg in the ‘black terminal’ icon… the abyss stares back at you.

why have desktop interfaces become flatter while graphics processors have become faster ?

Well, implementing basic UI functionality even is hard enough with all the changing environments, screen sizes, rotations, touch interfaces and what have you. Making it as simple as possible makes it possible to focus in making those work in a more functional and usable manner.

While it is true that CPU and GPU powers have increased, also the ways we use our machines have changed, people might have wildly different environments that the same UI needs to work on these days.

Scalable UI alone can become a nightmare if you have anything more complex going on. Even the big players have a hard time figuring out proper usability, like look at Apple or Microsoft constantly making a hurdle to iterate on their designs, making mistakes along different releases.

Building usable UI is freaking hard and requires a lot of user feedback, iteration and focusing on details that you don't know before starting to build the product. Changing even one thing can lead to another thing breakin, and so on..

Designers will point out all sorts of usability studies.

The reality is that the art world, of which industrial design is an integral part, lives and dies around fads or "movements", which negate each other every few years. We're currently at tail end of a wave that preached flatness, leveraging the move from low-res to high-res screens to entrench itself as easier to implement. Now that the migration is near completion, a correction is bound to happen. Apple have already started: they attempted to reintroduce depth and shadows in their recent iterations of icons, arguably with mixed results. More and more people will try, eventually resulting in a new wave against flatness.

I love it! These are so good!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com