Hello Mac OS X Tiger
bunn.dev
bunn.dev
For me it was more like “you have just torrented the Golden Master DVD image and restored it on to your bootable Firewire iPod because you only have a CD-RW drive and nobody has released rips of the six-CD version yet” ;)
https://betawiki.net/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Tiger_build_8A428
e: Siracusa’s review for Ars is still a great read too: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2005/04/macosx-10-4/
I still remember buying a RapidShare account for a month to get Snow Leopard off those multi-split files because I couldn’t find a torrent.
The 00’s were such a different time for tech.
That meant shelling out $129 after about 3 years (2 year lifecycles, and I think I bought my first mac almost a year into the then OS lifecycle).
This provided me with excellent stability and a very reasonable price. I'd save up a few hundred $s, and then upgrade the software and hardware at around the same time, so I also added additional RAM and moved the HDD to the CD-RW and inserted an SSD instead of the HDD (I am 100% sure I made these changes for my macbook, but I'm not sure if I made them, or if they were even possible, for the iBook I owned before).
That was almost a decade+ of highly stable, highly effective, and almost cutting edge of computing that I haven't even come close to replicating in the almost decade since, despite earning real money.
I did switch to Linux for my personal computing a few months ago, and I have hopes that this may allow me to do so, once I really set something up once I get to my Mar-Apr spring cleaning. Linux is giving me that Mac feeling for the first time in a long time, although the major challenge here appears to be restraining oneself. It seems so easy to get lost trying to distro hop constantly, or try a new terminal for marginal benefits, etc. The new shiny in Linux shines very bright, and restraint seems to be the core challenge required to have a stable, outcome focused computing experience with Linux.
I wish modern smartphones had a similar capability. I know Android phones let you copy files to them via MTP, but that’s not even a fraction as good as the portable HD function of iPods was.
And installing any updates would usually revert this, leading to an unbootable system :/
Not sure if this still works like that but it was a total PITA.
[0]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/streetwalrus.usbmountr/
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/panther-feature-home-on...
Unfortunately the oldest snapshot in Wayback is October 12th 2003 with the blurb already removed. Apple filed a patent application for it in 2002 which was assigned in 2006. It expires this year!
https://patents.google.com/patent/US7246226B1/
https://appleinsider.com/articles/06/10/11/apples_missing_ho...
Would love to have been a fly on the wall after the keynote where Steve chewed out the engineer that left that in.
Here is a secure external disk, which you can plug into your mac, it will be secure even when plugged into your mac, even the data over the thunderbolt bus could be encrypted in transit, its all technically possible to do.
I've used it successfully in the past to serve different Linux ISOs on the fly. It relied on certain kernel features / permissions to act as a USB mass storage device.
A lot of the people working on these systems weren't working professionally when 10.0 came out. Most of those people have moved on. Apple is not the same humans.
A corporation is a shield behind which humans plot and practice their most deliberate, libidinous schemes of avarice, moderated not by morality or community, but only by laws and markets. And for that, corporations have lawyers, resumes and advertising.
It is a rare corporation that retains a soul for longer than its founders presence, because lawyers, resumes and advertising cannot sense what founders could: a creative future.
I keep a Snow Leopard VM around to occasionally run old software in and the difference in shadow size is always striking. I personally like the more focused look of pre-10.7 shadows.
You may be thinking of Yosemite, which definitely toned down the shadows a bit as part of flattening everything.
They weren't the only or primary reasons but they had significant role. I personally love the new flat interfaces MUCH more TBH.
I couldn't really stand the tiger-era MacOS either; but early iOS and *MacOS Snow Leopard* we're the pinnacle of UI/UX for me.
I still remember the high pixel density of the devices being shown off so well with the crisp rendition of paper and leather. The way it felt like it was popping off the screen.
Back then I had really good eyesight (I was 20-22~) and those UI elements sold me on the quality of the hardware.
That, and it was much smoother in it's animations than android/windows/compiz.
Tiger was a big improvement. And, the earlier versions of OS X still look way better than what we have now.
As if we lived in the Matrix.
I have a neice who was born in 96. When she was 10 or so I found out she was listening to both Green Day and Patsy Kline with essentially equal interest.
That's when I got this idea.
She was born entirely after not only the existense of recordings that go back at least a few generations, not only after the existense of the internet, but after the mass adoption of the internet, digital copies of recordings, and countless distribution means, both centralized and peer to peer. The essential nature was not that different from today, the day she was born, let alone 10 years later.
For me, Patsy Kline was only on the oldies station at my grandmas house and the barber shop and which actually called itself the oldies station, and my parents wouldn't be caught dead listening to Green Day.
For my neice they are both just content.
I can go from Yes, to Twenty One Pilots, to Kansas, to TheFatRat, to Johnny Cash, to random youtuber, to Linkin Park, to Guns 'n Roses, to Elvis, and so on.
They're all just there, there's good stuff from every time period - why would you limit yourself?
Oh and don’t forget auto-tune ;) Although there are a few examples of it being used for pitch correction before 2000 (+ that Cher song), it wasn’t until the 2000’s that it got ratcheted up to T-Pain levels.
Tiger was solid - Leopard was where it was at. Snow Leopard may be my favourite, but as I can’t run it on any of my PPC systems I have no excuse to run it anymore.
64-bit started for me back when the G5 came out, and today that G5 screams, easily feeling as responsive as my girlfriend’s M1 MacBook Air most of the time.
It’s almost unbelievable how the G5 performs like it’s got bloody Sonic the Hedgehog trapped in there on a hamster wheel generator. My Intel machines never came close, and a lot of it seemed to have to do with major bloat as the OS moved along. Probably also bloat in Logic. My G5 can handle the hell of a lot more effects and VSTs with about 50% the impact they have on my Intel machines. It’s surreal.
I also find it absolutely pathetic and astounding that up until this year (16 inch MBP excluded) the maximum RAM a MacBook could have was the equivalent of a computer I got in 2005. 15 years later I still couldn’t get even 32GB RAM in a MacBook. And it was soldered so it couldn’t be upgraded. Shameful.
But yeah these things were beasts. The dual-CPU and then the dual dual-core were seriously impressive. I really wanted one at the time but could not justify it. I finally got one for €100 2 years ago, now it sits next to a G4 Cube. Both are some exceptional pieces of engineering.
There were hacks for absolutely everything. Simpler times...
When they moved them into a row and changed the way multi-screen worked it completely lost its usefulness for me. Before that I always used a 3x3 grid. It was one of the many ways macOS evolved against the grain for me.
Other major regressions: LaunchPad (cool for iPad users I guess but completely ridiculous on a 24" screen - Even Microsoft moved back from this). The incessant power saving tricks imposed that are all but impossible to switch off (I use mainly desktops so I care about performance, not battery). Notarisation, every app calling home to Apple every time it's run.. Wtf. Then there was Apple "Server" which became more of a joke with every release (the Leopard version was the last real one).
But really what it told me was that I hate an OS where every year some people sit around a table and decide what I should want changed, and offer no way to choose. In other words: I hate opinionated software.
I recently moved to KDE and wow, it's so amazing to have all the things I missed back. And also a more useful expose-style function again though the relative window sizing is unfortunately something it doesn't do.
Or there was a hack to backport certain things from Snow Leopard onto Leopard PPC...
It is real Snow Leopard with a Snow Leopard kernel, but a lot of components are copied over from Leopard, and there are still a lot of issues. I'm not clear as to whether or not anyone has gotten graphics acceleration working, for example—it certainly doesn't work on most models.
Tiger: Great new UI. Spotlight. Dashboard. Leopard: Quick Look. Time Machine. I hated it from a functional perspective, but wow it looked amazing. Snow Leopard: They just cleaned up everything.
10.6.8 was pretty good, but I've had similar stability on Mountain Lion (10.8) and Mavericks (10.9). I think Snow Leopard has developed a legacy partly because Lion (10.7) was pretty bad, and partly because Snow Leopard was the last release to support Rosetta.
Then again, Yosemite (10.10) was also really bad, and I seem to be the only one who thinks Mavericks was the actual pinnacle. *Shrug*
As I recall, per the HIG, the official line on brushed metal was that it was for apps that interacted with physical hardware in some direct way: portable music players, synch. managers, optical drives, disks, something. Now if you think that’s vague, you’re not wrong; most apps could at least print something, and it wasn’t applied consistently even within the iLife suite which up until the inclusion of iWeb consisted entirely of apps that were intended to bring the Mac and peripheral devices together (CDs, digital cameras, MP3 Players/iPods, DV cameras, SuperDrives, MIDI). This vagueness and the low popularity of brushed metal Safari in particular was one of the reasons the brushed metal theming was retired after Tiger.
The aluminum stuff all came about just immediately prior to (about one or two month’s prior) or after Leopard’s release, but Tiger’s era (and Brushed Metal didn’t start on Tiger) was dominated by plastic input devices.
Anyway, I used Firefox and Camino around that time.
Even though we have many gaping holes in the details of the current UI due to the many paradigms (SwiftUI, AppKit, Catalyst), skin-deep macOS is much more agreeable.
Cocoa apps are mostly fine in modern macOS. Their main issues are the lack of contrast*, but things like the dark theme are great. From what I have seen SwiftUI is fine too, although it still has some way to go to catch up with AppKit, and has some rough edges. Catalyst is plain garbage, though.
* a pet peeve: I have to click 3 times when I want to make sure that the shuffle mode is either on or off in Music. Another one: document proxy icons are getting hidden and harder to use, even though they are a fantastic feature of the OS. There's a bunch of others features that are becoming more and more obscure, which is a damn shame.
Mobile platforms benefit more from high contrast, very simple and flat designs.
Beyond just the touch screen convenience features -- A significant portion of users is seeig their UI under conditions of extreme sunlight, water droplets, or cracked screen at any given time. These things all inform design choices for mobile.
Now then, why is Apple making the same mistake as Microsoft Windows 8 by forcing these design elements onto Desktop and Laptop market segments? Apple doesn't really think of the PC market much. According to their financial reports, they make more money selling chargers for their mobile devices than they do on the entire PC market.
The answer, I assume, is apathy.
This design move is at this point getting to be a decade old. So this explanation from you makes zero sense.
I was mostly describing my feelings and guesses of it.
But more importantly, they existence of change is inherently important to the large-scale advancement of computing over time. Even if it is the case that a certain UI overhaul of a major operating system harmed productivity, the solution is not “permanently halt all software changes after this specific version that I have learned and enjoy using.” We ought to reject arguments that forced stasis is the solution any time changes introduce risk.
We also ought to reject the idea that forced change is the solution.
If you'd let people mix and match elements from different eras of macOS, I'm sure you'd see some patterns regardless of when people got into Macs; similar to how people have lots of abstract opinions about architecture, but somehow the tourist buses always stop at the same cozy-looking old towns. Beauty and usability are not entirely subjective.
It's not just apple, its everything in big tech. Venmo just released an update where they moved key workflows around for no reason at all, and now I don't have muscle memory for the app anymore, but I'm sure some project manager justified it with telemetry and got a huge bonus for rolling out an update and showing downloads grew by 1% (which they probably would have anyway).
Look at the MacOS release feature lists before and after the iPhone. It's pretty clear that the Mac teams got cannibalized and didn't recover for years.
Fun fact: OS X Public Beta had an Easter egg setting that I can’t quite remember, defaults write com.Apple.something or other, that would set all Cocoa apps to a straight-up NeXTSTEP appearance. It completely broke usability, though, as windows would minimize into little squares in the corner of the screen a la NS rather than into the dock.
Wow I've never read about this -- know of any screenshots? Would be really interesting to see what some of the default OS X apps looked with the NeXTSTEP appearance.
https://macosx-dev.omnigroup.narkive.com/WZX5AkMk/extras-rsr...
https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macosxdp2
I also like to use Jagwire's Extras.rsrc on Tiger to get my sweet sweet pinstripes back: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/jaguar-ui-on-tiger-proj...
I didn’t like the older thinkpad keyboards; noticeably too stiff for my taste. But this IBM "portable" keyboard is a dream: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_5100
Key travel is only important to assist in your typing + provide feedback, but unless you type like a brute (I've a friend whom I would NEVER lend my laptop too, as I would be worried for my keyboard) or have sensory nerve issues like from diabetes, you don't need much travel.
I was dubious of the newest Lenovo keyboards, but after using my X1 Nano for a few hours, I was convinced: while the keys themselves have less travel, it has a strong opposing force that gives a lot of feedback.
It's still a bit too stiff for my taste (it seems to have been made for big burly guys) and I'd prefer something more like the current Macbook keyboards, a self-avowed heresy for any Thinkpad fan :)
It's too bad that laptop switches will likely never see the huge and varied aftermarket that we have with mechanical keyboards. There's a switch for everyone, and it'll work in almost any keyboard if you're handy with a soldering iron or have one with hotswappable switch sockets.
Is there one for me, who likes little key travel, softness, and silence?
So far the best solution I've found : thinkpad USB keyboards everywhere :)
Indeed. Even if it's antithetical to the mechanical keyboard idea, I wish MX style keycaps (wide availability, for ex this is how I could get a Cyrillic keyboard) could be made compatible with rubber domes (with no mechanical switch)
It's a tough engineering problem, that's for sure. I agree that older ThinkPads are a little bit stiff.
Apple went too far with butterfly, but I think they landed a good place with their current line up. They have very little wobble. Cherry MX switches (and clones) are excellent in terms of off-axis binding. Some clones are significantly less wobbly than others, for various reasons but none of them sacrifice off-axis performance. It took decades to get to this point though.
On a related, Alps mechanical switches are notorious for dust and dirt ingress issues as they get older and they're extremely hard to clean. For some reason Cherry MX switches have fared much better over the years.
This is not accurate. You are thinking of cheap Alps clones. The “complicated” SKCM/SKCL switches from the mid 80s through early 90s have fancy switchplates that give an extremely clean electrical signal and have contacts entirely enclosed in a switchplate. All sorts of 20+ year old keyswitches (including Cherry MX switches) start to feel “scratchy” when they get used with a lot of dust/dirt inside, because the plastic gets scraped up.
I’m really surprised to read this comment because it really disagrees with what I’ve read and my own experience.
No this is not why people want the older Cherry MX switches. The older MX switches used less worn-out molds and/or different plastic, and were much smoother straight out of the factory than MX switches from a few years ago which are quite scratchy feeling when new (this may have improved more recently, I’m not sure).
> my AEK and AEK IIs with creams and salmons that don’t feel so hot today
Feeling scratchy is very common for 25-year-old MX keyboards as well, and other kinds of keyboards. Stuff that sits on a shelf or table (not in a box) for decades collects a lot of dirt inside. Alps also applied some kind of lubricant to the slider in the factory, which may not be there anymore. Alps switches might be a bit more susceptible to scratchiness from decades of dust inside than MX switches because the slider slides against 1 or 2 leaf springs which provide resistance; in linear MX switches the slider is only moving up and down in a plastic channel and scraping a bit against the sides but the resistance is all provided by a helical spring.
(You could probably improve your key feel by disassembling all of the switches, putting the parts in an ultrasonic cleaner, and applying some lubricant when re-assembling them. You might not consider that to be worth the effort though.)
But I would generally expect both of your keyboards to be electrically quite reliable (at least at the switch level, with a very clean signal across each switch, not much chatter).
If a keyboard is stored for an extended time with key(s) depressed, it can end up deforming the springs. Deformation of the leaf springs can reduce the switch resistance and tactile snap in Alps switches; you can try to restore this by bending the leaf springs outward yourself, but it is pretty tricky to make them consistent.
I also have an AEK keyboard which stayed in a box somewhere sealed for 25 years or whatever, and is amazing today.
I did try ultrasonic cleaning some of my Alps switches, but it’s hard to replicate the factory lube. The lubes we use for MX switches aren’t ideal.
I would fully expect a new old stock AEK to be amazing. All of my AEKs are indeed electrically reliable, but they are scratchy.
0: https://rndkbd.com/collections/broken-in-switches/products/u...
Unused new-old-stock MX switches from the mid 1980s have noticeably smoother feel and don’t make the scratchy sound you get with new MX switches from, say, 2010.
Artificially wearing in keyswitches with 100s of thousands of robot keypresses seems really silly to me, though I guess it’s easier than disassembling every switch and sanding down the friction points with fine-grid sandpaper or applying fancy aerospace lubricant or whatever the kids are doing these days. YMMV.
i duno... "they don't make em like they used to"? :P
I'm definitely in the minority in that I actually prefer the 2019 keyboard over the others. It's the "fixed" version with the rubber gasket that prevents dirt getting in the works and I've never had an issue with a stuck key. Maybe it's because I'm a very light typist, but the 2019 butterfly keyboard never leaves my fingers feeling tired after a day of typing, where the 2007 keyboard did.
My favorite example are the icons in the iTunes sidebar, which used to be distinctly colored (and therefore quickly and easily distinguishable!) and then became a dull grey. It looks incredibly bland and it's harder to use.
Now it's split into multiple apps with monochromatic sidebars, which is slightly less boring but no more usable.
Buttons had depth and looked like candy…. I really liked them.
Was the graphite option for gray button bubbles available in 10.0? I can't remember anymore.
Interestingly, though, Aqua holds up better than the Brushed Metal OS X phase.
I bought an old copy of the Hillegass book Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, but I'm guessing most people learned from Apple developer docs that I never saw (or guess didn't know how to find back then)
As an aside, I don't miss the old programming books where each chapter just showed you how to use some GUI elements and they never got around to showing patterns on how you would actually create a usable application.
The major difference between Apple docs, and Javadocs at the time (Java was the actual language I used to program in), was that Javadocs was basically API references, whereas Apple docs had API references but they also had guides that went into the why, and the best practices, and even occasionally alternatives for edge cases, etc.
And the fact that it was available offline as an optional download with XCode was a massive bonus at a time when ubiquitous Wifi and internet was not a thing.
It was a real surprise to me, after having stepped away from any sort of Apple development for a few years that Apple's docs were considered bad.
Back then probably a significant portion. Today, I guess most of those former Next greybeards have retired or moved to other gigs.
there was some transition time when Apple published Carbon interfaces to Mac OS 9 devs (like me), stating that they were "transitional". Quite skeptical, I used them to rebuild some tools and apps in CodeWarrior. Within a short time, more updates had less Carbon, and the news came out that Codewarrior was locked out of OSX -- no deal. It was obvious that the Mac OS 9 interfaces were for chumps, and who wants to be a chump. It was true, and things changed.
It was a good fit since the physicists and mathematicians wrote their experimental stuff in Matlab and the engineers and us computer scientists wrote the actual production code in C compiled for the embedded hardware in the avionics. Cocoa provided a good bridging platform for tool sets between the two camps. (Later, python and its robust set of science and math libraries became the tool of choice in this role as Python expertise became more general on our team)
Long story short, I learned by suffering through the interface, especially the fairly esoteric Interface Builder.
And then in 2008 I went to a bootcamp hosted by the former-NeXT guy that had founded Big Nerd Ranch, Aaron Hillegas. He made it just click, so yeah, maybe but did take a NeXT programmer to wrap your ahead around it, ha.
[0] https://corecursive.com/cocoa-culture-with-hansen-hsu/#big-n...
It was kinda rough, and I didn’t get to the point to where I could build useful things until the late 2000s and early 2010s… just in time to dovetail into iOS development (which I’ve now been doing as my job for the better part of a decade).
The cornucopia of free resources that are available to new learners today is a ridiculously stark contrast to how it was back then.
But it’s a profession, selling shrinkwapped desktop applications or the modern equivalent takes a lot.
I remember reading a brand new O’Reilly book called “Building Cocoa Applications”. It was written by two ex-NeXT devs and was quite helpful in understanding the system.
Apple’s own documentation and sample code was good back then. The API was much smaller, so I read the reference for every Cocoa class.
Apple provided a fully functional demo app called Sketch which showed important architectural patterns like undo/redo. When developing my first Cocoa app, I’d basically go see how Sketch.app implemented something and copied the approach.
(Incidentally, I’m convinced that the well-known Sketch drawing app is basically a case of somebody looking at Apple’s Sketch.app sample code and thinking “couldn’t we just sell this.”)
Some years earlier I had tried to learn Win32. It’s hard to overstate just how fun and easy and powerful Cocoa felt in comparison.
For reference: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/samplecode/Sketc...
This was a tad difficult to find due to the aforementioned commercial Mac app called Sketch.
You can find the last official guide to modifying and compiling the xnu kernel from that time.
Documentation was fabulous. I miss those times.
I'd love to know what this looks like to a straight-out-of-university developer of an Electron app, though.
The current Electron/React approach has no happy path - everything uniformly requires some amount of boilerplate code. But when you need to deviate you are less likely to have to write a novella.
I'm making this up, but perhaps this was beneficial for UI consistency across apps anyway?
In general I’d say UIs are much better these days functionally, at the cost of much less consistent look and feel (UX) across apps.
1988 [0]
edit: WoodenChair beat me to it with the right date
Still, RIP both Interface Builder and Delphi.
Even if it’s technically possible to comply with GPLv3 without open sourcing proprietary code, there’s enough caveats/hoop jumps involved that it was seen as too risky to even try. They don’t want, “no legal issues as long as”, they want a flat, unconditional “no legal issues ever”.
Apple in particular never shipped any GPLv3 software in their OS and stopped updating even v2 software. They used to be very heavy GCC users, but wrote their own permissively-licensed compiler that outdoes it in almost every way. In their defense, they actually wanted LLVM to be an upstream FSF project; but RMS famously lost the e-mail because he daily-drives barely functional ancient laptops. In a sense, that too is enterprise-hostility; albeit not owing to choice of license. I imagine that if the FSF had agreed to refactor GCC the way Apple wanted, Apple would have gone through the time and effort of GPLv3 compliance.
I'd also argue that GPLv3 didn't actually fix the TiVo loophole. It can't - not unless we're going to pull an SSPL and start writing copylefts that trip on software that merely runs alongside Linux. The way TiVo got around the GPLv2 installation instructions requirement was to make their own proprietary app enforce the kernel lockout rather than the bootloader, and prohibiting that would be very draconian.
That being said, you also should take into account the historical context of GPLv3's announcement and development. The FSF had some pretty crazy ideas, like rolling the Affero clause into GPLv3, that probably scared people into dropping their upgrade clauses even if it never actually made it into an actual FSF license document. The end document we actually got is relatively tame, but the message the FSF sent was that they were willing to ship whatever license language they felt met their personal definition of software freedom. If you didn't like any new restrictions they added to your own code, tough.
[0] Stuff that runs in a sandbox container and doesn't use private entitlements probably isn't violating GPLv3, because Apple hands out free dev accounts that let you compile and run whatever, albeit with some annoying requirements to renew the app's signature every week.
Damn imagine the horror.
That's not to say it can't be made reasonably secure. In fact, Apple actually did it on M1 Macs[1]. The secure boot policy there includes a device-generated key that only the first admin account - the Owner account - gets, which can be used to sign new kernels for that machine only. Ergo, if you want to install Linux, you have to be logged into that Owner account. You can't steal someone's Mac, wipe it, and defeat the activation lock by installing Linux. But to get there required a lot of additional engineering work[2] - the easy path is "only our software runs on our hardware".
[0] AFAIK Android has similar security features, so they face the same threats that iOS does.
[1] T2 has a similar but less elaborate scheme. It doesn't have per-volume security guarantees - if you want to dual-boot Mac and Linux, then you have to turn off the signature check on the macOS side.
[2] Engineering work, BTW, that I'm genuinely surprised Apple put in. I imagine there were some very heated internal debates over whether or not the Mac should even have an owner override. Especially given that Apple did their darnedest to ensure that the owner override can't touch anything even remotely related to iOS. If you launch an owner-signed kernel, iOS app support turns itself off; and the Apple-signed versions of macOS actually have the same sideloading restrictions on iOS apps that iOS does. Which is particularly silly, because you can get around that by just compiling for Catalyst.
>If you launch an owner-signed kernel, iOS app support turns itself off; and the Apple-signed versions of macOS actually have the same sideloading restrictions on iOS apps that iOS does.
Has there been an attempt to patch this out? if the supposed owner override is actually real then technically the only thing separating you from a non treacherous ios subsystem is a few conditional jumps right?
>We had a lot of gratitude in the Open Source community — particular for our fixes to make bash pass the tests.
The GNU projects showed their appreciation by re-licensing under the GPLv3.
when i was younger i had a used next slab. it had the same effect, everything was so cool you just wanted to build things for it. next thing i knew i was coming in on weekends to build a from scratch port of my then employer's product. my boss at the time was blown away.
it's no wonder to me that berners-lee wrote the first version of worldwideweb on the next, nor carmack with quake...
edit: i guess it was doom. it was a long time ago!
Compare this GUI-driven, mostly-discoverable flow with the incantations you need to know to set up a React interface, for example. It's night and day.
I still use XIBs when doing personal Mac Cocoa development though, because the experience there is still decent (though not as good as it was). Won’t touch storyboards with a ten foot pole though, they slow down IB too much and generally aren’t a good fit for desktop UI paradigms.
I usually praise Apple's UI for often being intuitive and elegant. But it looks like, in this specific case, there is a problem only outsiders can see clearly: ctrl+clicking an icon to an UI gadget is neither discoverable nor intuitive!
When I improved the Anjuta-Glade integration, I made some effort to do something simpler:
- Open the .ui then the corresponding (by marker comments that are automatically created when the project is created) .c and .h files... boom! They are automatically associated.
- Add an ID to a widget you want to access programmatically, double-click it on the inspector... boom! Code for accessing it as a member of the "private" struct is automatically created.
- Add an onClicked signal to a button (which already has an ID), double click it... boom! Code for the callback is automatically created.
I know that because I implemented it: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/anjuta/-/commit/5abe8fd3a97d8...
"GUI-driven, mostly-discoverable" vs "neither discoverable nor intuitive"
There were a lot of hoops you had to jump through to get unit tests working and there weren't iOS apps that could be run in a simulator or device.
Can’t find a reference to it now [1] but there was some sort of somewhat known issue with the powerbook g3 that I had at the time that presented under os x, but not os 9.
I argued successfully that it should be fixed under the “software warranty” because it said it was compatible with that powerbook, but the processor issue made it incompatible, and it worked.
Imagine that happening today…
[1] This CNET article alludes to it but doesn’t go into much detail: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/lombard-powerbook-the-pr...
Too bad the experience is diminished and what I still like were there with Tiger already in almost all cases (dock, top menu, hot corners, simplicity, ...). The simple but powerful things. New things like notification center are more intrusive than helpful/informative (first thing I try to disable in a new OS with more and more effort and fiddling around and less and less success. It is forced on me!), the AirDrop is too temperamental to be reliable, iPhone connectivity is the joke of connectivities and basically awckward for simple things even, icon redesigns are counterintuitive (still have to look for photos and system preferences 4 times more than earlier, simply cannot get used to those, are not discoverable or prominent)... are just some random items come to mind suddenly, there would be more. The forced new features sometimes does not play nice with each other. Did you try switching keyboard layouts (something that worked very well for more than a decade now) with fn button while the mouse is in the middle of the screen? Based on the location of the mouse the result will be random (floating menu item underneath the mouse will take precedence over the next layout, which is the expected way), and it is there without fix for almost years now?! A completely unnecessary notification from the notification center about dnd mode activation in locked screen (newest thing pushed upon me after latest update) has no close button but covers the pop up menus of the menu buttons available there, need to log in to disappear. Just two of the annoyances the new 'features' bring. The overall feeling is that Mac got much more stuff but did not got much better, sometimes even worse by intrusive and labour intensive disabling of things I never missed and are in the way, forced one me. Starting to work for the computer again rather than the other way around.
Concerning squashing bugs of new releases I recall Mac veterans around Tiger having the golden rule: 'Never install the new version! Wait for the first fix'. So I guess this part did not change much since.
It's at this point I get frustrated enough to give up and maybe try again in another year.
Is it just me? Does XCode really lack basic documentation?
The classic way of building building apps is quite well documented though. It has been modernized quite a bit since Tiger and Xcode 2.0, but the general structure and workflow is the same as in this article, and there’s plenty of docs.
The new SwiftUI stuff is still under heavy development, and starting with the wwdc sessions is probably the best approach.
When I lose faith in the IDE and its abstractions, that's when I get really antsy for the ability to opt-out/do everything directly without its help
To this day I miss being able to enter Dashboard with a single keypress like in the old days. I used that mini calculator, note taking app and weather widget constantly.
By I seem to be alone. For dome reason most people hated Dashboard.
Never mind the fact that apps like Calculator only allow a single instance/window for no reason. Only way around that is to literally duplicate the app!
If there are more I'd love links too!
68kmla.org
tinkerdifferent.com
Apple internally at that time was frightening. Coming neither from Apple or NeXT, I has an interesting position, being able to talk to various people more candidly. The Blue [1] team (System 7/8/9) on the second floor of the IL2 building seemed to be in constant distress. The ATG [2] team on the 3rd floor of IL3 was being swept out in mass layoffs and departures. There were still factions of Pink [3] and Copland [4] adherents trying to get their technology into the "Beaker" builds of what would become OSX Cheetah. The Beaker builds at the time were roughly re-skinned versions of NeXTStep and pretty uninspiring.
After my experience at Be, I really wanted to be involved in creating something great that would ship and be of real value to users. At Apple, I discovered that I just wasn't happy trying to exist in the chaos. Steve wasn't yet CEO, Avie and Bertrand were establishing a new OS organization on the 4th floor of the IL2 building and Steve Glass was still fighting to keep "OS 9" alive. In fact, OS 9 was critically important as it was needed to run on the new iMac and support all of the Apple hardware that was bringing in (diminishing) revenue. On that note, Steve was actively batting the Mac clone makers (or leeches according to Steve.)
In a moment of bleakness I received a call from a friend from Be. He said I should come join him, Andy Herzfeld, Susan Kare, Bud Tribble, Bart Decrem, Stan Christensen, Darin Adler, John Sullivan and more at Eazel. [5] Eazel wanted to create a user-friendly Linux distribution with a services model to generate revenue. The main product of Eazel was the Nautilus file manager and contribution to GNOME. After failing to raise addition capital after the initial 10 million dollars, Eazel went through a couple of layoffs. On the evening of shutting the doors, Andy gave Steve a call and told him about the Eazel team and Steve set up a large meet and greet with various Apple teams on the 4th floor of IL2. Those who were interested went to the meeting; the majority of those who weren't, ended up joining with previous comrades who had left Be to form Danger, who were now at a startup called Android.
The group who went to the meet and greet contained some significant contributors to various Apple software and hardware efforts; Darin Adler, Don Melton, Ken Kocienda, Bud Tribble, Maciej Stachowiak, Pavel Cisler, John Harper and more. Pavel helped in convincing Dominic Giampaolo [6] to come to Apple. This group of people also convinced other key contributors to come to Apple who were leery due to Apple's past history.
All that wanted to take a job were hired on the spot and we all showed up on campus got our pictures taken and started doing whatever project we thought was cool.It had only been 18 months since I had left Apple, which meant I qualified for an employment bridge; my stock options, employee number and previous employment time all rolled into my current employment phase.
This iteration of Apple was more stable; there was no more OS 9 group, the clones were gone, ATG was cleared out, Betrand had a functioning software organization, the product lines were much cleaner, Bas and the UX team were cranking out good designs and Steve was CEO and ruled with an iron fist. It was this organization that produced Tiger; the first release that I felt really represented the vision and aspirations of what a desktop operating system should be.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Advanced_Technology_Grou...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)
Working at Eazel was great! I was there when the team was quite small; less than fifteen people. Eventually our tiny workspace was bursting at the seams and all the cubes were dismantled and rows and rows of picnic tables from Costco were brought. OK, that part sucked big-time. It reminds me of high density floor plans at Amazon.
Most of us were on IRC all the time and it was always funny to see a majority of the office silently stand up to go on a lunch trip that had just been arranged on an IRC channel.
Andy was a huge proponent of the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman gave us our employee orientation. Yes, he did put on a robe and wear a hard disk platter on his head during the final convocation.
Because of the reputation of the founders and the quality of the staff, there was always someone interesting stopping by; Jeff Raskin, Steve Jobs, Alan Kay, Bill Atkinson, Mitch Kapor, Heidi Roizen, etc. I remember most of these people because I would always have to ask myself "How did a kid who grew up on a farm and didn't have a college degree end up at a place where I could talk to people like this?" I had a similar feeling when I was at Be and Apple as well.
The early GNOME developers who were worked closely with were also an amazing group of people. Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza, Raph Levien, Havoc Pennington and many more.
I mentioned the Eazel team having a huge impact on Apple as well. I was able to learn from these people, go to Apple with them and watch them do great work. Darin Adler and John Sullivan, who already were legends to me because of System 7 went on to found the Safari team along with Don Melton, Maciej Stachowiak and Ken Kocienda. John Harper, who was respected for the the sawmill/sawfish window manager, went on to create CoreAnimation and I believe large parts of SwiftUI. Bud Tribble became a senior executive behind many of Apple's technology. The Apple Watch is just one of his projects. Pavel Cisler brought his input from Tracker at Be and Nautilus at Eazel to Finder, where he is still managing the team. There are many more that didn't make the trip to Apple, but ended up at Android and other places doing great things.
As for the day to day work, it was a lot like any other programming job. We used gcc, edited code, compiled, checked things into CVS, managed bugs in Bonsai, automated builds in Tinderbox, etc. When I think about it, you could probably take 2001 me and drop me into 2022 and I wouldn't be all that shocked. Same processes, different tools. I would be super disappointed things hadn't progressed the way that I had envisioned though.
Awww. It must have been so shocking to MacOS devs when the iPhone was announced and it was web applications or nothing.
Played a lot of World of Warcraft on this thing. :-) And did some Cocoa/Objective-C development. But it was never the big investment that I thought it would be. After the Intel switch in 2006, the Power Mac G5 didn't have much more use for me personally because the new Intel machines were so much better...
Today I'm more into buying the cheaper machines for myself. Should have put the money from the Power Mac G5 into Apple stocks...
btw, taping the rss link doesnt open my rss app on ios, i think it may be the mime-type isnt set?
Edit: Best data I can find shows Google was about 35%, Yahoo 30%, and MSN 15%. So I guess it was a toss up if you were using Yahoo or Google, but I seem to recall everyone I knew who was a developer preferred Google because it did a better job finding developer docs.
My work laptop at the time was a G3 running System 8.6, which remains my favorite Apple OS to this day. I still have a G4 with 8.6 stuffed full of everything for the heck of it. And the Thinkpad.
.xib – Freudian slip? :)
It's just missing the part where half way through, osx and xcode updates and your existing app no longer builds on your machine nor runs on anyone else's.
My ascerbic observations about the platform aside, I love this, both in it's current context, and would have loved it at the time. Thank you!
I get it, my preference, but I'm allowed.
I'm running 10.12, for software compatibility reasons. Likely here our paths will split. Versions beyond this are of no interest to me.
Just for context, I'm 26, from a post-commie country, have been around computers since birth thanks to my dad. He wasn't technical, he just liked the new tech.
What stinks to me: - I very much prefer 16:9/16:10 ratios (4:3 begone)
- Skeuomorphism was always very "uncanny valley" for me; I much prefer the Win95/OS 7/etc. designs than skeuomorphic ones, the current flat designs are better but way too saturated and I tend to lose my focus quickly
- I vividly remember how lost and frustrated I was when those old IDEs would launch with multitudes of windows by default - most of them were never used by anyone and everyone would just click through to the main window; being a small child I didn't know what to do or where to start and nobody around me could help - this memory kept me disinterested with programming until I literally went to a programming bootcamp after my finals.
- I really mean it! IMHO user friendliness is over the roof compared to those supposedly golden times.
Tiger and Xcode 2 is quite old and I think is not really the version of macOS many people yearn for. It was the first version many started using (10.0-10.3's graphics were terrible - pinstripes! - and 10.4 was the 'Redmond, Start Your Photocopiers' release which was genuinely exciting. Although I'd used OS X at uni, I bought my first Mac with 10.4 Tiger. Since for many it was the first used, it's what's remembered - but using Tiger this month, I realised that several things I fondly remembered were actually in newer versions.)
The 'best' version is very likely 10.6 Snow Leopard (2009), or possibly Mavericks (2013), the last pre-flat-design OS X. Snow Leopard had a clean, fairly modern UI (so your concerns about multi-window were heard) yet was still joyful.
> I very much prefer 16:9/16:10 ratios (4:3 begone)
The iMac G4, which runs 10.4 Tiger and 10.5, has a 16:10 aspect ratio screen if you buy the 17" screen option. (Source: just bought one, to investigate if it's truly nostalgia or things really were better back then.)
> I much prefer the Win95/OS 7/etc. designs than skeuomorphic ones
Much of OS X was bright and colourful, with pretty graphics, which as you note is very different to Win95/OS 7. However the skeuomorphism wasn't as strong as its reputation is these days. Much of the interaction (say, Cover Flow) is what we'd today call skeuomorphic but really was just a fairly natural way to interact. The real skeuomorphic elements, like the Calendar app using stitched leather, were fairly rare.
> the current flat designs are better but way too saturated and I tend to lose my focus quickly
100% agreed. I personally find it very hard to distinguish elements at a glance in modern macOS.
> IMHO user friendliness is over the roof compared to those supposedly golden times.
I think early 2000s OS X was not as golden as remembered, but mid-2000s to 2012 was extraordinary. OS X really ramped up and improved in those years. Then when they switched to flat design, they lost a lot of usability tweaks along with it. Running current and old OSX/macOS side by side on one desk, as I'm doing, you can clearly see it's the same OS, but today's has much more onscreen, taking more space, but has many small UX indicators missing, and yet despite the amount onscreen the design feels austere and soulless. I find UIs with UX hints built in to their design, and designed for visual beauty, both usable and pleasing for my mind the same way any beautiful object is, and I dearly miss them.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/aesthetic-usability-effect/
Of course what we find aesthetically pleasing is a subjective function of our life experience.
Have you tried 3:2? Best of both worlds IMHO, I will never go back to 16:9 or 16:10!
My personal ranking: 3:2 > 16:10 > 4:3 > 16:9.
The one thing that does really grind my gears though — they've replaced all purpose-made icons in toolbars and such with some "universal" ones that completely disregard the existence of the pixel grid. There's literally not a single line in these icons that isn't blurry af.
And yet there's the completely washed out BigSur and Monterrey for which I recommend turning on contrast mode: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1456894618000400385?s=20
There were plenty of rumors about an Apple phone around that time, but it was generally referred to as the "iTunes Phone." And the mockups were significantly more hideous: https://web.archive.org/web/20070630183849/http://www.applei...
Five months after Mac OS X Tiger's release, the iTunes phone was unveiled: the Motorola ROKR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_ROKR).
You can find some fun things in the old MacRumors archives (https://www.macrumors.com/archive/). For example, a post (https://www.macrumors.com/2005/07/29/steve-jobs-on-itunes-ph...) from July 2005, two months before the ROKR, and two years before the iPhone:
> When questioned about the lifespan of the iPod and why the functionality won't eventually move into the cell phone, Jobs answers, "I'm going to leave the answer to our actions in the future."
Or this (https://www.macrumors.com/2005/09/20/jobs-on-motorola-itunes...), from September 2005:
> - Feels that Bluetooth isn't a good option. Sound isn't good. Recharging headphones is a pain.
Eleven years later: AirPods.
It's funny to see, because the first Android versions were similar / no touch