Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura
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The Mac OS classic architecture definitely had some problems with its non-protected memory and cooperative multitasking, but what it _allowed_ were extensions that could really get in there and muck around with things… and I looovvvved the zaniness that provided. To name a few:
- ResEdit! - Extensions that could seriously improve your computer's performance like RamDoubler or SpeedDoubler - That extension that made Oscar the grouch climb out of the trash can and sing a little ditty when you emptied the trash - The talking moose was fun for about 15 minutes, but still, I love the attitude. - After Dark! - Easter eggs like that "secret about box" text clipping thing that pulled up the pirate flag flying over the Apple Campus. - Playful messaging like "Installing System Morsels", or Sim City 2000's "Reticulating Splines" - Even the iconography was more playful—that little bloated mac icon in the Memory control panel next to Virtual Memory comes to mind
I miss the crew of developers, capabilities, and playfulness we lost in transitioning to OSX, but am thrilled that tiny fragments of this playfulness seem to be returning.
Welcome back Clarus! Moof!
I too miss that sort of whimsy and playfulness–I don’t think it’s inherently incompatible with modern expectations of professionalism/accessibility/security but it definitely seems to have been lost from most software these days.
Edit: found the extension! http://www.wildbits.com/gravite/
> I too miss that sort of whimsy and playfulness–I don’t think it’s inherently incompatible with modern expectations of professionalism/accessibility/security but it definitely seems to have been lost from most software these days.
Agreed completely but every now and then it still pops up. Recently, Notchmeister [0]
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/notchmeister/id1599169747
No memory protection, no multitasking (not even threads!), more minimalistic than the competition at the time in many ways in its core features – but on the flip side, extremely extensible in almost every way.
As I later learned, PalmOS was heavily inspired by Mac OS!
I would pay a frankly distressing amount of money for reproductions of After Dark screensavers, even if it was just videos I can set my TV to play when it gets tired.
What's so strange about this is that, as that playfulness has been lost, the software has, in many ways, moved in a direction that feels more childishly cartoonish. It seems the aim is now to make all computing feel fun and friendly (even when it perhaps ought to be more serious or economical), which has, ironically, stripped all the charm out of the experience by inundating us with bright colors and childsafe corners.
Small, unexpected, thoughtful moments and Easter eggs like those described in this thread are like a small piece of chocolate after a healthy meal. What we have in most software now (Apple is by no means the only company guilty of this) is more like a diet comprised entirely of candy.
The weird part is most current attempts of this are actually really bad at it past initial surface appearances.
Minimalist and “content-first’ UIs look great in screenshots and I guess they prevent new users from getting overwhelmed, but they also hide all the features in a way I find quite hostile. We have an absolute wealth of pixels in our displays today, but tons of software makes you decipher abstract line icons to work out what it can actually do.
The Mac thankfully still has the escape hatch of the menu bar, which almost universally allows you to browse and search all performable actions (and see their keyboard shortcuts inline!), but mobile operating systems don’t even have a touch-centric equivalent of tooltips.
Ugh I hate gestures. Such a stupid stupid non-intuitive stupid practice.
had me chuckle
To be fair they did come awfully close to that point before Steve came back and reinvigorated the place.
That sentiment was not entirely misplaced at the time.
(Oh, and all USB-C/Thunderbolt docking stations have these adapters)
Sadly, there’s a reason why we can’t have nice things…
This was responsible for my little sister completely erasing a 20 MB hard drive one file at a time.
They want the Mac to be great, too! If this was strictly playing on nostalgia it would have been a bit PR feature, or at least called out in WWDC. But instead it's just dropped in as an easter egg. Such a great sign.
I don't really use them much, but I think the Memojis are pretty charming and thoughtful.
So then how does one explain the unending UI regressions with every single major update? This whole system preferences thing for example? The terrible, terrible toolbars combined with window titles? The borderless buttons (with borders being an accessibility feature)? The utter disregard of the pixel grid? Everything else slowly becoming ever more un-desktop?
Do you remember what the battery icon in System Preferences looked like in the first beta of Mac OS 12? It's a beta. Give it some time. It's not out yet.
See this: https://twitter.com/siracusa/status/1534261202167152649
Instead of distinct readable controls with clear interactions it's a sea of gray upon gray upon gray.
It breaks Apple's own HIGs which says not to (over)use switches, and use checkboxes instead. The drop downs no longer look like they can be interacted with.
Where you'd have settings that can easily fit on a single pane in multicolumn view, you now have lists upon lists upon lists that are entirely alien to the Mac OS https://twitter.com/oskargroth/status/1534133558817742848
Interface consistency is a bullshit goal: https://twitter.com/MarioGuzman/status/1534585939971801088
post big-sur, at least dark-theme, the overall ui looks very much like gnome in many ways...
> This design thus makes absolutely zero sense in macOS.
what i find interesting is, that instead of building up ipad apps to match macos level of ui quality/sophistication, they compromise the more functional macos on the altar of ipad.... i find that a bit disappointing personally...
That's easy: not everyone agrees they're regressions.
Also what are the problems being solved by these redesigns and rearrangements? What was solved by going flat in 10.9 -> 10.10? What was solved by going even flatter, and using the dreaded SF Symbols icons everywhere, in 10.15 -> 11.0?
It's a done product — it's been one for quite a while. Could they just stop meddling with the UX already and maybe rewrite their PDF parser in a memory-safe language instead?
I find I legitimately prefer the newer UI of Big Sur onwards. I just don’t feel the need to shout it from the heavens.
An alternative take: you’re really going to suggest that one of the richest companies in the world doesn’t do extensive UI/UX testing before putting things out the door? They’re not just saying “yeah, this looks nice - ship it!”.
A good UI designer makes buttons look like buttons so our brain can quickly recognize them as such, without mistaking them for something else. A good designer has the window title in the same place no matter the application, so we know where to look before we even look. A good designer gives us a place to reliably perform common actions such as dragging the window.
We use our computers daily, and even imperceptible improvements to cognitive load and the amount of time it takes to perform actions make a difference over time. When I use my 2009 iMac running Snow Leaoprd, I perceive a reduction in friction compared to the latest macOS versions, and even compared to Catalina, which I use as my primary OS.
I really don't agree. When software/UIs were simpler, the buttons screaming loudly "I AM A BUTTON!" worked. Now it quickly gets way too busy. It was important when almost everybody was a computer novice and couldn't detect subtle hints and conventions about what is a button and what isn't. Now? Not as much.
Look at screenshots of older iTunes vs Apple Music. I can feel absolutely no difference in how fast my eyes finds play/pause buttons. I don't need borders around the icons when there's not a whole bunch of skeuomorphic noise around them, such that there being any visual complexity at all (icon itself) instantly grabs attention. I really can't see a single thing I think the old iTunes interface does better for common use cases. Not that the old iTunes was bad per se, just a different UI for a different time.
I agree that often UI designers go too far, but I think you can see a bit of back and forth going on, trying to tune into the perfect balance of simplicity and clear signaling.
Obviously, everyone is different. So it's not going to be perfect for everybody no matter which way they do it.
I also disagree that the old style of design is less suited towards complicated software. Apple's iWork software feels like it's suffered the most in terms of usability as a result of modern UI design.
Humans evolved in a world where things have depth, light and shadows. Even you admit that back when user interfaces were designed with that in mind, those interfaces were more friendly to novices. By ignoring these aspects of our visual perception, you're requiring prior knowledge on the part of the user, while simultaneously making it difficult to acquire that knowledge. That's not a good thing, even if you assert that "flat" interfaces are no worse once you get used to them (which I clearly disagree with).
That's... your opinion, though. I don't particularly feel any friction when trying to navigate or use modern macOS, at least from a usability perspective.
Even the example everyone throws about - the settings redesign - I fundamentally don't find to be that bad. It follows modern UI trends so I can intuit how it works, thus if I needed to poke around to find something I'm not really left wondering how to do so.
On top of that, it's not a tool you're in constantly, and as long as there's a search box, you're probably going to use that anyway as a power user. I don't even think I've tried stumbling around the mess that's System Preferences recently, I just straight up head for the search bar.
>We use our computers daily, and even imperceptible improvements to cognitive load and the amount of time it takes to perform actions make a difference over time.
I've been using macOS since... Leopard or Snow Leopard, ish. The adjustments over the years haven't ever thrown me for more than a few minutes. I preferred the skeuomorphic UI trend for a variety of reasons (of which nostalgia is included at this point) but I think modern macOS/iOS has found a decent line to ride.
I have 20/20 vision and I had to turn on contrast and button shapes, the new design is so bland and unreadable.
Macs have large screens and that's why... they changed all dialogs to be tall narrow boxes with center-aligned text?
Properly labeled color-differentiated icons are now indistinguishable grays crowding the title bar removing all affordances (from being recognizable to being able where you can drag the window).
Keyboard access is being removed or broken across all first-party apps.
Desktop metaphors like multiple columns, tabs etc. are removed in favor of tall narrow strips of gray text that surely look great on a screen that fits your palm. But that's not the screen Mac OS operates on.
The new designs break Apple's own HIGs and other recommendations like WCAG.
So please tell me what it is you like about new designs and, more importantly, what the hell is their purpose?
Citation needed...
>The new designs break Apple's own HIGs and other recommendations like WCAG.
You may have missed it, but they redid that HIG and released it during the latest WWDC. This train has left the station and it ain't backin' up.
>Keyboard access is being removed or broken across all first-party apps.
How about you... list some of these apps? I've been using macOS since Snow Leopard and all my muscle memory on the keyboard still works.
The newer designs feel smoother and less constrained, and don't fundamentally feel at odds with how I work.
I will, however, give you this point with little argument:
>I have 20/20 vision and I had to turn on contrast and button shapes, the new design is so bland and unreadable.
Someone needs to smack Apple UI designers upside the head and tell them to stop using 255,255,255,1 as the light mode color. With how good their screens are it's just way too much.
I use dark mode exclusively and maybe that's why I have less complaints?
They didn't redo it, they redesigned it. All the recommendations they are breaking are still there.
> How about you... list some of these apps? I've been using macOS since Snow Leopard and all my muscle memory on the keyboard still works.
Except Messages all of their new first party apps have horrible to no keyboard access: Home, Music, App Store...
> The newer designs feel smoother and less constrained
How can it be less constrained when they literally crammed toolbar items into less space and redesigned dialog to be narrow? :)
Edit: there's of course more, as evidenced by the redesign of System Preferences: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31746133 And IIRC they are not properly keyboard accessible either.
My point is that they have clearly acknowledged it's a thing and that it matters.
>Music
I really don't get your point here... I'm listening to Music right now and just spent a few minutes trying to use the keyboard. I don't really feel unable to do so.
>How can it be less constrained when they literally crammed toolbar items into less space and redesigned dialog to be narrow? :)
The dialog that they're... expanding in Ventura? Where they acknowledged it should be bigger for certain cases? I've not been bothered by it in Big Sur/Monterey otherwise since most apps (understandably) aren't cramming shit in there anyway.
You're welcome to dislike change, I just think you're really stretching here.
I'm not subscribed, but here's my experience.
When Music just starts, Tab is locked to a single pane.
Cmd+F to find something, how do I exit the search? Visually Esc does nothing.
While in Search Tab is locked to Search field. After Esc tabbing first does nothing, then cycles through top buttons, then goes somewhere?
There's no way to focus sidebar with keyboard. None of sublists there have a dedicated shortcut.
If you select something in the sidebar, Tab, And then Shift-Tab, the focus doesn't go back.
Once you've selected something (radio, or album, or artist, or...), how do you go back?
Focus is broken. Select an album, and tell me how exactly to get to the song list and navigate through it (hint: when you cannot see where it's gone, you can press Arro Down, and start going through the list).
That's 30 seconds of using this amazing first-party app. And that's before we start listsing all the ways it's badly designed, badly implemented, and breaks multiple Apple HIGs.
> The dialog that they're... expanding in Ventura? Where they acknowledged it should be bigger for certain cases?
Key word: "certain cases". So, they acknowledged nothing, but grudgingly reverted this inane behaviour for some random unknown length. As if desktop displays are have so little horizontal space.
> You're welcome to dislike change, I just think you're really stretching here.
Definitely not stretching. Changes to GUI have to justified. None of the changes since BigSur are. They are aggressively removing readabilty, affordances, plain humane contrast, etc. They introduce touch-only paradigms to a touchless OS. And so on.
To quote people much smarter than I [1][2][3]:
--- start quote ---
...the work of people who put iOS first. People who by now think in iOS terms. People who view the venerable Mac OS user interface as an older person whose traits must be experimented upon, plastic surgery after plastic surgery, until this person looks younger. Unfortunately the effect is more like this person ends up looking… weird.
These people look at the Mac’s UI and (that’s the impression, at least) don’t really understand it. Its foundations come from a past that almost seems inscrutable to them. Usability cues and features are all wrinkles to them. iOS and iPadOS don’t have these strange wrinkles, they muse. We must hide them. We’ll make this spectacular facelift and we’ll hide them, one by one. Mac OS will look as young (and foolish, cough) as iOS!
---
Going through Big Sur’s user interface with a fine-tooth comb reveals arbitrary design decisions that prioritise looks over function, and therefore reflect an un-learning of tried-and-true user interface and usability mechanics that used to make for a seamless, thoughtful, enjoyable Mac experience.
...an interface designer — who really should think like a chess player in these circumstances — can’t simply say It seemed like a good idea at the time to justify a UI change. There has to be a plan, a design. “Let’s try this, let’s try that” is not a strategy
...every time I point out some terrible or questionable UI design decision in Big Sur, there’s always, always someone who tells me “You’re just resisting change! You’re not willing to adapt!” without even entertaining the thought that, hey, maybe it is terrible UI design.
---
Apple’s approach when presenting the last few major Mac OS releases has always felt as if the most important thing to work on an operating system were its look & feel, rather than how this foundational tool can actually improve people’s work or tasks.
This insistence around the most superficial aspects of a graphical user interface — the look — often reminds me of the constant redesign iterations of some third-party apps in an attempt to make them more alluring to customers and to increase sales. The hyperfocus on always looking new and fresh
---
--- end quote ---
[1] https://morrick.me/archives/9368
Can't wait for this. And the same for the e-mail app. Even just a Swift rewrite of the 'hairy' parser code would be a reasonable starting point.
Why are people so eager to go back to a system where you have to hire an artist who knows how to make 1000 inner bevels so you can have any custom controls or app icons?
wait, what? when did this happen? I do not have any memory of the Apple logo being anywhere other than the upper left hand corner of the menu bar.
I do however remember the G3 PowerBooks with lit logo on the lid that was UPSIDE DOWN when open and in use
But I've been wrong before! At least twice.
That's so weird, it took me a bit longer than I'd like to admit to see it.
A 10.0 beta looks like they ultimately made the better decision as I've never seen that image, nor, obviously, used that interface. Even prior versions to 10.0 didn't do that kind of stupidity. I honestly feel like beta testers aren't paid their value for dealing with that kind of asinine BS.
Luckily, they seemed to have learned quickly and never released to public with that monstrosity.
Strategy Tax. They have a bigger strategy they are pursuing to align iOS<>MacOS. This is the big ecosystem play that raises ARPU and improves customer loyalty. This means standardization of UI to improve approachability for iOS users, who outnumber MacOS users considerably but whom are less loyal customers than combined iOS+MacOS users.
There's a secondary argument about moving off ObjC and code maintenance, since they want to gain the value of more modern language & to have new devs be able to jump on old products. This means every part of MacOS & every app is probably slated to be rewritten in Swift & SwiftUI as time goes on.
And this is a misguided idea to begin with. Input devices are different, interaction paradigms are different, why should UI ever be similar? IMO when designing macOS, they should simply forget that iOS exists.
On the WWDC talk show Craig Federighi said that the new settings have been "carefully crafted".
This is what "carefully crafted" is in Apple parlance these days.
Lack of critical thinking, patting too much on the back of ourselves and inability to make tough decisions is a general malaise in Big Tech.
When companies are too focused on other things and not enough on the fundamentals, this is what happens.
I reverse engineered the asset catalog format for a bit recently, hoping to be able to unpack and repack existing ones to create system appearances (themes/skins — these also come as .car files, and you can load one as an NSAppearance object and then apply it to your app/window/view).
If it says it's a PDF, then it must be an actual PDF as a "raw data" rendition. I did successfully extract some with nothing but my own code. But, there are no PNGs present in .car files; as of Monterey, bitmap images use a proprietary undocumented compression format called "deepmap2". I wasn't able to exactly reconstruct how it works because my skills of native code reverse engineering are lacking (or am I not using Ghidra correctly to get at least somewhat sensible code out of it?), but I did find the related functions in the vImage framework inside Accelerate.framework.
I write and think in Markdown and there was something about seeing it laid bare that I enjoyed. Wouldn’t want it on every site, but for something a bit different, call me a fan of this one.
I suspect this _is_ a vector format, and they’re using the Xcode 9+ features for a scalable image at runtime. I’ve never tried to extract the data back, it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re optimized for themselves, since in theory apple’s frameworks are the only “consumer” of the compiled asset catalog.
Unless you mean in a very abstract way, then, yes, both are related to nostalgia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogcow
> The dogcow symbol and "Moof!" are proprietary trademarks of Apple.
Good to know it wasn't just me. I also expected it to be an installer that let me choose a different volume to install on.
The process didn’t give me an installer, it just jumped to the volume building process. TBH I kinda knew it was messed up, but after cancelling and trying again, I just let it go.
I didn’t see any options in the dev site to pull down a full installer.
My M1 is fairly new, so I have recent practice reinstalling Big Sur from scratch if necessary.
Got it at Susan Kare’s shop: https://kareprints.com/products/copy-of-moof-the-dogcow-on-g...
I still have a set of the 6 color Apple rainbow logo fridge magnets from that day.
Thanks to Wikipedia contributors and to Archive.org!
https://web.archive.org/web/20040202021201/http://developer....
Weird, on my MacOS (12.3 Monterrey) I think I always see a thumbnail of the actual page I'm previewing there?
Surely they haven't taken a step back to showing a generic clarus icon instead in new version of OS? That would be weird. I must be confused about what he's talking about.