Even the window handle bars were subtly shadowed, the window shadows evolved when they were collapsed. Like Windows 95 at the time, Mac OS 9 was a beautiful work of interaction design.
All feels more coherent than anything today. It feels like it was sketched out by a small group of people and executed incredibly well. Meanwhile things today look more disjointed like the product of a lot of design-by-committee.
Susan Kare's 'Chicago' in this rendering hits hard in the nostalgia factor to me a well.
I do agree on all other points :)
They look pretty similar but now that I look it them side by side I see it a bit.
As much as it is the style, it's also that kinda.. not-True-type still-a-bit-pixelated edges look that is the nostalgia factor, I guess.
I have wondered in the years since whether the newer abstractions and UI patterns we find in MacOS and Windows are actually necessary. These days both OSes are trying to be tablet friendly, trying to discourage user-installed/curated software, and trying to promote bundled cloud services, so it's not even clear to me whether the MacOS 9 abstractions are really the correct ones anymore, as evidenced by the many problems with cloud backed file explorer interfaces, synchronization, etc.
The fat borders for the windows and the control strip at the bottom left of the screen took up a lot of space on real monitors of the era. Try running at a more modest 800x600 or 640x480 and it will seem less efficient. Modern Mac OS X is actually quite efficient, with zero-pixel window borders on three sides, and narrower scroll bars.
Worse, a bunch of applications had code that would set up window locations with the assumption that the window borders were 1 pixel wide, like they were prior to Mac OS 8. This often meant that controls which were supposed to be visible would be partially covered by another window’s border.
I remember the Mac OS 8 era as a bit of “excess” that got cleaned up somewhat with the arrival of Mac OS X.
On the other hand, Mac OS 8 came with a fresh batch of standardized widgets (Appearance Manager) which made all the apps look better. These widgets came with guidelines for how they should be sized and placed, something which is missing from a lot of modern UI toolkits.
Although for a while (starting with 10.3?), some windows had a chunky brushed-metal look.
If anything, modern pointing devices are often less precise. We now commonly use trackpads, touch, and pens. In the 1990s, it was usually the mouse, so you find a lot of 1990s UI elements that are very small. The only reason our modern scrollbars on macOS are so small is because it’s assumed that you can scroll without them, either with a scroll wheel or with a touch gesture.
I’m not sure if the list of contemporary operating systems is particularly illuminative. You might look at Windows ’95, CDE (Solaris), or BeOS and find chunky borders. Or you might look at TWM or Window Maker (OpenStep) and see thin borders. The only conclusion I draw is that everyone agreed that you should have borders.
You're discounting the joys of using a dirty mouse, where the mouse would momentarily stick due to gunked up rollers.
> The thick borders took up valuable screen space and weren’t necessary.
Define "necessary". I think you are not considering why they were present in the historical context.
> They weren’t present prior to Mac OS 8
Yes, but there are reasons for that which I will go into.
> and they weren’t present after Mac OS 9.
There was no "after"; MacOS 9 (no space) was the last version. It was replaced.
> You might consider the era of thick borders as a 5-year blip on the timeline from 1997 to 2002.
Which fails to consider what happened in that timeframe.
Up to System 7.x you could only resize a MacOS (note, again, no space; that was important) window from the bottom right corner, where there was quite a big widget for this sole purpose... but in a brilliant bit of UI design, it was at the intersection of the vertical and horizontal scrollbars. Continuing either of them into the space past the end of the other would imply priority and that was a bad thing; the classic MacOS UI thought about this.
Examples: pics of MacOS 1.1.
https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos11
Now consider what happened in 1996. Apple was in big trouble, bought NeXT, and Steve Job came back. The primary reason was to replace MacOS with Mac OS. (Note: that's why the space is important. MacOS = classic; Mac OS = OS X.)
Jobs cancelled Copland, the planned MacOS 8, and directed the internal Apple team to start salvaging what could be taken from Copland into what was really MacOS 7.7 or something, renaming it to MacOS 8 in order to make it look big and important.
It wasn't; it was UI tweaks and stuff. E.g. the multithreaded Finder from Copland, and the Appearance control panel that allows skinning of the OS, which MacOS couldn't do before.
(All this while the new NeXT team are porting OpenStep to PowerPC and building a VM to run Classic in, stuff that has no customer impact or benefit yet.
Important point #1: this is adding a lot of customisability to the MacOS UI that wasn't there before. This is not some minor trivial point of graphical design.
Important point #2: this is Jobs aping a Microsoft tactic.
Windows 98 is the same timeframe. Win98 is the same basic OS as 95, but with UI tweaks. Why? Because NT 4 is late, and not ready for consumers, but also, because at the time, MS is fighting the US DoJ over monopoly claims, because MS is bundling IE with Windows.
To fight this MS rewrites bits of the Windows Explorer in IE. Gaining, oh hey look, what a coincidence, a multithreaded Explorer, because window contents are rendered in HTML... which means it gets a selling point to upsell W95 customers to W98.
Apple borrows the adaptable UI stuff from Copland and backports it to MacOS 7.
Result: now you can resize a window from any side, like Windows. Jobs comes back and Apple starts "borrowing" ideas from Windows UI and MS GUIs, something pre-Jobs Apple wouldn't do, and only fair as Microsoft "borrowed" so much from Apple.
So how do you show that a window can be resized from any side, not just from the bottom right corner? Answer: you put big fat draggable window borders on it, just like Windows has.
Pics: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos80
That's why those borders were there.
Because Apple was recycling tech from its own, very expensive, failed new-OS development project, so that it could:
[1] offer UI tweaks that [a] enabled it to upsell customers an OS facelift and [b] showed that it had learned both UI and business methods from MS.
[2] as a byproduct kill the Mac clones as that only covered System 7
[3] find a use for the hundreds of millions of dollars it spent on Copland
[4] show people it could adapt and survive and sell new stuff while the NeXT team worked on Rhapsody, which would in time become Mac OS X.
In other words, there are very good strong reasons by those windows got big fat borders, important reasons that helped to save the company.
Second lump of history you failed to consider.
Why didn't Mac OS X (note, with a space), have those?
Two reasons.
[1] Because NeXTstep didn't have fat window borders, and Mac OS X is NeXTstep. NeXTstep only let you resize from bottom left or bottom right, and to do that, it had a big fat bottom window border with market bits at the left and right end to show you where to grab.
Pics: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/openstep42
And why didn't NeXTstep use the bottom right corner? Because NeXTstep doesn't put scroll bars on the right. It puts them on the left.
Why? Because in the late 1980s when Jobs started NeXT, Apple had recently sued Digital Research over GEM, because GEM looked too like MacOS (no space), and it won, and PC GEM was crippled as a result.
So the little startup company founded by the departed leader of the hostile litigious one does things as differently as it can so it can't get sued by the CEO's former employers. Or by Microsoft.
So, no menu bar, menus stack up on the left.
So, scroll bars are somewhere else.
So, windows aren't resizable by the edges and don't have fat window edges.
Aside:
Fun fact: Motif had those fat window edges and resizing from all corners and all edges too, because the design of Motif was licensed from Microsoft by the OSF. This is also why Motif menu bars are inside the window, like on MS Windows. Because back then MS was trying to be Not Like Apple, and Apple wasn't like anyone by default, but both sued anyone who copied their designs.
And that's also why almost all Linux desktops today are recycling the same tired old ideas. Because since the dawn of GUIs on xNix, it's been under the influence of Apple and Microsoft designs.
Sun did interesting stuff in OpenWindows and OpenLook but it wasn't really "open" despite the name and it's gone now. Damned shame.
SGI did some, in other areas, in IRIX. Also not really open. Also gone now. Also a shame, although there is the Maxx desktop, but nobody cares because everyone else did an end-run around it and the industry moved on. By 1993 it was a little throwaway gag in _Jurassic Park_ -- "hey, this is Unix, I know this!"
End of aside.
Mac OS X dropped that clunky bottom bar, because when the litigious company that sues copiers owns you you don't need to worry. So, scrollbars move back to the right. Menu bars go on the top screen edge, like MacOS and GEM and AmigaOS, and where Fitt's Law of ergonomics says they are easy to hit.
Result: Rhasody copies the MacOS 8 design.
Pics: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/rhapsodydr2
And then Mac OS X one point zero, sold as Mac OS X 10.0, uses 3d shading to show the edges of windows, because by the 21st century you could assume the display was in 24-bit colour and could do stuff like that.
Pics: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macosx100
And truecolour icons and things, and shading everywhere, because when you control the hardware you can assume stuff like this and show it as the only way of showing window edges.
Fun fact: we early adopters of Mac OS X used little utilities to turn off the window shadows because it sapped performance on the low-powered old Macs we were using to run this stuff.
But oh hey look, the window corner widget has come back because we need to tempt Mac users onto the new OS, too.
Because Jobs _thought_ of stuff like this. How can I use any of the failed OS project my company rendered obsolete? How can I salvage some of all that wasted R&D budget? How can I sell interim releases? How can I make MacOS (no space) a little bit more familiar to Windows users? MS is making money selling small UI innovations to Windows customers, so how can I do that too?
There are good solid reasons for all this stuff, reasons totally driven by business models and IP ownership and tech of the time.
It wasn't accidental. It wasn't a blip. It was all for very good reasons, all of which you just skipped over with your rash assumption that it was a glitch of late-1990s design cosmetics.
Not to say it was perfect, but overall old computer interfaces were more information dense than todays one.
Back even then I used my desktop heavily too.
There wasn’t a default folder structure in the early days. Your hard drive had a “System” folder with merely a few hundred files in it (in a hierarchy) that you can ignore day-to-day. Otherwise the whole drive was your playground.
Back in the day, Finder used to remember whether folders were open on the desktop or "put away". It was a direct, one-to-one mapping between your spatial awareness of objects in the real world and the representation of objects in the computer. Meaning that things were left exactly where you put them on-screen, just like in the real world and, hence, it was easy to find your applications because they will be right where you left them.
But you don't need to launch applications, you just double-click on documents. Mac OS remembered which program was associated with each document -- not each document type or extension, each document. Each file had distinct type and creator codes associated with it, so that a JPEG created in Photoshop will be opened in Photoshop, and a JPEG downloaded off the web might be opened in a browser, when double-clicked.
Mac OS, pre-X, was quite simply the best UI ever designed. It took advantage of pioneering research into human-computer interaction and the underlying psychology of how humans relate to objects in a way that nobody today -- not even Apple -- is doing. It is what all UIs should aspire to be like, even today.
But I don’t know if it would scale to the terabytes of today.
https://i.imgur.com/WwFdpJH.png
They even offered a crazy "Memphis" art themed option: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSLWbFUG_ig "High-tech" wasn't very pretty either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBUgDnPT8Ps
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Appearance_Manage...
There was a fairly healthy third-party theming community, though, and the Apple-developed themes (Memphis, High-Tech, and a sketch-styled theme called Drawing Board) would still work if you got your hands on them.
It appears purplish, but it's actually a desaturated blue with hue right at 240°. Something about the lack of saturation and brightness gives it a purplish cast.
The other two themes were basically unusable, though, and it's very clear why they were never officially released.
I was a macOS 9 user before I switched to Windows ... and I have to say: I had a fonder memory of it than what I see in this emulation. All operating systems came a long way since. But hey, it is 20 years, is not it.
At least a small amount of C knowledge is sometimes helpful for getting those old projects working. Sometimes a new compiler or new libc will expose old bugs.
My experience with old window managers is they need tweaks to work reasonably on modern high dpi displays.
Iirc mlvwm builds with imake, which is positively ancient. It's the build tool that X.org got rid of after taking over from XFree86.
To get consistent usage out of a dbus-based global menu (KDE's or that one XFCE panel plugin) one would need to fork quite a number of packages, and for proprietary Electron apps you'd probably just be stuck.
Not sure about the state of things with Electron. I'm sure you're generally right and there are some gaps, and of course, on Mac OS you do only very rarely encounter an app with an empty menu bar (I have though).
You can theme XFCE to look really, really close. Won't behave identically, of course.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29937562
I'm aware of unfinished efforts and mockups, e.g.
Later versions of HyperCard let you choose the size of the window. Various extensions would let you use a borderless window for the stack, and put a big black window behind it covering the rest of the screen.
The Motorola 68000 does not have a barrel shifter. You want to shift by 4 bits? That’s four cycles, buddy! Avoiding shifts keeps you on the fast path for CopyBits().
Later on, there was DrawSprocket. It solved the problem of figuring out how to do “portable” and “fast” at the same time, and let you use features like page flipping, if the hardware supported it (saving you the call to CopyBits).
>Believe it or not, full screen apps are a Windows thing.
Nope. It’s just that maximizing—single action to expand a window the whole screen minus the OS docks/taskbars—is present in every widely used OS except for Mac OS.
>they haven’t let go of the idea that all apps need to use the whole screen at all times
Not sure where you’re getting “at all times” from. Windows and Linux desktops all easily support having windows take up less than the whole screen. In fact, it’s easier than in Mac OS because of window snapping to sides and corners. It’s only that Mac OS makes it very clumsy to get the effect that maximizing has on every other OS.
Single-click maximizes to the content size.
Option-click maximizes to full screen minus menu bar and desktop volume icons.
Apps like games and screen savers don't seem top have trouble covering up the entire desktop and menu bar.
I prefer it to the current macOS Finder where zooming covers up the menu bar and desktop volume icons, and where there doesn't seem to be an easy way to zoom to content.
Most 21st desktop UIs are, to a greater or a lesser degree, Windows ripoffs. Most of Win95 or later, but sometimes you can trace a specific version -- e.g. KDE apes Windows 98 in program design as well as function.
(Rendering filer window contents as HTML before displaying them using the browser engine: this was designed by Microsoft to evade prosecution by the US DOJ for anticompetitive bundling of IE with Windows. It tried to claim that IE was integral by, for example, rejigging Explorer to render using IE. The Win 95 and 95B versions do not do it; nor did NT 4 at launch.)
If you believe that all GUIs do this, that suggests that the only desktop GUIs you've seen are ones that are copies of the Windows design.
To the best of my ability to recall that long ago, before Windows 3 and OS/2, most GUIs didn't have a maximise function.
Examples: AmigaOS; DR GEM; classic MacOS; Sun OpenLook; Acorn RISC OS.
I read somewhere that the reason Apple finally added full-screen support to macOS (back then OS X), wasn't because of the Windows switchers. It was to get a bit more real estate out of the MacBook Air's small screen size.
And iOS. Funny, that!
What do you mean by this?
How did screen savers and games work?
To add to this, even after I "maximimze" windows, I have an ugly menu bar at the top, in addition to the windows own titlebar. Allow apps to have a menu in their own window, but don't force an ugly global menu. For the clock/systray, integrate it like windows in the bottom app bar.
I could keep listing frustrations. Many of these are objective.
Note: I'm not talking about app installation, or malware, or "polish". Mac is superior, will agree.
Classic Mac OS apps did not put the entire application UI in a single full screen window. Instead, it was typical for an application to contain multiple windows that could all be visible at once.
> To add to this, the "top" menu bar is lame.
This is related. In Windows, the entire UI of the app is contained in a single window, which you would typically maximize to fill the screen. In classic Mac OS, apps have multiple windows open at the same time, but the menu bar pertains to the application and not to the window.
This advice is actually rarely followed by apps regardless of whether they are on Windows or Mac. Consider Microsoft Word; if you open two Word documents, does Microsoft Word open two windows or does it open one main app window and then contain both documents in a single window? Are you aware of this Microsoft concept called MDI?
It sounds like you were used to iOS where each app has but one window and you'd prefer that to be the case on desktop operating systems like Mac or Windows. There's nothing with preferring that, but it's against decades of desktop computing tradition.
Why would I want a webpage which stops showing additional content after ~1200 pixels wide to take up the entire of my 2560px wide monitor?
Just another instance of different users having different patterns.
Personally, 80% of my web usage these days is hacker news and wikipedia. Neither of which do this.
The rest is probably majority dev docs (crystal atm), and I'm not aware of any dev docs that do this either.
The point here being that not all websites exhibit this behavior.
There’s nothing wrong with that! You’re allowed to prefer particular approaches. It’s like when I use Windows or Ubuntu, and get frustrated at how particular interactions work. It’s not because the Mac is objectively better, but because I’m used to it.
(Except for the keyboard shortcuts. Distinct control/option/command keys is objectively better and I will die on this hill.)
https://www.wired.com/2000/10/eek-a-two-button-mac-mouse/
"In recent years, the company has added "contextual menus" to the Macintosh operating system. But to activate them, users must hold down the control key while pressing down the mouse button, which more or less defeats the purpose."
Oct 31, 2000
For example, I learnt that, completely different than Windows, on MacOS you're not really supposed to minimise windows, at least not as you would on Windows. Instead, you open the command centre or whatever its called and switch between them. Workspaces also arent an optional extra, they're pretty crucial to using the OS if you have multiple windows open. Its for these reasons I can see why people praise the trackpad so much, its actually preferable to use over a mouse because its so deeply embedded in the flow of the OS.
I'm not saying MacOS is objectively better in its workflow, for that I'm still not sure what I'll end up using as my main computer, just that its different and should be treated as such.
> Why the Z X C V keys? — They were close on the keyboard. We did X because it was a cross out (CUT). We did V because it pointed down like this [he makes a ‘V’ shape with his hands], and you were inserting; it was like an upside-down caret (PASTE). And Z was the closest one, because we figured you’d UNDO a lot. And C for COPY — that was easy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW-atKrg0T4 via http://morrick.me/archives/8432