Look at that subtle off-grey colouring, the tasteful thickness of it...
What the hell happened to modern GUIs, man. We peaked in the 1990s.
What the hell happened to modern GUIs, man. We peaked in the 1990s.
As amazing as OSX seemed when it was launched, I partially blame OSX and the whole "make everything round and groovy and graphical goodness" trend that started us down the path of making GUI's 'form over function'.
This is bleeding over from OS into power-user-oriented software like CAD and engineering tools and most everyone hates it. The whole "lets take away buttons and make the ribbon icons bigger and more graphically pleasing" to make products look more modern is a cancer for power users and productive people who just want access to everything as best and fast as possible. It's a delicate balance that I do indeed believe peaked well over a decade ago.
This reminds me: There was pretty interesting community of Linux users customizing X11 desktops in the late 90s and the very early 2000s... When the first screenshots and demos of OS X and Aqua came out, almost immediately, people tried to imitate that.
I ran windowmaker on my linux systems around 2000 to get that same look, but I had serious NeXT envy.
I'm not sure they had it literally "better" than everybody else, but they certainly had something unique, well executed, etc.
You can still recognize NeXT patterns in modern Mac GUIs. They're usually not surface level anymore.
Still a disaster compared to System 7, 8, or 9.
https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/beos-1....
It started as apple's knockoff but quickly spun out of control with amount of stuff you could setup with compiz/beryl.
Then people figure out most of it while very cool is not all that practical.
That's what always annoys me. I have a computer that's easily 100x or 1000x more powerful than my 1995 desktop yet so many actions have noticeable lag.
Like, try it, resize outlook right now (just stretch the side left and right). You'll see so much jank and jitter. How is something like that not instantaneous?
Sometimes there are accessibility options that speed it back up (don’t redraw until mouse let go) - I know you can turn off animations but not sure you can disable that one.
JS can run full GPU accelerated graphics with WebGL (and soon WebGPU), with shaders, complex geometries, textures, etc at 60 FPS: https://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_animation_keyframes.
The MacOS 9 demo as shown, is impressive, but it is far from optimized, given that it is a side project. But it's impressive all the same that it's emulating a full Mac environment in the browser. Read the developer's own comments on it: https://blog.persistent.info/2022/03/blog-post.html
The discussion was to answer, "And why is everything just so slow!"
> The web has a reputation for being slow, thanks to a traditional lack of GPU acceleration as well as 25 years of legacy code attached to its Document Object Model, that are pretty gnarly for browser vendors to deal with. That has nothing to do with JS itself.
That's not exactly true, though, as many discussions here on HN have demonstrated. The web is not slow due to, "a traditional lack of GPU acceleration." The DOM is the execution environment of JS in the browser. This isn't a discussion about JS in any other environment.
While you may have a vested interest in JS, that doesn't change its properties. Please, let's get back to the actual discussion.
I would hazard that the vast majority of "jank" you see in desktop apps today is due to cross-platform code. A large portion of this is webviews (ex. Slack), but some of it is also poorly-implemented shims between the platform's native APIs and shoehorning that into some cross-platform library (ex. Photoshop).
It's just so much faster than any other GUI-based editor.
Wondering which model you have? Is it fanless? I’ve never used until o got my 2022 m2 air. It’s the best computer I’ve ever used.
Before that, 10 years of Mac Pro, and they’ve all been old (2010 models) and fast.
The 2010 Mac Pro doesn’t run macOS 11+, that might be its X factor.
The Mac Pro can run newer os with the help of open core. I can do many things with it like run Mac osX 10.6 using my modern amd rx570.
I can also run macos 12+ which I do. It runs great!
It’s more pronounced while recording but that’s the idea.
The Early 2020 MacBook Air is a joke from a CPU/Graphics perspective - even compared to other Intel Macs.
I still think something's wrong with your computer, as I have worked with multiple of that model and they weren't nearly this bad (even accounting for screen recording) - perhaps your cooling is worse?
Sure, under the hood Electron is powered by Chromium V8 (which also powers Node.js), which is written in C++. But that is just the basic packages and services available to all Electron desktop and Node.js apps.
The current macOS is humungous, kernel aside. There is a variety of systems running under the hood (Spotlight, fsevents, Apple Events, duet, launchd, MIGs, XPCs, caches, endless network services, launch services, anti-malware background programs, AppleID agents, diagnostics, cloud/AppleID integration, auditing, RAM compression, energy management, backups, filesystem snapshotting, COW,.... not to mention that huge OS inside the OS that is the browser) that is more than a surgeon can know about the human body.
Of course most of that is spying on you and telemetry... But you just have much more features these days and stability and security increased a lot. If that is not added value for you just work on one of those "minimal" OSes that appear from time to time. I guarantee you that you will miss a modern "bloaty" OS in no time.
This is all very close to the metal. On early 68K Macs, this is driven by QuickDraw, some very tightly coded assembly routines in ROM. Invoking them is only 2 bytes of code, as they're simply CPU opcodes (trap instructions). Render this string at this point size with this font at this X, Y location. Redraw the menu bar. Draw a rectangle. And so on. If you sequence these Toolbox invocations correctly, as a great master programmer of coroutines who never mistreats a handle as a pointer, you can render a complex scene with hundreds of polygons and a full screen of text in 200 milliseconds at 8 MHz.
But it takes thousands of lines of hand-holding the machine to do it.
Today, all of this is typically handled by instantiating a window object which draws into a private framebuffer which the system composites. That right there is tens of megabytes of RAM overhead. Then you use a thread to handle the UI and a thread to draw and etc. There's almost no boilerplate to just show a window. Perhaps one line of code. And it doesn't get overwritten by intrusive neighbour windows. Creating frameworks that can do all that bookkeeping in a flexible and general way (don't forget you want to be able to render vector fonts for any Unicode language) has a tremendous overhead.
There was an extension to enable window previews whilst dragging.
FWIW the slowest spec of DDR3-800 transfers 100MB is about 15ms.
Outlook is old, old code and still does things network I/O in the same thread as window repainting. I wouldn't treat it as a reference of anything other than how much Microsoft has struggled with the baggage from a bunch of mistakes they made in the 90s.
If you use Safari, Apple Mail, or almost any other macOS app, it is instantaneous — and unlike the older Mac apps like the Finder which did the rubber-band overlay until you released the mouse button, that means things like Safari seamlessly reflowing the entire Mac OS 9 emulator the whole time.
However in support of Apple's M1/M2 macs, I dont have this problem so much!
Apart from Electron based apps...
Which is why I find the wide spread love of VS Code so befuddling!
It's fine.. but so laggy when redrawing windows, switching tabs and so on!
Maybe it doesn't seem slow when in isolation, but compared to a GUI editor like Sublime Text, it's very noticeable!
But yes - your broader point stands and drives me nuts!
Somewhat gone are the days of upgrading your computer and everything being noticable faster because the software is the same! (to be fair, the M1 upgrade from Intel was impressive)
These days to have a decent experience (as a self confessed geek with high standards) you need an M1 Mac or on Linux and Windows a modern CPU, decent GPU and as much RAM as you can fit!
Minimalism is a good thing for an OS as it really makes it easier to use.
Another thing to note: there’s a lot or duplication in modern software. For instance, each OS file browser has a search bar to help find files. But tragically, the browser also has one, and so do many websites in the browser. So we have a recursive, ever-expanding set of search bars—yuck.
And also tragically, so do many apps have built-in file browsers. Ideally there should be one mechanism to find things, one mechanism to organize things, etc. It should be simple but flexible, and apps shouldn’t have to roll their own, they should be able to gracefully use the one provided.
We’re at a weird point in software where the browser is basically the OS for many people. ChromeOS was an interesting thought but it’s more like a limited-feature OS designed to sell Google services.
We need to take a step back and kind of assess the situation more—and then make a nice little OS :)
People of this opinion will probably enjoy using the latest version of XFCE4 on a Linux or BSD environment.
It's "less terrible" than most other modern GUIs that waste space and are full of bubble shaped smooth looking jellybean UI elements.
Mate desktop might also be something they'd enjoy. I personally recommend the Ubuntu-Mate version since it inherits a lot of the papercut fixes from when it was used in Ubuntu as Gnome 2.x. I was very excited to hear that the lead developer of Ubuntu-Mate was working with Debian to port those changes over.
I appreciate that dropping a user in a window with 150 unlabelled icons is intimidating for them, but needing to hover over the magic space or find the correct icon abstraction of "junk drawer" to find core features is hardly intuitive either.
I didn't have too many major complaints about working on MacOS, but I've always preferred windows. I used Windows 3.1 before MacOS. It's probably since I used Windows first, but I've always preferred the Windows approach of window management. Whenever using a Mac, I would always end up with a jumble of windows and I'd frequently click the wrong one when and it would pop to the front and hide what I was looking for. Then the wrong application's tab strip would be visible. Arrrgggh! It was a common point of frustration for me when using Photoshop and Illustrator since there are a number of similar Windows.
In Windows 11, I like that there is reasonable support for dark UI and multiple desktops. I haven't used OS X that much in the past 10 years, so I can't comment on the improvements that have been made since then.