Comment by flenserboy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flenserboy | Hacker News Reader

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A few quick answers —

>Why do folders all open in a new window?

Spacial Finder (see https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/). It remembers window position, icon positions within the window, and the like.

>Why can't I maximize a window by double-clicking the title bar? Why can I only resize windows with the little handle in the bottom corner?

Nobody really thought about maximizing by double-clicking, as there was the maximize button available, that maximized not to the screen but to the content being presented (at least that was the intent). Double-clicking on the title bar made the contents of the window disappear while keeping the title bar hovering there. This was great on small screens so that you didn't have to click between windows that had information in them but could hide the top one, read the one below, and go back to the top one without moving the mouse.

As for the little handle, that was for a) the sake of consistency, and b) because that was the one way the OS did things; resizing windows worked just that way. Not sure if that was purely intent or if it was due to system resources, especially in earlier Systems.

>What is the point of the settings dock in the bottom left of the screen? Do I really need to change resolution and colors that often?

I remember using settings much, much more than on current machines — there were a lot of little tweaks one might want to make for performance or ease (changing colors or resolution might be necessary due to a game, for instance, whether for speed or compatibility if it were older).

>Why do I have to browse the whole hard drive to find any of my applications? Why can't I right-click files/folders?

That was simply the way of things, though there were plenty of extensions out there that put application links (or links to pretty much anything) into the Apple menu, which became a catch-all that Apple has pared down (in response?) to almost nothing.

>What is the point of the bigger/smaller window button, why not maximize? Why does minimizing just collapse windows to their title bar?

See above.

>How do you even turn off the computer?

Choose shut down, and turn it off with the switch when it told you it was safe to do so.

Thanks for the replies, I guess a lot of it does boil down to "that's just the way things were".

Although, like I mentioned, all those features do work on Windows 98, which released over a year before Mac OS 9, so I think the parent's comment of "no wonder Windows kicked their ass so hard" does have a point. Windows 98 feels far more "modern" than this, at least in my opinion.

Also, in response to "Choose shut down, and turn it off with the switch when it told you it was safe to do so." That's what I was asking, where do I choose "shut down"? I expected it to be in the Apple menu but it wasn't there. After searching some more I eventually found it in the "Special" menu, still seems like a weird place for it.

Shutting down is used infrequently, so there is some logic in putting it farther away.

Now let's look at a few things that never made it into Windows :)

The desktop was special. If you move a folder or a file there, it would remember the original location of it. Later you could select things on the desktop and choose "Put Away" from the menu to move them back into their original locations. The idea was that you could do that to organize the work the way you do it traditionally: bring the current work on the desk, work on it, then file away.

If this sounds like it would break file references, no, it wouldn't. On Mac applications normally remembered files by their internal ID, so you could rename a file or even move it into a different folder and still find it via the 'recent' files in your app.

Files and folders were "things"; this is why there was always one window for a folder. If you open a file or a folder, the icon of it changed into an outline to show that it is currenly open and there is a full-scale window for it somewhere. If you clicked the icon, it would trace the way to that window.

The window of a folder remembered its settings, including the manual arrangement of icons inside. Together with color labels they made it very easy to organize small sets of files. (I do realize this won't scale to today's millions of files, but I indeed miss it for smaller projects.)

Shut down is in the Finder, in the “Special” menu.

That’s an evolutionary left-over from the first Mac. It ran only a single program at the time [1]. It booted up running the Finder. From there, you could launch a single program. If you quit that program, it launched the Finder again.

[1]: except for desk accessories, a special kind of device driver (!) that could present an UI (https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...)

Remember that there are a lot of holdovers from the very early days of widespread GUI use — many, many of the things introduced on the earliest Macs are still present in Mac OS 9. This is not a new phenomenon.

Also, spelling error on my part: spatial Finder.

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