OS X "Aqua" theme, 20 years on, looks dated to me in a way that the 40-year-old Susan Kare-era design of the original Mac OS does not. I can't put my finger on why, but I think it has something to do with "arbitrariness".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Leopard#/media/File:L...
I do wish windows rolled up into a bar like MacOS Classic did it.
Surely hardly any users even knew what a hard drive looked like outside of the computer case, but there it is on the desktop, seemed like a very un-Apple thing to do.
You could easily manipulate the scroll bars in Aqua, which is a useful feature that has been lost in recent updates.
And it was just plain fun and relatable, while flat UIs are more corporate and functional.
Flat reminds me of 1950s/mid century corporate design - inoffensive, but claustrophobic.
Another example was the "LCD" display at the top of iTunes, depicted as having a transparent cover over it with a sheen and highlights. Unbeknownst to most users (I suspect), some of the labels in that display were actually clickable controls. WTF? I've owned numerous audio components with displays behind clear plastic windows, and I've never tried to poke at one with my finger.
I think mid-'90s GUIs hit the right combination of graphical (not photographical) with universal visual cues. Buttons had only three or four monochrome shades, but had beveled edges whose shadows inverted when the button was "depressed."
I'm glad to see some backlash against the lazy obscurity of "flat UI," and a return to some proper demarcation of controls.
They really didn't need to change it. It's now just 4 coloured bubbles, which symbolises...what? I always thought it was just so...random. It's the most irreverent icon of the iOS home screen since iOS7.
Oddly, Game Center is missing from my phone, so I'll take your word that the new icon sucks. I like to scorn the Photos icon: a multicolored Spirograph. Why?
As the 'cell phone' folks get older and eyesight gets worse, I think we'll see things shifting back. I basically don't use a cell phone for anything except 2fa cuz the silly lil screens are too hard to read.
TBH - I work from home, so I'm never more then 20 feet from real monitors. So I just use the phone for 2FA stuff...
And by the way, may I suggest you try to search on the Internet what GNOME desktop environment developers did to theming with their libadwaita and flat Adwaita design. For a start: https://www.osnews.com/story/133955/gnome-to-prevent-theming...
Also, am I the only one sketched out by the javascript ads with the internal 'x' close buttons? Its obviously part of the ad, and not the program chrome/controls. For all I know, it's just a redirect to pwnme.com :-P
Or while trying to copy a link or text on page - you gotta grab it perfectly otherwise everything else gets selected. So you're maneuvering like under microscope at the very beginning or end of the text.
Similar thing I'm experiencing on Xfce: some themes use this very slim window borders which are almost impossible to grab to resize. And since there's no grab to resize widget in the bottom right corner (it used to be once a standard, I'm pretty sure), upper right corner near the close button is the way.
Was in an era when full colour bitmap graphics were becoming effortless to draw on screen, so let’s make EVERYTHING a high res texture! That will prove how modern and powerful this machine is! But now, it’s less impressive so the sheen doesn’t sparkle as much.
Where as maybe the older 1bit display of an old Mac isn’t trying to sell you anything thru UI fancyness. The fact that it’s not impressive technically is maybe less of an issue when it was obviously not the thing they wanted you to focus on.
On the other hand, MacOS9's UI style has aged remarkably well:
https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos90
(minus the media player, ugh)
It's really easy to forget how far we've come. Going back to an old OS and trying to get some real work done can be eye-opening.
Remember that Apple had just made a killing selling jelly-bean aesthetic iMacs (running classic Mac OS 9, even). The Aqua stuff matched the physical case design of those machines.
It all goes along with the late 90s / Y2K times, intense colours. "Run Lola Run" and Fifth Element and late 90s club culture and whatnot. Nothing restrained about that era in terms of style. It was boom times end-of-millennium and that aesthetic continued even for a bit after the .com crash and 9/11 deflated the tires.
Also as others have pointed out, it had to do with "we can do this now'; the graphics hardware and the software stack (showing off "Quartz" etc)
I realised very quickly that I'd forgotten how good the OS9 interface is, and how well it stands up against today's offerings. Trying out a lookalike theme on Linux [1] is definitely on my todo list:
[1] What was it with 90s and having medium-grey be dominating UI color? And everything having faux-3d bevels?
I took fvwm and a very simple blue bar, trim and simple window buttons. And weirdly now it looks pretty modern and fresh.
Anyway there's always the bizarre windows fisherprice theme, and over used chrome gradients there to help you bring up some bile.
In the 90s, most large software companies (especially OS vendors) would run usability studies with real-world users at a variety of skill levels to try to make their software as easy to use as possible. Everyone used medium-gray as the main UI background color because it makes colored elements easily stand out, and doesn't affect an element's perceived color. Everything had faux-3D bevels because they make it obvious which elements are clickable, and which aren't.
AmigaOS 1.x had a blue background color, but this was mostly because home computers were used on cheap TVs at the time, where white-on-blue seems to have been the color combination that gave the least video artefacts and flickering.
As for the medium-grey: I guess that had mostly to do with the properties of CRT displays.
• 10.0 - 10.4
• 10.5 - 10.9
• 10.10 - 10.15
• 11+
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nsappearanc...
11+ to my eyes has more of a "timeless" potential. It's a bit more utilitarian, less showy and particular.
Cf. shaker furniture and Amish furniture vs. mid-twentieth-century furniture.
I imagine it would have looked like a very, very well-designed iPhone app: soft and welcoming, yet with delightful new features that became apparent with use, and serious functionality that would stay out of the way until it was needed.
I bet MacPaint would have looked a lot like Paper or Procreate.
It's a very interesting question, and honestly, I don't know how good it would have looked. I know what a lot of websites (including Apple's) looked like when designers had access to full color, bevels, drop shadows, etc. They looked terrible. I think those technological limitations—no color, almost no RAM, no hard disk—are one reason the original Mac GUI looked as good as it did. There just wasn't room for anything else.
That said, the primary reason why the first Mac OS was so tasteful was because Susan Kare is an excellent designer, and would probably not have made the mistakes I described above. (The Lisa had all those limitations too, and an extremely similar feature set, but if you compare the Lisa GUI to the Mac's, it looks a lot rougher and more inelegant. Kare was not involved with the Lisa, and it shows.)
So who knows. I'd love to see someone reimagine the original Mac OS using a more contemporary design language; would be an interesting experiment.
(Also, if you meant Bruce Horne, he was a software engineer; he wasn't involved with the visual design as far as I know.)
I'm not sure that the Spatial Finder needed to die; the standard excuses (we have too many files! our displays are too large!) feel knee-jerk and not well thought out at all.
And the Bruce I was referring to was Bruce Tognazzini.