I'm not sure if all the ingredients necessary to brew up that magic could ever come together in quite the same way again. HelloSystem is dealing with a vastly harder problem with vastly fewer resources; it's no surprise that they're not there.
Attention to detail is still doable, it just isn’t something that is valued by MBA/PM types.
(Being an ambitious personal project made in limited free time is a better excuse, and I commend the project author’s efforts)
Or by folks who are not seasoned in user experience. Just because you use something doesn't make you an expert - UI is often thought of that way, but it is a real discipline.
Depends which day one goes back to.
Web projects I've been involved with since early 90s considered user modalities, affordances, predictability, and frictionlessness. To clients we used utility words like straightforward, coherent, clean, functional to describe the system, and experience words like delight, effectiveness, familiarity, ease, as sensations a user should have using the system.
Not sure when I first recall the abbreviation UX, probably mid-90s.
Mostly we just called it Design, a blend of things one might do making comfortable office furniture and effective graphic design and editorial layout for a magazine.
Perhaps things were interesting then because design was an emerging intersectional craft and interfaces were experimentally evolving. Digital UX wasn't yet the ubiquitous sameness of content marketing scaffolding.
Now that sounds way more gatekeeper-y than what you complained about before. Websites and web apps are by and large terrible in terms of UI and UX and would benefit a lot from people who know what they are doing in terms of design of the user-facing parts. Still, they are the software a lot of people interact with for a significant chunk of the time they spend on a computer.
Too bad the project is going through some drama from what I understand.
It has its own HIG, which you can see here: https://docs.elementary.io/hig
Personally, I never loved menubars, so I don't mind that difference.
By all means bow down before what they did at the time, but please do not treat macOS or the Apple HIG as "the be-all and end-all of UI/UX for all time". Because it is not.
But in practice it is. Or can you show something better (that exists now)?
Or can you explain why you think it is?
Because it is not.
Many of us don't want to use a Mac not because they are bad computers (they are extremely good) but because of MacOS
Two very popular examples: Finder and iTunes
The good bits in MacOS come from NeXTSTEP
Of course. Menu bars are still much better than catch-all hamburger menus. So it is still annoying that a project that supposedly took inspiration from older Mac OS regresses in that respect.
It doesn't work so well anymore for example with todays 34" ultrawide monitors, as the application window and it's menu are potentially far away from each other.
In NeXTSTEP (the predecessor of Mac OS X), the application menu was actually vertical and moveable freely on the screen. The menus were also detachable, so you could for example leave the "File" submenu open.
As for NeXT style menus, I don’t really have an opinion because with WindowMaker/NEXTSPACE on Linux the only applications that use the floating menu are GNUSTEP ones, so I don’t actually have much experience using that style of menus.
What drama?
I know you can install their stuff on other distros too, but it isn't well-supported
Since everyone gave up on native software in favour of web frameworks and the browser, there has been precious little innovation in native UI frameworks.
So my point is: couldn’t most of the attention to detail in Apple’s Classic Mac OS be replicated with a UI framework that understands design concepts such as proportionality, spacing, Schelling points, etc?
Why not? Nothing is stopping them - but statements like yours.
My own standards are high enough that I'd never even show such a screenshot to a friend, let alone put it into the readme to my project for all of the internet to see.
The technical hurdles they had to overcome - despite targeting lower resolutions, non-color screens - was considerably higher and more impressive because none of the scaffolding was there to support the work, and the system resources were also far, far less. You're significantly discounting that effort. It's also worth reminding you that — even among the engineers who left or felt too much pressure — nearly all of them say the emotional investment was both necessary and worthwhile in retrospect. There are very few ex-Macintosh-team detractors in the world.
Taking nothing away from this open source project, but let's not rewrite history.
A comparison I might make, then, is to video games then and now: despite extreme technical restrictions, in the 80s, a single person or at most a small team could make the equivalent of a AAA game in a matter of months in their basement. But precisely because those technical restrictions have now been lifted and so much more is now possible and expected, such a thing these days is absurd, and it instead takes teams of hundreds years of work and tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to put together a modern AAA game. But observing that fact in no way discredits the talent, hard work, and ingenuity of those basement coders of bygone days; nor does it mean that I think game devs these days are orders of magnitude less competent, either.
My intention was never to say that what the Macintosh team did was easy; but it was possible (clearly) with the enormous effort they put in, and I don't think what HelloSystem is trying to do really is, especially not with the resources they have. After all, Apple can't even do it these days, and they have virtually all the resources in the world.
Tell that to Microsoft. Resizing windows in Win 10 is a masochistic act.
I assume MPW Pascal was used once the OS could be booted.
The problem today is that everything is possible yet the quality of SW has gone down. We have UIs (GUIs are deprecated) using GB of RAM without help (how could they have a help menu with so little memory), where you have to guess what an UI element does, when you have to click on the only one text field on the screen to write something. It is like Will Smith came and erased the memory of everything that was done before. Using Win 95 was an exercise in pain because programs crashed. Using win 10 is an exercise in pain because it is user hostile. Yes i need to resize a window and yes i need a titlebar and a big enough scrollbar.
I really don't think so. The original Mac had 128K.
I’d argue that Palm was also a similar success at the time.
You are right that it’s not easy and probably impossible for a too small independent team or an open source project, it needs as you say a very focused goal, a small cohesive team.
And for example Meta totally failed to ship a great UI/UX for Quest (it’s ok, but with incredibly bad parts like inviting other users, typing text, inconsistent controls between apps and games, no standard UI library, etc. they really need to just start from scratch now, IMHO). So pure ressources are not enough.
If only browsers had used the past two decades to provide a comprehensive set of well-behaved, uniform, native-feeling UI controls for 95% of the use cases. Instead web devs still spent a lot of time reskinning and re-implementing basic controls.
https://css-tricks.com/dropdown-menus-with-more-forgiving-mo...
which are mostly from NextSTEP as described in the "NextSTEP user interface guidelines" first published in 1992 and later by Sun as "OpenStep User Interface Guidelines" in 1996
(pdf) https://gnustep.github.io/resources/documentation/OpenStepUs...
video from 1982
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q
that notoriously Steve Jobs saw and copied for the Lisa?
> which were also heavily inspired by the work of the Mac team for obvious reasons
[citation needed]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34531184
Apple has always been good at copying and (sometimes) improve things.
But mostly they have been good at selling stuff to the richest segment of the population.
Similarly to what Prada did with bags (before becoming a luxury brand focused on women, Prada made bags for the Italian Royal Household).
There's no shame in it, but I don't get why people try to credit Apple for things that have not been invented by Apple.
In this particular case, Xerox and NextSTEP did a lot of research on the matter, that Apple benefited from, because their core business was that: research.