Not many companies and people developed for Mac OS X, but the ones that did pretty strongly adhered to Apple’s design guidelines, partially because it just made dev live easier and partially because your application would stick out like a sore thumb if you didn’t.
At least the global menu still lives on macOS. I’m sad Gnome 3 didn’t pilfer it from Unity.
Anybody else remember the UI from the Photoshop plugins from Kai[0]? You clicked the plugin, and then you were looking at some alien organic texture full screen with a few adjustment sliders. That was someone that said, "I see your UI suggestions, but I have other ideas"
Edit: Holy shit, Bryce! I think I had that on my family PC. We were really into Myst and Riven at the time and I guess someone thought it would be fun to try to make our own 3D worlds. It turns out that making digital art actually requires art skills and I don't think I ever created anything with it.
it used to. now, you're only skills in art need to be to properly describe the scene and let some generative model do the work for you. i hope we continue to have distinctions made from digital art created by a generative model and not actually give the artist title to the people driving the prompts. to me, that's no different than me telling Bob Ross that I want a painting with a happy little bush in the left corner, a waterfall in the right, with a nice cabin in the woods in between them and then saying I was the artist because I was able to describe the scene.
AI can't do it, doesn't understand it. Generative art makes excessively beautiful wallpaper, right now.
There, FTFY.
When I first had to use one for work I thought it was buggy and defective and losing data. Turns out it was just hiding it because scrollbars were entirely hidden and disabled by default. They also hid a lot of other stuff. What kind of idiot created that design guideline?
Then there's the fact that the editing keys don't work at all consistently or correctly (and sometimes just don't work at all).
And nowadays they like to hide functionality behind obscure multi-finger touchpad gestures.
Their 'magic' mouse was a magic louse, that didn't work very well, ate batteries like they thought they were in a hotdog eating contest, and just randomly did stuff you didn't want based on where your finger happened to touch them.
I hope someday they hire a designer that has used a computer before and can upgrade their UI/UX standards to at least the Windows 95 level.
They are if you use the touchpad, and appear whenever you scroll. The logic is that as you are scrolling with the touchpad, you will not click on the scrollbar, so in that case it is a useless appendage.
> Then there's the fact that the editing keys don't work at all consistently or correctly (and sometimes just don't work at all)
I am not sure what you mean by “editing keys”, but Apple takes painstaking effort to make sure most shortcuts are global, and in text entry fields, Emacs shortcuts always work.
> And nowadays they like to hide functionality behind obscure multi-finger touchpad gestures.
Sorry but this is just a laughable complaint. Apple’s touchpad and accompanying gestures are considered best-in-class and have been so for more than a decade. Microsoft and various Linux distributions have tried to catch up during that decade+ and still aren’t close.
There are many things one can complain about with macOS ever since Lion started the iOS-ification, and I’d be right with you, but saying the old Mac OS X UI was lower standards than Windows 95 (and I assume XP) is a supremely contrarian statement that few people of that era would have made.
> Mac apps that are unapologetically _Mac_ apps. They’re platform-specific and they’re not trying to wow us with all their custom not-Mac-like UI (which often isn’t very accessible).
I wonder if there's a directory of such applications somewhere, actually.