Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmooss | Hacker News Reader

That old MacOS UI looks so appealing. I want to use it and I don't care that it's low-res, black and white. I love that they created what seems like a texture in the window titlebars, I assume to give them physical-like presence and to encourage grabbing them.

I don't want to use my computer's UI; it's just necessary and slightly annoying in its aesthetics and cognitive load.

View on HN

> texture in the window titlebars, I assume to give them physical-like presence and to encourage grabbing them.

That's called a visual affordance. Once upon a time it was canon that interactive UI items had visual affordance -- you could tell that you could interact with them at a glance, just by looking at them.

In MacOS There's an accessibility setting in System Settings > Accessibility > Display called "Differentiate without colour" that adds some extra affordances like on and off icons in the switches. I forget what else, but I always have it on because it makes things even more obvious in a way that it feels like OS programmers used to take more seriously in an era before the flat design idiocy.

There’s another option for high contrast that makes things look more like old Macs. I think it looks better, regardless of accessibility considerations.

I feel the same way. I have an original iPhone that I still use as a music player, and the old UI still looks insanely great compared to the flat, gray expanse we find ourselves in today. System 7 was pretty solid design work as well. Imagine what our desktops would look like if they had gotten Copeland running.

UTM (the Virtualization and Emulation software for Mac) has a system9 image on their gallery which is easy to install. It also looks great.

But to do anything more interesting than boot up, it quickly becomes cumbersome and non functional.

I'd love to use OS9 in UTM daily, but it's really just a tech demo.

Ah ok. I also only booted it up and checked old memories but nothing more. I did a simple network setup and wanted to know if the internet works (well with the security restrictions it has)

I will forever miss skeuomorphism.

I suspect it will return as we realize newer generations of people don’t really know how to use anything? Maybe that’s more of a hope than anything :)

I suspect newer generations will instead try to change the reality so that it resembles the digital world.

It’s been happening for some time. Look at how many touchscreens get used on things that shouldn’t have them.

same. I really thought the community made a mistake entirely rejecting the concept in the past 10+ years

I'd argue it was a reaction to "rich Corinthian leather", yellow-lined notepads and green baize, which only appeared in Lion and Mountain Lion. The more subtle use of skeuomorphic elements (aqua buttons, brushed aluminum, etc.) was collateral damage.

I was on the team that implemented all those things. We hated it. We did it because Steve had an epiphany while flying back from Hawaii on his jet that the seats were like, really nice. He wrote an email that all the apps needed to be like that. And thus we spent a year doing it.

not surprised. this anecdote is some good evidence for how i felt at the time: apple took a good thing way too far and as a result now we have to suffer through the google / windows flat UIs everywhere which are just plane lazy

If you use MacOS, you can get some of that black-and-white feeling back by going into System Settings > Accessibility > Display, scroll down to Colour Filters, turn it on, change Filter type to Greyscale and set Intensity to High. I do this on my personal computer to try and make it less compulsive at weekends, to remind me that it's just a tool, and that there are other interesting things to do with my time. I'm probably getting old, but I also find this more restful to look at. Sometimes you need the colours because apps rely on it: although I can't remember how I did it now you can add an Accessibility Shortcuts item to the menubar which allows you to turn the Colour Filters on and off with a click, drag and release on Colour Filters.

I also use that filter on iOS to tone down the colours by setting the Intensity of the same filter at a much lower level - I find the standard colours really garish when I turn them back on (e.g. when looking at photos). On iOS you can set a three-click shortcut on the action button to turn that on and off.

Edit: I forgot, there's also an "Increase contrast" setting there which makes the UI even closer to the older MacOS look, but although it does give different areas more differentiation I find it a bit too harsh - I think because it's just flat black and white, whereas the older systems used more greyscale textures.

I do this with windows 10 for a tablet with a detachable keyboard to make it like an eink display.

I think the "finder" in this needs to become a fully-fledged standalone project:

https://github.com/arthurchoung/HOTDOG

The texture in the title bars was definitely there as a visual cue, as much as to alert the user to the fact that the window beneath it was active. The title bars on inactive windows were unfilled.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com