Projects for Old OS X | Hacker News Reader

Projects for Old OS X

jonathanalland.com

141 pointspierremenard34 comments

I wish Apple would bring back the Dashboard for modern macOS versions, using the modern widget technology. I like the modern widgets but it's awkward that you can only use them on the desktop or notification centre. It's been gone for years now, but I still really miss Dashboard!

What I'd like is:

* Dashboard is a special desktop that appears to the left of the main desktop

* Can be accessed with a single F-key press, or by swiping with the trackpad/Magic Mouse

* Widgets can be organised/laid out any way you like, anywhere on the screen

It was an absolutely brilliant idea, which they tossed... But .. nothing prevents someone from retro programming it or a better one.

Apple has left behind some of the most brilliant UX/UI ideas of the century...

There was also an overlay option to see Dash atop of other apps, which I liked more than the extra desktop. You could pop up a unit converter without “leaving” the current program/desktop.

I'm not sure what it was called but the "web clipping" Widget was always my favorite. It worked really well to just have a always updated time table from your school in the dashboard just by basically taking a screenshot of it once.

Yes, I found that very useful too! Although it was always pretty fragile. Minor changes on the underlying clipped website would often break the widget and you'd have to go back and clip it again. And occasionally WebKit would crash or act weird because of the clipped website and the whole Dashboard would freeze or crash.

My understanding is that the technical foundations of Webkit-based Dashboard were always a bit flaky and this is what did it in. But now that we have modern, native widgets, it's a shame that the excellent Dashboard UX hasn't been brought back. They threw the baby out with the bathwater!

If anyone is interested in old Mac software and open source projects, I have an archived version of my old OS X listings. While most links are broken these days, it can be a handy for finding things for old Macs. I think the list ended when the App Store finally went online, around the time of Lion. http://osx.hyperjeff.net/Apps/

We've accumulated much bloat in macOS since "big cat" days... and what seems like only 10% more OS utilities/functionality. Interesting to think about it in retrospect.

I still find it baffling how huge (in disk space) a clean install is nowadays, even before Apple Silicon universal binaries. I remember thinking years ago how slim an OS X system was compared to C:\Windows, but in the recent years they’re both huge. It’s not like we got much less functionality back then either.

Tiger 10.4 was such a breath of fresh air for someone like me, coming from Windows XP and some variety of Linux with Gnome 2.x back in 2005.

Twenty years later, I find Windows 11 and MacOS 15 to be in such a bad state, that I would rather use XP and Gnome 2 over them.

macOS keyboard shortcuts situation is weird. it shines where Windows is lacking, and falls behind where Windows is ahead.

Example:

I still don't know how to install an app (*.pkg) just using keyboard on macOS. On Windows, it's simply "press tab or alt and see what happens". Another example: on Windows I can press Alt and see a letter underlined in the menu to let me know what keyboard shortcut activates it, but on macOS I have to do Cmd-Shift-/ and search for the command.

On the other hand, on macOS I get to create custom keyboard shortcuts in the Settings app while Windows, afaik, doesn't have this feature.

I can make a new folder on macOS and put the selected files in it automatically if I do Ctrl-Cmd-N, but if I want to "show package contents" of an app in the Applications, I definitely need a mouse! On Windows machines there's often a right-click button which is really useful

Now I think of it, how do you install a pkg from the CLI?

installer -pkg InstallMe.pkg

Check out `man installer` for details.

> I still don't know how to install an app (*.pkg) just using keyboard on macOS. On Windows, it's simply "press tab or alt and see what happens".

You may be looking for the "Keyboard navigation" preference that lets you tab between controls like on Windows.

I believe they're talking about menu access.

Menus aren't part of the GUI flow for installing a .pkg; you just open it from the Finder and click through the dialog boxes, or set the aforementioned option and tab to the right buttons.

installer(8)?

For peak usability, Windows 3.1 kept the mnemonics underlined _all the time_. It's been downhill since then. Though I'm looking at the menu bar on Firefox on Ubuntu right now and at least the mnemonics are underlined now as I type, even without hitting "alt".

Oh, man, I had forgotten about having the menu keyboard shortcuts underlined all the time. Sometimes you could even tell that whoever had a sense of humor in choosing the mnemonics. I don't even know how to open the macOS menu bar without my keyboard now.

After doing an Internet search for it, I have learned that it is Fn-Control-F2, after enabling Full Keyboard Access in Accessibility. How could it get this bad? (Apple's other accessibility features are amazing.)

I found screenshots on Mac OS very counter intuitive… why does it need to be 3 keys and one of which has the number 3 or 4 it? Why not 7 or 9 ? Or 1 or 5 ? Crazy

Back on the original Macintosh, which was a single-tasking system, there were special keyboard shortcuts that bypassed the current application and invoked system functions. Command-Shift-1 ejected a floppy from drive 1, …2 from drive 2, and …3 being the next available slot became the screenshot operation.

on Windows I can press Alt and see a letter underlined in the menu to let me know what keyboard shortcut activates it

Have you not noticed that every MacOS menu item that has a keyboard shortcut has the entire shortcut listed on the right side of the menu? This goes back all the way to System 1 in 1984: https://web.archive.org/web/20140512112637/http://www3.nd.ed...

It's somewhat more obvious when you're using a keyboard that actually has all the same symbols on the meta keys; Apple likes to drop those sometimes and it's really not helpful for someone who hasn't learnt the cryptic glyphs. The ancient Magic Keyboard on my desk only sports a ⌘ on the Command key, and lacks ⇧ on the shifts, ^ on control, and ⌥ on the alts.

You can even navigate the menus entirely by keyboard, if you turn on "Full Keyboard Access" in the Accessibility prefs. https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/navigate-your-mac-u...

but if I want to "show package contents" of an app in the Applications, I definitely need a mouse!

With Full Keyboard Access on you can hit tab-m to bring up an app's right-click menu and navigate to it. FKA has a lot of tab-something shortcuts.

Menu items on Windows can have 2 shortcuts - a keyboard shortcut like the macOS equivalent, that can activate the item when the menu is closed, and an access key, that can be used to activate it when the menu has keyboard focus. See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...

(The access key concept applies to many other types of control. Anything with a text label can have one, pretty much.)

The shortcut is indicated towards at the side of the menu bar, like macOS. The access key is indicated by an underlined letter. For example, in Firefox, the File > Save Page As... menu item has a shortcut key (Ctrl+S), and an access key (A). The A in As is underlined to indicate the access key, and there's a right-aligned Ctrl+S in that row of the menu bar to indicate the shortcut.

Projects for Old Versions of OS X - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31164521 - April 2022 (87 comments)

> it was time to leave modern macOS behind.

I can relate. But there's one thing I really find great in Sonoma: Select Cyrillic text and hit the keyboard shortcut for Speech and it pronounces the text in Russian. Select Japanese text and it pronounces it in Japanese. And so on. Also, translations or transcripts of such texts in images. Finally an alternative to Google Translate!

But I'm still pissed that I can't install 10.14 on the latest Intel iMac, the hardware won't let me. You cannot run one of the more resource-hungry games on Intel macOS > 10.15 any more. For Apple Silicon, they don't even exist.

you might be able to run them with https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover or parallels if that doesn't work someone got steamvr running with his quest on parallels

The effect on that page is awful. I also suspect not great on older Macs.

I wish it at least honored the prefers-reduced-motion [0] setting.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...

I have that and dark mode on all the time. It’s sad the number of sites that don’t support it.

It's one of the most obnoxious things I've seen in a while, but a good excuse to test my uBlock rule skills:

  jonathanalland.com##*:matches-css(transform: /.*/):style(opacity: 1 !important; transform: none !important; transition-property: none !important; transition: none !important;)

I want reduce-motion to give me a way to set that for all sites.

You can kinda to it in uBlock by matching multiple TLDs, like:

  com,net,org##*:matches-css(transform: /.*/):style(opacity: 1 !important; transform: none !important; transition-property: none !important; transition: none !important;)

It’s a shame you can’t just write . and have it work for all TLDs/ccTLDs

10 years after introduction, Swift is now 6.1 and soon to be 6.2. May be another revision or two before finalising on 7.0 ? Then may be Apple could rewrite everything in Swift 7 ?

I know this sounds fun or cool for a lot people on HN. But I much rather they kept Objective-C and keep refining old codebase for the past 10 years instead.

And as many have noted. macOS is now huge. And apart from continuity I dont know any recent macOS feature that made any different for me. We are now close to yet another remake for UI with Vision OS styles.

May be they will do a big clean up when they stop supporting x86 Mac. But I wont be holding my breath.

I shudder to think anyone still has OSX connected to the internet. How many unpatchable critical vulnerabilities are there already?

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