ayaros

Built in the style of Apple's early website. Sites like these were much more valuable back in the day before larger software archive sites became more prevalent.

Good post. Also, Bear Blog is great. I just set up one myself. It's nice and minimal, and I can add as much or as little as I want to the CSS.

This is pretty incredible...

"Needless to say, they’d still want you to take the responsibility. If bugs or tickets get raised on the shipped code, it’s you who gets fired, not the copilot or chatgpt - though the larger narrative or news headlines next day would still be, 'AI is eating jobs'!"

I'm also reminded of that legendary old IBM quote from 1979: "A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision."

(•﹏•)

"One of the design goals was when you saw it you wanted to lick it."

- Steve Jobs

They would have to fire Alan Dye for that to happen. Discontinuing it without blaming something or someone would be an admission that Apple isn't perfect, and they don't have it in them to do that. I suppose it's either their own egos, or legal won't let them because it will open them up to lawsuits.

"'LoLoL' redirects here."

Yes... yes it does. LOL

Just because it is not doing anything at the moment doesn't mean it doesn't serve an important, necessary purpose. For a windowed application environment to be functional and usable, there needs to be an easy way to drag windows around the screen. When you start moving things into that space, it makes the system harder to use.

A once-simple action which required minimal thought now requires you to parse an arbitrarily populated area of the screen and find a tiny gap within a litany of buttons and controls and carefully drag that part of the window. If you make a slight mistake and click on a tab or button, the unwanted activation of that control (e.g. switching to a new tab) serves to needlessly penalize the user.

This is not just an issue with web browsers now, but seemingly everywhere. It's been a big issue in the macOS Finder for a while now.

At the very least, Firefox still gives me the option to show the native window title bar, which I very much appreciate. It's certainly not the sexiest part of the UI, given the native element clashes a bit with FF's controls, but at least it's usable! This is an issue that could be solved by giving people a choice via a simple toggle... Most often, the option isn't there.

I'm sorry people have downvoted my post here a bit, and I agree it was a bit strongly worded, but I won't apologize for venting some frustration at what I see as the perpetuation of user-hostile design choices like this.

Why did anyone think it was a good idea to put tabs in the title bar. How the hell am I supposed to easily drag a window if I have 100 tabs open? Who the hell thought this was a good idea? Why do I feel like the only sane human being left on Earth? Why is this project continuing to use this horrible UI convention?

How are they going to make money or enshittify this in the future or sell it off to an evil billion dollar corporation who will sell my data off to god knows who?

</rant> :/ ...the site design is nice at least.

"Gee Rick, uh, I d-d-don't know if this tutorial is for real, I mean there's a bunch of random nonsense words and other stuff. I mean, is 'backside Snarfus stagnator' even a real thing?"

"Shut up Morty, you just don't unders-*buuurp*-tand what it takes to be a software engineer."

"Are you sure? What's a 'hoob-tunnel' and how does it get clogged with 'gramelions?' That just sounds like an improvised line from that sci-fi cartoon show..."

Thanks for writing this particularly detailed post; I enjoyed it. Incidentally, you've reminded me I really need to upgrade one of my NAS drives soon...

I'll do you one better: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-10-25

I just meant I appreciate it as resource for all kinds of information, and as an invaluable backup of the web.

The internet should be a repository of all human knowledge and culture; all information and media should (at least eventually) be free as part of the common heritage of mankind. Sites like Wikipedia and IA are a partial realization of this dream. They aren't perfect, for sure, but we need them, and we need more sites like them. I fear too many take these things for granted.

I guess things could be worse? The Internet Archive is too precious of a resource for humanity to lose. I still fear its days are numbered. I don't think non-technical people appreciate it, or are even aware of its existence, in the same way as Wikipedia.

Each one of these posts makes me feel better about having no dependencies on my current project, other than Gulp, which I could replace if I had to.

But also I miss having things like spare time, and sleep, so perhaps the tradeoff wasn't worth it

Well, that's what I get for sharing the Bluesky post... :/

He posted on mastodon too: https://mastodon.social/@marioguzman/115176037346083982

It's a shame because I love these little pieces of Apple's older, better-designed liquid-themed UI...

Meanwhile my 2019 i9 16" MacBook Pro gets battery life on par with the MacBook Wheel (as seen in this classic from The Onion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA) I kid you not, the hummingbird battery is real.

At least I have something to look forward to when I upgrade.

The Streisand effect is a beautiful thing.

VMware Fusion's graphics drivers suck harder than a Dyson. For the love of god, I just want to play some games without rebooting to a native Windows environment. I'm not even asking to run, say, Crysis, or something... I guess my days are numbered as an x64 Mac user but let me at least go out with some dignity.

Get rid of the AI profile picture. Just use the picture on your resume! That AI one means a good chunk of people will hate this website before they even click your name to "login" due to their own preexisting biases. As an artist myself I'm not happy about how AI companies have shamelessly plagiarized people's work. The fact you're using the same Studio Ghibli style everyone else is using just feels unoriginal. Whether employers would care is another story entirely.

Others have left good feedback regarding the UI inconsistencies that you should address.

If you really want this to reflect on your abilities as a graphic designer, you should make this "themeable." XP had multiple visual styles - there were variants of Luna, as well as the Royale theme that came with Media Center Edition, and other themes like the Zune theme. There were also numerous third-party user-created themes you could download and use (if you installed a dll patch).

You should consider adding a few of the standard themes - at the very least the silver, olive, and royale themes. But more importantly, you should make your own themes, and add them as options as well. Open up a dialog similar to XP's "Appearance" dialog on first run so users instantly know they will have that option.

It's great if you can recreate a user interface... but anyone can do that and many already have. What matters more is how you can build on the UI while remaining true to its design language and interaction paradigms. What uniqueness can you add to the UI?

Here are some links for inspiration:

- One example of this sort of thing is https://macthemes.garden/, which has thousands of Mac OS 8/9 themes.

- Here's the wikipedia article that goes over the first party XP themes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_visual_styles

- For examples of XP third party themes... I don't know any good websites off the top of my head but DeviantArt has had lots of 3rd party themes and style assets uploaded to it over the years (for both Windows and macOS): https://www.deviantart.com/search?q=windows+xp+themes

Use these as inspiration and come up with your own unique visual styles which would still feel at home with Windows XP. If you can do that, I think it will really impress people.

Sometimes it's in the middle of the track, with no way around it. A dialog pops up that says "stroke dog to continue." Then I do that and the game calls me a bastard... :/

That poor dog... :(

Really glad to see I'm not the only one out there who appreciates these patterns.

In my LisaGUI project I've added not just the ones from the Lisa Office System and Mac System 1, but also a few I found in betas of the Mac OS, as well as some from Windows 3.x and 9x. These kinds of patterns popped up in all sorts of places in the 80s and 90s. I'm continually surprised at how much you can fit in an 8x8 monochrome grid whenever I come across a clever pattern I haven't seen before.

Edit: https://alpha.lisagui.com/ At the desktop click the preferences icon and go to the Decorate Desktop pane

Oh... only a "bit" messy, you say? ;)

I love JS's async. I don't know how anyone ever did anything useful in the language before it was introduced. I think something between a third and half of the functions and members in LisaGUI are probably async functions at this point.

This is a cool idea but it still needs a lot more work and polish.

I'm having trouble scrolling through the dropdown menu of component types without triggering the panning/scrolling of the infinite wall of components behind the menu. I had to drag the scrollbar thumb to get that dropdown to scroll.

I don't know if it's just me (latest FireFox on macOS) but the background of each component's container is dark, while the space behind the containers is white. There's way too much contrast. I don't even think you need a visible container or border around each component - it makes them too hard to compare. Just have them all sitting there on a neutral light gray background - something a bit easier on the eyes.

Also I'm a bit disappointed because when you said UI components I thought you were referring to the more basic building blocks of the UI - buttons, controls, etc. as opposed to actual interfaces built out of those components. I figured it would be various types of scrollbars or buttons or other components from various OSs and applications - a thing where you can compare visual styles... I guess this really ties more into my own expectations and interests...

Scrolling in general needs to be much smoother. There's a lot of lag!

This is a very real problem, and I understand it well... I have my fair share of relatives who are technologically incompetent.

The solution is to integrate sideloading into the parental controls. There are already existing permissions in iOS to restrict the installation and deletion of apps, so adding a sideloading permission should be straightforward. (They can still leave it disabled by default and bury it a bit behind a few menus and dialogs...) If a family member is really so technologically inept they can't be trusted with their own phone, then you should already be making use of parental controls in some fashion. Set a pin for them which you know and they don't know. It's as simple as that.

Perhaps that's a bit harsh, but we should not be sacrificing these freedoms at all, let alone at a time when there are already existing solutions for protecting those who are vulnerable.

(The relative simplicity of this solution is yet another piece of evidence this issue is not really about the security of users.)

Both Apple and Google should just bite the fucking bullet and let people install whatever they want.

Apple, for their part, should have just buried the option to "sideload" deep in the settings. They could have put up a dialog, or maybe 5 dialogs in a row, each one scarier than the last, warning the user that if someone told them to do this, they are being scammed. They could have done it every time someone installs an app from outside the App Store. Make the user wait 10 seconds or a minute between each dialog. Put the option behind their passcode, or their Apple ID password. Void AppleCare if they do it, for all I care. They could have done any of this. Anyone actually concerned about their security would have avoided it anyway.

This is what they should have done. Now it looks like regulators are going force their hand. Why Google is doing this now, of all times, is beyond me. Have they read the news lately?

The regulation should be for phones, computers, and game consoles too.

I know this isn't an unpopular opinion... whatever. I gotta vent somewhere.