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Frankly, I’m not sure I trust Apple to support this appearance API over time. They’ve been down this road before. It’s kind of funny/sad to see how Apple oper

Frankly, I’m not sure I trust Apple to support this appearance API over time. They’ve been down this road before. It’s kind of funny/sad to see how Apple operates with APIs. None of these concepts are really “new”: they were there, in Carbon, prior to Mac OS 8, in the days when that OS was meant to support really elaborate themes. The original theme APIs were huge, and 3rd parties were expected to adopt them as needed (e.g. using appropriate theme selectors for fonts and background patterns). For about a year, things looked really cool: you could create a great Platinum-esque UI for any custom control, and it would fit right in. Then, they threw it ALL away for Mac OS X, ironically right about the time when an appearance-agnostic API would make a lot of sense. They didn’t even bother to update their API implementation to ease migration: really trivial changes that would have been helpful, like “update the damned font/color/pattern value returned for X to resemble Aqua”, were not done. This meant that an app full of seemingly-appearance-agnostic code would look like crap under Aqua, and you had to rip it all out. And it’s not like Mac OS X didn’t change its look. Heck, for a long time you could find 3rd party app bundles chock full of images that were there just to implement the Apple-Look-and-Feel-of-the-Week, because the SDK didn’t offer any reasonable way to do half of what they came up with. So yeah, 14 versions later, the Mac wants to be appearance-agnostic again. Sounds great. My advice: always have the option of doing your own UI as a backup.

mark_edward 8y ago
Who is downvoting you? This site is full of fucking Apple cult members.
- dang 8y ago
  Please don't post like that here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - mark_edward 8y ago
    Why haven't you been replaced with a bot yet dang? Just download the training data from anal.tone-police.biz and run wild.
    - IntelMiner 8y ago
      It's very telling I did not have to look far through your comment history to see someone asking you about comparisons you made to Hitler
pvg 8y ago
These transitions are never fun but they happen sometimes. No API is eternal and it seems a little overwrought to be 'not trusting' Apple because they ditched an API (and entire OS) once, nearly 20 years ago.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  Eternal is, of course, a very strong word, but I raise you POSIX, X11, and win32.
  - jacobolus 8y ago
    GUIs made for X11 or Win32 20+ years ago have aged terribly.
    - IntelMiner 8y ago
      But they still work, which is his point
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - DanBC 8y ago
      Is that opinion? Do you have any research to show that people find them harder to use than modern UI?
      - jacobolus 8y ago
        Do you have an example of an X11 or Win32 app from 1995 which you think is especially usable today?
        yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
        - xfig - xterm - Paint - Wordpad We can argue how useful those versions of Wordpad and Paint are, especially with modern file formats, but they are usable. I won't blame you for disagreeing with xterm, but over 30 after it was first shipped it's still the closest thing to a standard terminal, and the UI is decent once you get used to it (and much like emacs, it's partially jarring at first because it predates some expectations).
Razengan 8y ago
Windows also lost the ability to have multiple UI styles after Windows XP -> Vista, and has yet to recover it as far as I know. Microsoft also never officially exposed the API so you had to use performance-degrading hacks like WindowBlinds. In my experience as a Mac + iOS user and developer for the past 8 years, and for the rest of my life before that on Microsoft platforms, Apple's record has been much better compared to Microsoft re: abandoning APIs or pulling the rug out from under devs. Take NSDocument for example. It has been around for almost 20 years. All you usually needed to do was inherit from it and adopt its interface and your app would often get new features for free with each release of macOS, like autosaving and version histories. The foundations for multiple UI appearances have been there since macOS 10.10 Yosemite, 4 years ago. They were hard not to notice. As a user and developer I'm glad they took the time to work out a sensible implementation that is very easy to adopt now and makes good sense for the future. It definitely seems to be in a better spot than Windows' support for multiple appearances currently, if it has any. If you see the WWDC sessions on Dark Mode, you might come to appreciate the thought and effort they've put into it: [0] Introducing Dark Mode: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/210/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/210/ [1] Advanced Dark Mode: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/218/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/218/
- Illniyar 8y ago
  You can say a lot of things about windows but abandoning apis isn't one of them. Windows is the king of backwards compatibility, for better or for worse.
  - Razengan 8y ago
    DirectInput -> XInput, which dumbed down many of the advanced Force-Feedback features to the level that the simple Xbox gamepads could support, compared to the original Sidewinder line of awesome joysticks (another victim of Microsoft abandonment.) Often not making many APIs available in their latest programming technologies like .NET/C# (at least initially.) WPF, Silverlight, the "Metro" experiment that lasted for a single (!) version of Windows (8), and great discontinued apps like PhotoDraw, are some of the other cases that personally affected me.
saagarjha 8y ago
> they threw it ALL away for Mac OS X That’s because apps were supposed to migrate to Cocoa rather than sticking with Carbon. > 14 versions later, the Mac wants to be appearance-agnostic again Ten versions. NSAppearance is 10.10+.
robertAngst 8y ago
> I’m not sure I trust Apple to support this appearance API over time. Next time you can stop here: I’m not sure I trust Apple.
coldtea 8y ago
>Then, they threw it ALL away for Mac OS X, ironically right about the time when an appearance-agnostic API would make a lot of sense. That's almost 20 years ago, and for very good reasons: moving to a whole new OS, with a new graphics pipeline and UI engine, and one they especially wanted to tout. If that's the reason you don't trust Apple to support the "dark mode" APIs going forward, then that's bogus. >So yeah, 14 versions later, the Mac wants to be appearance-agnostic again. Were "the Mac" is a very different OS (the legacy Mac OS vs NeXT based OS X), by an almost totally different company compared to the one that created the original Mac OS 6, 7, 8, 9 and co. And 14 versions later is 18+ years on. At which point do you draw the line? Should we also be concerned for what Sculley era Apple did to some APIs?
- makecheck 8y ago
  At the time, the APIs were not that old and not deprecated. It simply became clear that the theme stuff wasn’t updated for Aqua and was a liability. Furthermore, an awful lot from those days had recently been touted as “the future”, encouraging developers to invest more heavily than they might have otherwise. It would have been more future-proof to not to adopt the API wholesale and just hack in fonts and metrics everywhere but no one knew it at the time. Had they simply kept using the API, it would have naturally evolved over 20 years. It wouldn’t look the same today (it would probably be way more powerful than NSAppearance) and developers wouldn’t feel like time was wasted. They could have even created an immediate NS-wrapper for the older API back then (as they did for certain things), if supporting C long-term wasn’t palatable.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >At the time, the APIs were not that old and not deprecated No, but they were also created for the previous OS. Not merely the previous release of the OS, a totally different OS. >Furthermore, an awful lot from those days had recently been touted as “the future”, encouraging developers to invest more heavily than they might have otherwise Sure, that was bad. But that was the last steps of a dying company, and probably touted as such before Jobs and co took the helms. The decision to drop lots of existing stuff and focus on a totally new platform is what turned the fate of the company around. At least in retrospect we can say it worked great, even if there were some casualties along the way. Compared to the theme API, I'd more lament Yellow Box (which was a NeXT based technology anyway), and perhaps WebObjects (ditto, and ahead of its time). That said, I really liked the "Platinum" (I think was the name) OS 8 look, and used to mimic it on Linux through cheapo wm themes.

mark_edward 8y ago

Who is downvoting you? This site is full of fucking Apple cult members.

dang 8y ago
Please don't post like that here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- mark_edward 8y ago
  Why haven't you been replaced with a bot yet dang? Just download the training data from anal.tone-police.biz and run wild.
  - IntelMiner 8y ago
    It's very telling I did not have to look far through your comment history to see someone asking you about comparisons you made to Hitler

pvg 8y ago

These transitions are never fun but they happen sometimes. No API is eternal and it seems a little overwrought to be 'not trusting' Apple because they ditched an API (and entire OS) once, nearly 20 years ago.

yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
Eternal is, of course, a very strong word, but I raise you POSIX, X11, and win32.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  GUIs made for X11 or Win32 20+ years ago have aged terribly.
  - IntelMiner 8y ago
    But they still work, which is his point
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - DanBC 8y ago
    Is that opinion? Do you have any research to show that people find them harder to use than modern UI?
    - jacobolus 8y ago
      Do you have an example of an X11 or Win32 app from 1995 which you think is especially usable today?
      - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
        - xfig - xterm - Paint - Wordpad We can argue how useful those versions of Wordpad and Paint are, especially with modern file formats, but they are usable. I won't blame you for disagreeing with xterm, but over 30 after it was first shipped it's still the closest thing to a standard terminal, and the UI is decent once you get used to it (and much like emacs, it's partially jarring at first because it predates some expectations).

Razengan 8y ago

Windows also lost the ability to have multiple UI styles after Windows XP -> Vista, and has yet to recover it as far as I know. Microsoft also never officially exposed the API so you had to use performance-degrading hacks like WindowBlinds. In my experience as a Mac + iOS user and developer for the past 8 years, and for the rest of my life before that on Microsoft platforms, Apple's record has been much better compared to Microsoft re: abandoning APIs or pulling the rug out from under devs. Take NSDocument for example. It has been around for almost 20 years. All you usually needed to do was inherit from it and adopt its interface and your app would often get new features for free with each release of macOS, like autosaving and version histories. The foundations for multiple UI appearances have been there since macOS 10.10 Yosemite, 4 years ago. They were hard not to notice. As a user and developer I'm glad they took the time to work out a sensible implementation that is very easy to adopt now and makes good sense for the future. It definitely seems to be in a better spot than Windows' support for multiple appearances currently, if it has any. If you see the WWDC sessions on Dark Mode, you might come to appreciate the thought and effort they've put into it: [0] Introducing Dark Mode: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/210/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/210/ [1] Advanced Dark Mode: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/218/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/218/

Illniyar 8y ago
You can say a lot of things about windows but abandoning apis isn't one of them. Windows is the king of backwards compatibility, for better or for worse.
- Razengan 8y ago
  DirectInput -> XInput, which dumbed down many of the advanced Force-Feedback features to the level that the simple Xbox gamepads could support, compared to the original Sidewinder line of awesome joysticks (another victim of Microsoft abandonment.) Often not making many APIs available in their latest programming technologies like .NET/C# (at least initially.) WPF, Silverlight, the "Metro" experiment that lasted for a single (!) version of Windows (8), and great discontinued apps like PhotoDraw, are some of the other cases that personally affected me.

saagarjha 8y ago

> they threw it ALL away for Mac OS X That’s because apps were supposed to migrate to Cocoa rather than sticking with Carbon. > 14 versions later, the Mac wants to be appearance-agnostic again Ten versions. NSAppearance is 10.10+.

robertAngst 8y ago

> I’m not sure I trust Apple to support this appearance API over time. Next time you can stop here: I’m not sure I trust Apple.

coldtea 8y ago

>Then, they threw it ALL away for Mac OS X, ironically right about the time when an appearance-agnostic API would make a lot of sense. That's almost 20 years ago, and for very good reasons: moving to a whole new OS, with a new graphics pipeline and UI engine, and one they especially wanted to tout. If that's the reason you don't trust Apple to support the "dark mode" APIs going forward, then that's bogus. >So yeah, 14 versions later, the Mac wants to be appearance-agnostic again. Were "the Mac" is a very different OS (the legacy Mac OS vs NeXT based OS X), by an almost totally different company compared to the one that created the original Mac OS 6, 7, 8, 9 and co. And 14 versions later is 18+ years on. At which point do you draw the line? Should we also be concerned for what Sculley era Apple did to some APIs?

makecheck 8y ago
At the time, the APIs were not that old and not deprecated. It simply became clear that the theme stuff wasn’t updated for Aqua and was a liability. Furthermore, an awful lot from those days had recently been touted as “the future”, encouraging developers to invest more heavily than they might have otherwise. It would have been more future-proof to not to adopt the API wholesale and just hack in fonts and metrics everywhere but no one knew it at the time. Had they simply kept using the API, it would have naturally evolved over 20 years. It wouldn’t look the same today (it would probably be way more powerful than NSAppearance) and developers wouldn’t feel like time was wasted. They could have even created an immediate NS-wrapper for the older API back then (as they did for certain things), if supporting C long-term wasn’t palatable.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >At the time, the APIs were not that old and not deprecated No, but they were also created for the previous OS. Not merely the previous release of the OS, a totally different OS. >Furthermore, an awful lot from those days had recently been touted as “the future”, encouraging developers to invest more heavily than they might have otherwise Sure, that was bad. But that was the last steps of a dying company, and probably touted as such before Jobs and co took the helms. The decision to drop lots of existing stuff and focus on a totally new platform is what turned the fate of the company around. At least in retrospect we can say it worked great, even if there were some casualties along the way. Compared to the theme API, I'd more lament Yellow Box (which was a NeXT based technology anyway), and perhaps WebObjects (ditto, and ahead of its time). That said, I really liked the "Platinum" (I think was the name) OS 8 look, and used to mimic it on Linux through cheapo wm themes.