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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. Furthermo

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.
Razengan 8y ago
Why do you think Microsoft removed themes from Windows after XP? Why did Windows 7, 8, and 10 only have a UI single style? (which, in the case of 8 and 10, is close to no style, little more than lines on solid rectangles.)
mercer 8y ago
> Had they simply kept using the API, it would have naturally evolved over 20 years. Honest question: how simple would this have been considering the fact that they switched to an entirely different OS, as coldtea points out?

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.

Razengan 8y ago

Why do you think Microsoft removed themes from Windows after XP? Why did Windows 7, 8, and 10 only have a UI single style? (which, in the case of 8 and 10, is close to no style, little more than lines on solid rectangles.)

mercer 8y ago

> Had they simply kept using the API, it would have naturally evolved over 20 years. Honest question: how simple would this have been considering the fact that they switched to an entirely different OS, as coldtea points out?